MASS MEDIA AND INTEREST GROUPS

(Week 14)

(Note: these are actual class notes, valuable to those having an excused class absence, or those wishing to review their class notes for the test. Double spaced notes reflect subjects that are so important that they are likely to be asked about on a test.)

The mass media is an important source of our knowledge of government and politics, and it can shape our perceptions of reality and our political views. The textbook provides an excellent review of the role of the mass media in shaping public opinion. I will hit on some of the high points. We’ve already covered so much material that this week and next will not be on the final exam.

After World War 2 and after Hitler had dominated the German people with his fascist ideas, Americans worried that an authoritarian leader might someday do the same thing in the United States. Political science and communication researchers, however, argued that the American media did not exert a Direct Effect on citizens, in that they did not provide a single message that affected everyone the same way. Instead, the media at the time had a Filter effect on citizens. That is, any media message was distorted in very different ways for different people.

First, the individual’s own characteristics affected whether any media message they received had much of an effect on them. Their pre-existing attitudes were very important, and could cause them to reject information that was contrary to them. Examples- good luck saying something good about Trump to a Democratic friends of yours, or saying something good about Biden to a Republican friend. They will disagree with you or ignore you, in most cases. Your personality traits are also important, as someone with a strong personality is more likely to reject information contrary to their pre-existing values. Again, Trump is a good example, as he has a strong personality, and rejects any information that says that the 2020 election was fair and that he lost the election. Selective exposure says that people may exposure themselves only to those media sources that are consistent with their own values. In the 1960s, this did not occur a lot, because there was no cable TV and no Internet, and the three broadcast network evening news programs had a large diverse audience and therefore they were politically neutral. Today, with Cable TV and the Social Media many people do engage in selective exposure. Conservatives watch FOX or One America News, while liberals watch CNN or MSNBC. Selective perception and retention is when people are exposed to views contrary to their pre-existing values, but they disregard and forget such contrary information, and only remember the messages that are consistent with their own views. As such, these individual characteristics would limit any political leader’s ability to exert firm control thru propaganda over the American population.

Second, the citizen’s Group Memberships would limit the impact of any leader’s messages. If one is a member of a group that is important to them, they are likely to reject messages that are contrary to that group’s orientation. Thus, the liberal teachers’ unions during Covid tended to reject Republican governors’ desires to re-open in-class sessions without a mask mandate or without compulsory vaccination; today, they tend to disbelieve GOP governors who say they would rather spend money in the classroom and not on the education bureaucracy. The conservative NRA tends to reject any modest Democratic effort to control guns. There is also the Two-Step-Flow model that reduces any direct effect of a message. We may not even read or hear a politician’s message, but we may hear about it from some member or leader of a group. So, a politician may speak to the Rotary Club, and club members may tell their friends what she said. So, messages can be garbled in translation, so to speak.

Third, the Characteristics of the Medium can affect the impact of a message. The nature of the source is important. A Credible source is more believable, and their messages are more likely to affect people. In the 1960s the most credible newsman was Walter Cronkite, and everyone hung on his every word in the real-life movie about the Apollo 13 disaster. A message coming from a source with a Similar Attitude to the citizen would also be more believable. I joked that if the CDC really wanted to encourage Trump supporters to get vaccinated, they would have given him more credit for Operation Warp Speed, named the vaccine the Trump Vaccine, and had him give public service announcements. (For African American vaccine hesitancy, just call the vaccine the Martin Luther King vaccine, which would free you from the fear of disease much like King freed African Americans politically and socially.) A perceived ideologically-biased media can cause some citizens to disregard the messages they receive. President Nixon according to Ted White in his Making of the President books faced a liberal axis of major newspapers and television networks, whose investigative reporting brought the Watergate scandal to light. The textbook shows how American journalists have tended to be more liberal than the average American. Most Newspapers on the other hand have tended to have more conservative candidate endorsements over the years, and some studies have found their endorsements to have some effect on voting behavior (particularly for less visible political offices). Exceptions abound, with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger being a more pro-education and pro-racial justice newspaper, which won the coveted Pulitzer prize for its supportive reporting on the 1982 Education Reform Act. In this century, fewer newspapers are making candidate endorsements, and USA Today as America's national newspaper has a liberal orientation in its reporting of events.

