ABSTRACT
The amount of political information available to voters in today’s media environment is seemingly endless. The internet provides data on demand from news sites, both mainstream and not mainstream, ideologically driven websites, blogs of all political stripes, candidate, campaign, and party websites, and videosharing sites such as YouTube.com, where anonymous individuals or groups can post videos related to candidates and campaigns. Some of this information is vetted by gatekeepers, some not. And when a gatekeeper is supervising, the norms under which that function is performed are not necessarily either clear or disclosed. Does this cascade of potential informa-
tion confuse users or help them make
sense of contesting political claims? Can these new information technologies provide information to enable users to protect themselves from misleading campaign rhetoric? This chapter examines the effectiveness of the internet in providing the tools to enable citizens to distinguish fact from deception in the 2004 presidential general elections, above and beyond the tools afforded to them by the traditional news media. In the 2004 U.S. presidential election,
citizens turned to the internet for campaign information at unprecedented levels (Rainie et al., 2005). By one estimate (that of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press), 75 million Americans looked to the web during the
election, “to get political news and information, discuss candidates and debate issues in e-mails, or participate directly in the political process by volunteering or giving contributions to candidates” (Rainie et al., 2005, p. i). The number of citizens going online for political news increased from 18 percent of the general public during the 2000 election to 29 percent in 2004 (Rainie et al., 2005, p. i). Similar percentages were found in the National Annenberg Election Study (NAES). Over the course of the campaign, from October 2003 through November 2, 2004 we found that 26 percent of registered voters accessed the internet for political information during the 2004 election. As election day neared (September 7 through November 1, 2004), the proportion of registered voters with internet access who reported going online for political information averaged 34 percent (Winneg and Stroud, 2005). Like past elections, the one in 2004
included deceptive claims and misleading rhetoric by both the Republican and Democratic camps (Jackson and Jamison, 2004; Milbank and VandeHei, 2004; Winneg et al., 2005). Misleading attacks on opponents’ vote records, military service, and proposed policies found their way into Democratic and Republican advertisements and stump speeches. None of this would make much dif-
ference if the public were immune to its effects. However, Winneg et al. (2005) found at the end of the 2004 primary season that a majority of the American public living in battleground states in which political advertisements aired, mistakenly believed that “George W. Bush favors sending American jobs overseas” and “John Kerry voted for higher taxes 350 times.” These were, of course, central claims in attack ads. The press is supposed to sort fact from
fiction. If it does, an attentive public would not be deceived. Put simply, “when
those seeking office offer discordant facts, the public should expect the press to weigh in to make sense of the discrepancies” (Jackson and Jamieson, 2004, p. 229). The press, however, seems to be failing in its role as the “custodian of fact” (Jamieson and Waldman, 2003; Jamieson and Hardy, 2007). Nor is the public holding up its end of the bargain. Relatively low consumption of traditional news combines with a reluctance on the part of the press to adjudicate fact to all but ensure that the presumed protection against campaign distortions expected of the press is less effective than democratic theorists would like. Confounding such an ill-fated combi-
nation is the press’s reliance on “horserace” campaign coverage that focuses on strategy and politicking and, as some have argued, leaves citizens cynically sitting on the sidelines (Cappella and Jamieson, 1996, 1997; Jamieson, 1992; Patterson, 1993). Studying the race for mayor in Philadelphia in 1991 and the 1993-4 health-care reform debate, Cappella and Jamieson (1996) found that such coverage significantly increased cynicism and suppressed the likelihood that participants in their study could accurately report the information present in strategically framed news stories. Those experiments, however, took place in the old media environment. In the early 1990s citizens did not have any other functional alternative for accessing political information besides the traditional news outlets. Back then, citizens who were exposed to information about the gaming of self-interested politicians through traditional news, and as a result became more cynical and learned less than they otherwise might have, had little recourse. Today, however, the internet presents a viable alternative. Here we examine the following ques-
tions. Do failures of the press lead individuals to turn to the internet in search of political information? Does the internet
enable them to discern fact from deception in presidential elections, above and beyond the tools afforded to the citizens by the traditional news media? Does the use of the internet affect citizen’s overall knowledge of facts? These questions require that we explain
what we mean by fact. Campaigns are contests over completing claims. Some are simple matters of opinion. “John Kerry betrayed his country by testifying against the Vietnam War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee upon his return home,” is a statement of opinion. One might believe that any critique of an ongoing war is an act of disloyalty, while another might believe that it is a citizen’s duty. However, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of noting, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion; no one is entitled to his own facts.” The fact that John Kerry is a Democratic
Senator from Massachusetts who served in Vietnam and testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee upon returning home is not a matter of opinion. If one holds that Kerry is a Senator from Iowa, for example, there are widely accepted sources to which one can appeal to demonstrate to a reasonable observer that the person is incorrect. For practical purposes what we mean by fact is what Jamieson (1992), in Dirty Politics: deception, distraction and democracy, called “consensual fact.” Whether a person voted for or against a specific piece of legislation and how many votes a person cast for a certain position are matters of fact as well. To draw up the battery of factual and
false claims from the 2004 presidential campaign, this study relied on the reports of the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org.1 That source was cited approvingly by both Democratic and Republican campaigns in 2004, most notoriously by Vice President Dick Cheney during his debate with Democratic Vice Presidential contender John Edwards.
