More than just access, media literacy affects us all

During our class project, www.factcheckwa.org, we spent a fair bit of time watching ads, visiting campaign sites and checking out the communication tactics of political actors.  What struck me as slightly odd during the whole process was that we had to do this in the first place. Where along the line did it become ok for political parties to misrepresent the facts so much that people have to fact check their claims? (See: Is 2010 Officially the Worst Year for Political Ads?)

While I knew political speech was protected by the 1^st amendment, I didn’t know that almost all political speech was protected – even calculated lies. Although slander and libel laws still apply, these are so hard to prove – and generally take so long to prosecute that they have little or no effect on political outcomes.

What this means is that burden of reporting is further increased on the press and that the public should expect a dedicated and responsible media. This also means that the voting public needs to be informed and educated that just because “it’s on TV” or “in the newspaper” doesn’t mean it has any validity.

But does fact checking political ads do anything to help? We’ve talked at length this political cycle that more people are living in echo chambers of political thought and that in many cases people just don’t have the time or inclination to follow up advertisements with any real research. According to the numbers I found (all from the 2008 elections) visits to political websites spiked the week before elections. However, of the approximately 30 sites that make up the top political news sites, none of them are dedicated toward fact checking elections, and many of them are merely news aggregators or acknowledged biased sources.

So what does this mean? Advertisements are effectively unchecked and unless the media begins reporting that a politician is running a dirty campaign, the citizenry is basically on their own to analyze and decipher the ads on their own.

If this is true then what recourse do we have? How can we encourage voters to research initiatives and candidates so that accurate reporting and advertising is rewarded? Is it even possible or desirable? Is the digital divide responsible for this information inequality?

While a lot has been made of the digital divide in terms of governments allowing unfiltered access to information or economic conditions prohibiting connectivity for disadvantaged populations, what I find interesting is the digital divide in terms of media literacy and the ability to discern accurate information or use modern tools to research falsehoods.

Essentially – are the voters educated on how to use the tools available (or do they even know about them?) The numbers cited above seem indicate that they don’t know about them (or care about them) and the effectiveness (and sheer number of) negative (and false) ads seem to indicate the voters can’t tell the difference (or don’t care).

By many accounts, the teaching of civics in public schools is on the decline. Combined with little or no media literacy training in public schools, the environment is ripe for interested 3^rd parties to control the message and spin. Combined with the rise of anti-intellectualism (typified by continued claims of media bias by conservative politicians), it seems that fact-based reporting is fighting a losing battle against sensationalistic, partisan reporting.

So how do we fix this? Can it be fixed?

 

 

 

Week 7 Comments

What’s not to love? Good info, good music and a few adult beverages to tie it all together. I am pretty sure this wasn’t in the MCDM program overview (I just checked, it’s not) but I’ll take it.

Luckily I don’t have to use DRM at my work, but let’s just say I’m pretty familiar with how much of a barrier they can be.

Salut!

TV Party Tonight!

Any chance to use Black Flag in a post, I am going to do it!

The long tail of eGovernence

What an interesting article, although it seems very quaint at times! So much has changed in only a few years, most of which I would say is expectations of the general public. A few things stuck out though, such as:

-          The two seminal events in the arrival of the internet as a “destination” appeal to the two stereotypes of internet users – geeks (the Mars Pathfinder mission) and those seeking salacious material (Clinton/Lewinski). It’s also interesting that they were both government driven, but I would venture to say that most people got to those websites through more traditional .com sites like cnn.com, yahoo.com or other “news” portals.

-          Not sure I agree with the contracting as the biggest benefit of the internet. Department of Defense shares massive amounts of intelligence over the internet (both secure and unsecure networks). I’d also say that most low-level contracting work is done in person. There is no doubt that the internet is changing how we purchase things, especially large and complex items. But to single out just contracting is a little short-sighted into how vital these networks have become to front line operations.

-          This was obviously written before President Obama – who has a well designed internet site with lots of information, and who was an admitted BlackBerry addict.

