Weekly Quiz: Test Yourself on this Week’s Events

The weekly quiz is now live in Mypoliscilab. Good luck!

Weekly Quiz: Test Yourself on this Week’s Events

The weekly quiz is now live in Mypoliscilab. Good luck!

The Daily Show: Republican Candidate Said What About Rape Now?

Richard Mourdock forgets the first law of fetus club.

The Irrelevancy of Facts

English: Barack Obama at the Fort Worth Convention Center during his presidential campaign. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mitt Romney (Photo credit: Dave Delay)

In politics, a campaign strategy is a strategy to communicate a candidate’s platform in order to win an elected position. In a perfect world, candidates running for public office would merely explain to the electorate why they, the candidate, deserve their votes. The campaign strategy would simply be on the merits and the electorate would be well informed on the issues thanks, in part, to an objective and competent news media.

However, it is not a perfect world and the electorate is not well informed. As such, political campaigns heavily rely on the spinning of facts and the spreading of misinformation to win elections. Negative ads and spin doctors (i.e. campaign surrogates) now make up the core of the successful political campaign. Facts are now increasingly irrelevant to both the political campaign as well as the news media.

The result is a campaign agenda to depict Pres. Barrack Obama as a secret Muslim communist-socialist-fascist who not only hates America, but has secret plan to destroy her. Equally, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is portrayed as a heartless non-Christian über capitalist who not only hates workers, but has Machiavellian plans to destroy the American middle-class.

Whom do you blame for the seemingly irrelevancy of facts that has saturated political campaign strategy?

–TERRANCE MULLINS

Related articles

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Weekly Quiz: Test Yourself on this Week’s Events

The weekly quiz is now live in Mypoliscilab. Good luck!

Weekly Quiz: Test Yourself on this Week’s Events

The weekly quiz is now live in Mypoliscilab. Good luck!

The Colbert Report Formidable Opponent: Mitt Romney

Stephen argues the centrist Mitt Romney seen at the debate is the real Mitt Romney, but Stephen thinks Stephen got sucked in.

MPSL VLog: SCOTUS versus POTUS

The Supreme Court of the United States just began its new term. It is expected to decide cases about affirmative action, same-sex marriage, and voting rights. Professor Gaffaney explains.

The Abdication of Fact Checking

Strasbourg, le 14 septembre 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last week, the University of Denver hosted the first 2012 presidential debate between President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. However, the media coverage of the debate and the resulting political fallout will be the same; both republicans and democrats will try to spin the outcome of the debate in a way that benefits their side. Meanwhile, the news media will overflow with coverage concerning the political impact of the debate, but will ultimately fail to explain if the facts actually fit the claims made by either candidate. Instead, the American electorate was given nonsensical and derivative sports analogies purely to oversimplify what should have been journalistic analysis of policy claims.

By lazily relying on the typical horse-race coverage of elections (i.e. the news media’s focus on which candidate is up or down in the latest public opinion polls), the news media, especially cable news, have abdicated their role as fact checker. These actions further exasperate the inescapable certainty that presidential debates are more about presentation than substance. Consequently, the big news story following any and all debates will inevitably be which candidate “won” divorced from any assessment concerning which candidate, if any, actually had the facts on their side.

This week, the news media will predicatively bombard the American audience with poll numbers along with a bloviated analysis of said poll numbers with a pretentious and misguided sense of accomplishment for delivering the very “news” that they themselves have shaped with their utter lack of journalistic examination. Get ready for hundreds of hours of useless analysis and flagrant political spin; well, until the Vice Presidential debate feeds the horse-race coverage even further.

What changes, if any, would you make to the American news industry to ensure reporting of political events involved more fact checking and less horse-race coverage?

–TERRANCE MULLINS

Related articles

• How much will the debate move the polls? (washingtonpost.com)
• Initial Polls, Media Debate Consensus: Romney Won Big, Obama Lost Big (News Media and Blog Roundup) (themoderatevoice.com)

The Colbert Report Mitt Romney’s Debate Rhetoric & Body Language

Mitt Romney distances himself from everything he said on the campaign trail, but his confident facial expressions are what really mattered.