Detecting and Defusing Campaign Propaganda
The latest TV ad, Crisis, seems to move away from the recent McCain negative strategy, focusing instead on the ability of McCain/Palin to resolve the economic crisis. Until you look at the press release for the ad, designed to provide the media with unfounded negative generalizations: “With an economy in crisis, the American people cannot afford Barack Obama’s agenda of higher taxes, new bureaucracy and economic isolationism.”
The latest McCain ad, “Disrespectful,” gives new meaning to the phrase “negative campaign ad.” Several transitions segue into photos of Barack Obama and Joseph Biden from (literally) negative images. Notice also how frequently the shots cut off part of Obama’s and Biden’s heads.
Frame 82 5.455 seconds
Frame 83 5.521 seconds
Frame 86 5.721 seconds
Frame 88 5.854 seconds
Frame 114 7.584 seconds
Frame 121 8.050 seconds
Frame 144 9.580 seconds
Frame 151 10.45 seconds
Frame 194 12.906 seconds
Frame 199 13.239 seconds
Frame 248 16.499 seconds
Frame 254 16.898 seconds
Negative Language:
The phrase “How disrespectful,” spoken by a chiding female narrator, recalls the old stereotype of the uppity Black man (see frame 121) dissing the white woman. The commercial also uses negative terms like “celebrity” (i.e. a superficial attention getter); “star is fading”; “lashed out”; “desperately”; “wrong.”
Misrepresentation:
The ad implies that Obama “dismissed” Palin as good looking (frame 121), when in fact the remark came from Biden, and in a humorous, self-deprecating way, with the audience about his own looks, (see Jake Tapper’s ABC blog entry and Andrew Romano’s Newsweek commentary).
The ad “McCain: Fact Check” uses a number of propaganda techniques in its brief 31 seconds:
Imagery: The video paints the Obama camp as vicious predators via footage of a hungry pack of wolves (scavenging for dirt on Sarah Palin). Additionally, three photos of Obama (in black and white) convey anger and despair. In color photos (taken with the camera looking up at their faces), Palin and McCain smile and look determined.
Negative Words: “attacks”; “false”; “misleading”; “dig dirt”; “drops in the polls”; “try to destroy [Governor Palin]: [Obama's Politics of Hope are] “empty words.” Obama is referred to by his last name; Palin is called “Governor Palin.”
Poisoning the Well: The McCain ad uses this powerful logical fallacy not only to predict future bad actions by Obama but to associate such behavior with desperation: “As Obama drops in the polls, he’ll try to destroy her.”
Misrepresentation: The video associates the spoken statement “The attacks on Governor Palin have been called false … misleading” with an image (superimposed over the picture of a grimacing Obama) of the FactCheck.org logo and the phrase “completely false”…”misleading” 9/8/08.
McCain ad misrepresentation
But as FactCheck.org itself points out in its September 10 posting “McCain-Palin Distorts Our Finding,” FactCheck used the phrases “completely false” and “misleading” to refer to anonymous Internet postings, not to any statement by Obama: “We have no evidence that any of the claims we found to be false came from the Obama campaign.” FactCheck also notes that the McCain ad distorts its quote from The Wall Street Journal (the Journal did not use the phrase “dig dirt” to characterize the mission of a team of lawyers Obama allegedly sent to Alaska (a mission that Obama’s campaign say did not happen).
The pictures of Willie Horton in the following ad (courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image), made by an independent political action committee, burned into viewers’ minds the association of murderous black rage with permissive liberal policies on crime attributed to Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Although the commercial only aired once, it was picked up by national news programs, which served to further embed the image.
A favorite Republican trick is to associate positively-charged words with the conservative cause and negative terms with the opposition.
Newt Gingrich wrote an influential manual, Language, A Key Mechanism of Control, providing a list of “positive governing words” such as “citizen,” “peace,” and “truth,” and an opposing list of negative terms like “corruption,” “hypocrisy,” and “radical” for characterizing opponents.
Background and lists of words, courtesy of The Propaganda Critic.
The following Swift Boat Veterans ad (courtesy of YouTube) uses both types of terms masterfully in their attack on Presidential candidate John Kerry.
Negative terms: lying / lied / not honest (6 times); lacks the capacity to lead; could not count on; no war hero; betrayed (twice); dishonored; cannot be trusted.
Positive terms (used to characterize veterans in video): served (4 times); truth.
Note how the ad progresses from “not honest” to “lied” to unheroic to “betrayed / dishonored” and finally back to “cannot be trusted.” Such a strategy was designed to shift attention away from Bush’s lack of combat experience toward a debate over the trustworthiness of Kerry and an unsupported characterization of his service.
A simple technique for exposing the lies behind a television ad is to edit the original message by splicing in footage that contradicts the original statement. This approach works best when the contradictory footage contains the candidate’s own words. Observations by journalists or pundits may be dismissed as media bias.
A number of sources in the above video (MSNBC, “The Daily Show”) might be dismissed by conservative viewers as biased. Furthermore, the quote by T. Boone Pickens (presented as “a former oilman”) is itself misleading because it doesn’t point out that Pickens currently develops alternative energy sources (wind power) for profit, and thus is not an impartial source. By providing the entire context of Obama’s statement, the video does effectively counter the McCain ad’s misrepresentation of Obama’s remark about Iran being a tiny country (see Politifact’s analysis of McCain’s distortion of Obama’s words).
Video debunking is particularly effective in reaching the type of audience that would have been persuaded by the original clip. The propagandist may also have a difficult time presenting a counter video argument because the viewer may lose track of who’s saying what.
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