-          It’s funny to think that it took an overhaul to add search functionality to the Washington State website. Sometimes I forget what it was like before Google and the other search engines. Everything was portal-like before, with lists of categories and lists within lists.

-          The Hatch Act is a big deal – there is a difference between election sites and official homepages. It’s very important to understand the shadow the Hatch Act extends over everything government officials do. For example, when elected officials want to visit a government building, holding a press conference becomes tricky as electioneering language is outlawed.

What I felt was the best point of the article was the paragraph describing what government officials and academics want out of eGovernment sites. In a nutshell, what academics and political wonks want is much different from what regular people want. Most people just want to get in, get the information they want, and get out. For most people, government isn’t something to interact with (except around elections) but something to either get something from or give something to.

One can argue that this is the point of our representative democracy. For the most part, I don’t really care about how the roads are made, I just care that they are made. Now, if fraud or waste is involved in the process, than the watchdogs should in theory expose them. But for the most part, as we have discussed in class numerous times, most people just have too many things going to on to follow how the process works.

But, this isn’t to say that access to this information isn’t important or useful. It’s a long tail of information. Maybe building roads is only interesting to 100 people, but to those 100 people it’s really interesting. Perhaps they are contractors or economic analysts or journalists or academics looking for ways to better improve either the contracting process or the construction process. Or maybe they just really love construction. Either way, all this infomration is meeting their needs.

One thing the article touches on, but doesn’t go into detail about is that information produced by the government is generally the property of, and accessible to, the taxpayer (with the obvious exceptions of medical records and intelligence/DoD reports). While access to this information has often been hailed as the panacea to government transparency, what people don’t often realize is that without context this information is generally useless.

In any given day, a government agency produces huge amounts of data. Just visit www.data.gov and you will see this. What has changed recently though, is requirements that this information be presented in a usable way with some context so that people can repurpose that data into a usable form. For example, EPA produces lots of reports concerning air and water quality. But because they have made public this information in easy to use formats, people have gone out and made use of free online map software to create great resources that normal people can use to check the environment near their home.

While this article was generally optimistic about what the internet can offer in terms of expanding access to government, what is also important to remember is that just because information is available, people won’t always clamor to use it. What I think is more interesting is the long tail effect of this information. That those who are very interested in very specific topics will find the information they want more easily than ever before. What I hope is that this will lead to a greater interest in the intersections of government resulting ultimately in a more informed public.

Post Election Dysfunction

1053 – Yes!

For – $1,284,953

Against – $1,530,977

1082 – No!

For – $3,394,034

Against – $5,778,325

1098 – No!

For – $6,099,873

Against – $5,113,900

1107 – Yes!

For –$15,038,170

Against – $341,384

After looking at the Public Disclosure Commission website (http://www.pdc.wa.gov/MvcViewReports/Committee/initiative_committees) and adding up the total money officially spent on a few of the Washington State initiatives, a few things really stuck out.

1)      The money was relatively even for most of the initiatives except for one of the liquor initiatives (1105) and more interestingly 1107 (candy and soda tax).

2)      In the case of 1107, the money that came in for the repeal was 5 times greater than the money against the repeal.

3)      Almost all of the initiatives were blowouts, except for 1100 concerning liquor stores.

4)      The side who spent the most money didn’t always win. The side that marketed themselves better won.

While there is no way to quantitatively measure which ads were better, anecdotally I can think of a handful of ads that seemed to be more effective at a) firmly entrenching if an initiative was good or bad; and b) didn’t just seem like a standard, cookie-cutter attack ad.

In the not-effective column – Every Rossi ad. I never heard once why I should vote for him. Lots of reasons to not vote for Murray; but nothing about how Rossi would do anything differently. I learned he put himself through college as a janitor. That’s it.

Most of the liquor ads, both for and against. Selling us the idea that we should be able to buy liquor at the grocery store came off to me as hedonistic while I never heard a good reason to not allow liquor at 7-11 other than kids might be able to get it easier. As long as there are older brothers and sisters, that won’t matter.

