4.7: Getting Solid Information about Whom to Vote For

A leaflet shows up in your apartment mailbox a week before the election. It says, "David Marr will be the ONE judge accountable to the people, not the politicians." The flyer says Marr will be a "judge for the people" and that "YOU should decide who serves in this courthouse." On the basis of this solid information, you are ready to vote for or against David Marr. Wait, there's more. The leaflet contains two pictures of him smiling. OK, now you are ready to vote. Hmmm.

Suppose an election is coming up and you want to make an informed choice about the ballot measures and candidates. How do you do it? You might ask your parents or friends for advice, then follow their recommendations if they agree. But if you want to think things through for yourself, you should seek out other sources of information. Would it help to reserve one evening before the election and sit down with all the campaign leaflets you have collected during the previous month? If you use these leaflets to figure out who stands where on the issues, you will get frustrated. All candidates sound good, too good, in their own literature. You won't even be able to figure out what the important issues are this way, although you may get some inkling when one candidate's literature attacks the opposition. The government's voter pamphlets that are mailed free to all registered voters can be more helpful. They let the candidates speak to whatever issues they desire, and the statements are fairly informative, given their short length.

Are there better sources of information? Yes. Consider television, their news, not their ads. The advantage of TV is that you can see the candidate in action and get some emotional connection. TV information comes in two forms: paid ads and news. The paid TV advertisement is mostly junk food for the eye and mind—fast and appealing, but nutritionally barren. In fact, the techniques used to sell senators are practically the same as those used to sell soft drinks. Any political advertiser worth a sound bite is aiming for your heart strings.

Commenting on this point, President Nixon’s advisor William Gavin wrote, “Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort to understand what we’re talking about.” In another memo he said,

Reason requires a higher degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we demand that he make the effort of replying. We seek to engage his intellect, and for most people this is the most difficult work of all. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.¹

TV news is a better source of political information than TV ads─which is not to say it is a good source. It's more nutritional, but still junk food. The average bloc of uninterrupted speech by presidential candidates in the TV news is only ten seconds. Ten seconds is enough time for a slogan, but not enough for thoughtful argumentation. TV commentators use these ten-second "sound bites" of the candidate to provide flavor, although they know it is not much information. Commentators believe they can say it better than the candidate; they give themselves a good twenty seconds, and the candidate ten. Their primary fear is that the public, with its short attention span, will click the channel changer once the candidate starts going on and on.

The big-budget campaign managers know the territory. For example, they may have crafted an excellent strategy for getting their candidate on TV without the candidate having to answer tough questions. Suppose a TV station has a well-informed reporter who knows just what hard-ball questions to ask, given the chance. When the campaign manager learns that particular reporter is out in the field covering some event, the campaign manager calls the station manager to say that the candidate is nearby and can be at the station in 15 minutes. The station manager cannot resist the opportunity. He calls over to his news staff and says, "Andy, get ready; you're on in 15 minutes in a one-on-one with the senator." This reporter in the station will be more apt to treat the senator as a visiting dignitary and will throw more softball questions and fewer of the hardball questions than the well-informed reporter would have. In the next news broadcast an hour or so later, the senator probably will look great during those crucial ten seconds. Another victory for the campaign manager and another loss for the viewing public.

TV news is dangerous for the public in other ways. After having watched nightly news stories about a candidate, too many viewers falsely believe they know enough to make a decent choice.

TV occasionally does provide high-quality reporting; but watch out for the ordinary TV news.

OK, if you can't rely on the ordinary TV news you are most apt to watch, how about the newspaper? There you go. But what part of the newspaper? How about the list of recommendations in the newspaper’s editorial page? This list usually appears in the days before the election. To be safe in adopting your paper's recommendations, you need to know the political ideology of the publisher that drives the recommendation process. Is your ideology the same as his or hers? Can you read a newspaper and figure out its ideology? That takes a great deal of skill. Better to ask someone who knows more about this than you do.

Like computer blogs, the newspaper columns written with a columnist's byline are another source of information. The writer of a newspaper column is like an editorial writer—opinions can be mixed in with the facts. Libel laws are looser for columnists; often they can get away with saying what a regular news story cannot. Columns can be helpful sources of information if the columnist is careful to give reasons for his or her opinions and is careful to distinguish the reasons from the opinions. The problem with editorials and columns that offer advice is that even if they give you reasons for the advice, you always have to worry that they are covering up other reasons that weigh against their advice.