The negativism of the media. The press performs a very important Adversary Role. The President and other public officials and their press spokeswomen love to give the public glowing reports about how great they are doing, so the press asks tough questions that contradict such claims. That of course angers the President and his supporters. Trump’s conflicts with the media are nothing new, as President Nixon’s press coverage was so hostile that his Vice President Spiro Agnew blasted them as “an effete corps of impudent snobs.” We saw the critical value of a free press, however, in their uncovering of the Watergate scandal, and both Nixon and Agnew were forced to resign. But sometimes the press can go too far. Their sympathetic coverage in the late 1960s of urban rioters and Vietnam War protesters complete with videos of the protests caused some Americans to vote for right-wing George Wallace, and Nixon got elected President. The unrelenting negative coverage of Trump by CNN and MSNBC (particularly on his alleged Russian collusion to get elected, and his delay in delivering legally appropriated military aid to Ukraine as he sought to get them to investigate Hunter Biden’s operations during the Biden Vice Presidency), may have resulted in a scenario similar to the little boy who cried wolf when there was no wolf, so people ignored him when a real wolf showed up. Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 election by filing 62 lawsuits (losing 61 of them), trying to influence key states’ electoral college vote reports by pressuring state Secretaries of State and state legislative leaders to change the reported vote counts, and his whipping up his January 6 crowd of supporters (which then attacked the nation’s Capitol while Congress was finalizing the election by counting the electoral votes) can be viewed as the real wolf showing up, an authoritarian leader emerging. (Sadly, the hard Democratic party left may be viewed as a near totalitarian force, so quite a world we live in!) The textbook has a chart that shows how cynical and negative the press has become of American presidential candidates. In the first five of the presidential elections of this century, Democrats received more negative than positive coverage three times, and Republicans received more negative coverage than positive in all five. Only John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 received more positive than negative coverage. You could see this negativism of the media in 2020 with the liberal CNN and MSNBC acting as if we were all going to die from Covid (given their unrelenting coverage of it), and conservative One America News and Newsmax constantly saying that the Democrats stole the election and saying how horrible Biden was. So, how do responsible citizens deal with the media? I constantly channel hop across multiple cable TV programs (FOX is another conservative one, and BBC America is a more liberal one), review the FOX and CNN websites (as well as English language foreign newspapers, such as Al Jazeera, Moscow Times, and the Chinese People’s Daily), and read on-line the conservative National Review and the liberal New Republic. I also review the articles cited by the website RealClearPolitics.com, which includes articles on both partisan points of view. Sadly enough, the three foreign sources often provide less emotional and more informative coverage of some issues than American sources.

Televised Presidential Debates have shaped public opinion to some extent. In 1960 Kennedy’s better visual appearance triumphed over Nixon’s appearance, showing that the visual can be more important than what is actually said (Radio listeners felt Nixon had won the debates, but TV viewers said Kennedy had won.). (The same thing happened in the 1987 Mississippi televised gubernatorial debate, where the pro-education, pro-civil rights, businessman Republican Jack Reed read his statements slumped over, while the articulate, young, somewhat arrogant Democrat Ray Mabus ended up winning the debate and election.) In 1976 Ford had been making a comeback by blasting Carter as a big spending liberal, but in the nomination battle Reagan had blasted Ford’s détente policy with the USSR and accused him of giving in to Soviet control of Eastern Europe with his European Security Conference agreement (which also permitted us to monitor and criticize Russian human rights abuses). Therefore, in the debate with Carter, Ford made the famous statement: “Eastern Europe is not under Soviet domination, and it never will be under a Ford administration.” As Carter and the journalist pointed out that hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were in Eastern Europe, Ford shot back, “I don’t think the people of Poland think of themselves as being dominated by the Soviet Union. I’ve been there. They are a fiercely independent people.” Suddenly, Ford’s comeback in the polls flattened out, and he spent the last weeks of the campaign explaining what he had meant to say: “I meant that the U.S. will never recognize as legitimate the Soviet control of Eastern Europe.” Ford lost a narrow election. Years later after the fall of the Soviet empire, Ford joked, “You see, I was a prophet.”