In the effective column – Some of the Murray ads. Especially toward the end of the election season, she started touting her accomplishments in office. Reminding people that she had been a pretty effective senator was nice and made it easier for her supporters to actively support her.

Most of the pro 1107 ads. Some of them may have stretched the truth, but in all the campaign gave easy to digest reasons that appealed to logic. Even if you are for the taxing of candy and bottled water, it was hard to argue against this initiative.

Although I know this is a completely unscientific poll of one, it’s a good reminder that dollars spent does not equal a winning campaign (See Meg Whitman). Although I would like to think that these measures and politicians succeeded or failed on their merits, in many ways it seemed as though the group that more effectively marketed their brand won out in the end.

In this election cycle, the conservatives began setting the talking point agenda early, leading to a mid-term that had progressives on the defensive from the beginning. What’s truly remarkable though, is how Washington generally resisted this national trend. Brian Baird’s district turned to a republican, but the rest of the state held steady (if Larsen’s  lead holds) while voters kept alive two government institutions that are privately run in many states (liquor stores and workers compensation insurance).

What does this all mean? What I would like to hope is that voters are getting more sophisticated and require more than a cheap attack ad to change their votes. But what I really think is that more and more people are bypassing traditional media and getting their information from outside sources, many of which are held to no standards of truth or factualness.

Radio talk show hosts, under the guise of political commentary, have essentially turned into shills for the two political parties. Commentators on both sides of the political spectrum provide shady half-truths and lies of omission to their listeners, many of whom are too busy to follow up with research of their own. Add to this the ability to find an expert or media outlet that will agree with just about any viewpoint, and voters are left in one of three predicaments.

1) Vote along party lines that generally match their beliefs.

2) Not Vote

3) Lose faith in the media and the ability to rightfully give credence to what is correct or even plausible, resulting in a massively misinformed voting public.

Unfortunately, the 3rd option is gaining stream (Obama is a Muslin, Kenyan, Cactus) and here in Washington we are thrilled with 66% turnout.Maybe if we could market voting as American, and not as partisan things will change. Until then, it seems as though branding and marketing will continue to dominate.

Week 6 Comments

Lots of good info, like usual. Too bad I had to miss last week, although having it streamed was nice. When it comes to online video, it still amazes me how much time people are spending online watching videos. Maybe I am on the long side of the generation gap, but I just don’t watch online video on YouTube.

Question: Are these numbers being skewed by Netflix?

When you showed the news website and said that the text was just the script, all I could think is that I love when pages do that. I stopped going to CNN.com because I can never tell when a link is just a video and not text – I just don’t have time to watch a bunch of 30 second or 2 minute videos when I can scan 10 text stories in the same amount of time.

I have so many technical questions and really need to take a formal class to be grounded in this stuff: any suggestions? I will have six months or so of GI Bill left after next quarter and I graduate the MCDM.

edit: Suggestions on premiere, after effects, etc…

To the Cloud!

Someday, everything will be everywhere for everyone. Until then, we have to deal with only 3g on Mt. Everest.

Behold the Great Pumpkin

It’s true the older I get the more sappy I get.

Brush those teethers!

We had a workshop on shooting/editing digital video – here is the final version. Still need a little work on jump cuts and audio, but it tells the story -

Week 4 Comments

Your friend Paolo really shed a light on how targeted content can be used and prove popular enough to warrant it’s creation. The more I think about this,I wonder if part of their popularity is the result of working at a tech savvy company. I think to my employer and remember some of the conversations I’ve had with office mates – sure some are on Facebook and we all send email, but really most of them have no idea and no interest in online video.

However, I do think there is an audience among certain groups of employees across government agencies much like you were talking about programmers and engineers using screencasts to discuss best practices.

As for viral videos – I think the best you can do is to make a great story and hope for the best. There are some tricks to encourage sharing, but without a good story or hook its going to be tough.

See you on Saturday