New stories, on the other hand, are supposed to be more sanitized, cleansed of opinions, full of facts, and more reliable. Very often they are. The best news stories are usually the ones that appear early in the campaign. In these, the writers interview the candidates and probe for positions on the important campaign issues. Writers of these early stories are usually the best informed of all the reporters on a newspaper's staff. Early on, the candidate isn't slinging so much mud and is trying to show the highly politicized voters, especially those who give campaign contributions or volunteer in campaigns, that he or she has significant positions on key issues and is a credible candidate. Later in the campaign, the atmosphere changes. The least politicized voters, those who are undecided as the election nears and those whose decision to vote for a candidate or ballot measure could be easily changed, are the primary target of the bulk of the campaign's media blitz. For these voters, the campaign will create short, memorable slogans plus blasts at the opposition. The newspapers (and web pages) then react and give primary attention to these slogans, to the mudslinging, and to the rise and fall of the polls. The issues take a back-burner.

When Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was campaigning for the U.S. presidency, much of the early coverage of his campaign was about whether he had slept with a woman who had been paid for her story to appear on the front page of a supermarket tabloid. The average voter kept thinking, "I want to hear about the issues," but the news reporters kept covering the sex angle. "This is all inane, stupid and insulting, and I hope the American people jam it down you-all's throat," said Bob Slagle, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Texas, when speaking to the press. "The national press corps is acting like a common street gossip in a small town." Meanwhile, the nation's top newspapers were trying to set things straight. On the same day, The Boston Globe 's frontpage headline said, "Poll Shows Clinton's Lead Undiminished," while across town The Boston Herald 's main headline said, "Clinton on the Run." Each paper frames the issues according to its publisher's politics. We get inconsistent headlines. So, we voters have a tough time, don't we?

The searching reader will have to look back on page fourteen in the newspaper for any in-depth reporting of the issues, and, even then, we readers need to be aware that story placement can be affected by the paper's editorial policy. Busy readers usually read only the headlines, and a story's favorable treatment of a candidate can be torpedoed by an editor's unfavorable headline, regardless of what the reporter put into the story.

Other significant barriers block the sincere, interested reader who tries to use news stories as a source of information. Reporters too often fail to write stories that take the trouble to explain the issues, and it's not just that those stories aren't viewed by readers and editors as sufficiently entertaining. Explaining the news is harder work than simply stating what is new─the news. Also, there is little reward for writing in-depth reports. The reporter rarely gets a pat on the back from fellow reporters with the accompanying remark, "Beautiful piece of writing." There is no glamour in this part of the business.

In addition, a different factor obscures the public's vision of what is going on. The reporter's notion of objectivity gets in the way. When there are two candidates in an election, reporters often believe they must give equal weight and equal column space to both sides. The idea is to present the facts, then back off and let the voters decide for themselves. Unfortunately, this notion of fairness gets in the way when a campaign gets dirty and one candidate starts making false accusations about the opponent. The reporter sees what is going on but rarely will tell the public directly. Instead, when the attacked candidate tries to respond and say that the accusations are not true, the reporter will treat this reaction on a par with the smears themselves and will run the story with a headline "Mud flies," falsely suggesting to the public that both sides are engaging in negative campaigning. Paul Krugman once joked that "if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read Views Differ on Shape of Planet." The reporters are reluctant to tell what is really going on because they believe doing so would be putting their own judgment into a story, which it would be. However, the reporters often really are the only experts in touch with the readers, so if the experts won't tell the readers what is really going on, who will? Perhaps that is where the columnists and editors come in. Hmmm.

All in all, though, more good information is available than we are likely to take the trouble to use. The five best sources of information, not ranked in order of importance, are (1) the newspaper stories and magazine articles that profile the candidates and discuss the issues long before election day; (2) government voter pamphlets; (3) extended TV news programs; (4) public debates (but not the thirty-second TV summaries of the debates); and (5) the arguments of editors, columnists, and well-informed friends. All these are better than TV ads, campaign leaflets, blog entries, and sound bites on the ordinary TV news.

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¹ From “The Lie Factory” How Politics Became a Business” by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, September 24, 2012, p. 59.