In 1980 as we already mentioned, Carter tried to paint Reagan as a conservative extremist, and the nice guy Reagan did an Aw Shucks routine and showed how he was actually pretty progressive. “There is no threat to Social Security for our senior citizens. After all, I am a senior citizen!” (He didn’t really say the second sentence, but you get the drift.) In 1984 as we already mentioned, Reagan in the first debate stumbled over the word “progressivity” when talking about his tax cuts, so when asked in the second debate whether he was too old to be President the 73-year-old made the joke: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The Gipper (a football term) was back! In 1988 Dukakis was being blasted as the ice-man liberal, so journalist Bernie Shaw asked him the famous question about whether he would still oppose the death penalty if his wife was raped and murdered (thinking that it would give Dukakis a chance to show some human emotion and that he wasn’t a left-wing kook), but Dukakis kind of smirked as if he was in an intellectual Harvard debate and coldly recited his death penalty opposition and alternative anti-crime programs he had pushed, while Bush showed more human emotion when talking about dead cops. In 1992 Bush1 was kind of still living in the pleasant world of being the popular national leader during the Gulf War though America was now in a recession, so Bush acted aloof in a town hall debate, said he didn’t understand a woman’s question about whether he could sympathize with economically hurt citizens, and was caught checking his watch. Clinton on the other hand talked about his Feeling Your Pain, being from the small town of Hope, Arkansas and personally knowing people who had been hurt by the recession. In 1996 I don’t even remember the debates, but I do remember poor old Bob Dole falling off of a platform when he bent down to shake the hands of supporters in the street, and then Saturday Night Live doing some great skits (One had Dole falling through the podium, and then getting up gasping “Where’s my pen?” and viewers can see that it was sticking out of his hair.).

In 2000, as already mentioned, I got the perception that Gore was kind of arrogant, as he kept impatiently sighing in the first debate when Bush2 was speaking, and then in the second debate he walked towards a seated Bush (who proceeded to stare him down). In 2004 all I remember of the debates was Bush whining about how hard his job was, Kerry flip-flopping on the Iraq war (“I voted for the Iraq war, before I voted against it.”), but coming away from the debates with the same impression as one of my students- that Bush will protect us from terrorists and enemy nations, and he won’t ask the permission of the UN to do so. In 2008 all I remember is how thoughtful, articulate, calm, and bright Obama was, while McCain looked like an old man as he stumbled around the stage. In 2012 I remember how tired and low-energy Obama looked in the first debate (the burdens of the Presidency), but then Romney dropped the ball in the second debate as he failed to capitalize on the Libyan terrorist attack killing our ambassador, and let Obama get away with saying that Russia was not a threat and that ISIS was the JV team of terrorists. In 2016 I remember Trump as a crude fighter. When the groping hidden mike tape came to light, it was so bad that one-third of Senate Republicans called on him to be kicked off of the ticket; Trump responded by having many of Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment (and assault) victims seated in the front row of the next debate. When Hillary Clinton talked about how much better she’d be as President than Trump in presidential temperament, Trump roared back, “If I were President, you'd be in jail." Do you remember anything about the 2020 presidential debates during Covid? I just remember a fly on Vice President Pence's head, Trump walking to the helicopter to take him to the hospital for Covid, and Biden having car rallies. Amazing how televised debates have changed over the years. It used to be that candidates worried about every word and every gesture, and little things could have a big impact. By 2016, candidates could say the dumbest things (Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables knock on Trump supporters) without even realizing it. As such, we have come to live through frequent dumb Trump statements, and arrogant left-wing remarks by left-wing interest groups and politicians. The 2024 first debate between Trump and Biden was decisive, as Biden was clearly old, tired, and confused, so Democrats pressured him to resign from the ticket, and Trump had to face a new opponent in the next debate.

Well, we’re out of time again. Interest Groups is the least relevant subject for this course, so it came last, and we've run out of time. We now briefly mention some key interest groups, and contemporary political issues. The most important interest groups are the two major political parties, which will be covered next week, as we close out this class.