American Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Richard M. Valelly

Author:Richard M. Valelly
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780195373851
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-02-11T06:00:00+00:00

Caveats

Should pollsters be middlemen between the people and government? The term “pollster” was invented in 1949 by a political scientist who was unhappy about the rise of polling; he wanted a word that rhymed with the 1946 invention of “huckster” to disparage marketing executives. Pundits have long denounced “government by polling,” believing that the public is ill informed. Other analysts think that politicians manipulate the public so that the polls tell the politicians what they want to hear.

Political scientists are less concerned about manipulation. Politicians do have message consultants. But neither political party dominates the country, the airwaves, or the bandwidths. Media bias is regularly discussed on the Left and the Right, a discussion that itself helps to correct bias. Citizens also have an inherent distrust of the media. As for corporate control of the American mind, one could point to the campaign finance case of January 2010, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Supreme Court decided that the principle of free speech required lifting regulatory limits on political advocacy by corporations and unions. They can now directly and independently contribute to political action committees (PACs) that advertise on behalf of political candidates, and those PACs can run their campaign ads when they choose. The case certainly raised the specter of a tidal wave of negative campaign advertising, and some members of Congress and state legislators have found themselves barraged by misleading ads and have thus lost their seats. But close students of the advertising wars in American politics currently doubt that there is an overall bias toward any constituency, group, or party.

The media environment of citizenship has in fact become highly fragmented, with formats for news delivery rapidly evolving and with news consumption increasingly custom-built by citizens to suit their own tastes. National newspapers of record, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, have seen their circulations shrink sharply in the past decade. The major broadcast networks long ago ceded their monopoly of the broadcast environment, as cable television and the Internet offer fierce competition. The decentralized structure of communications impedes the manipulation of public opinion.

Additionally, no single political figure can command the attention of the public for very long, with the possible exception of the president. Still, aside from the unique crisis atmosphere that attends a truly grave emergency in national security, presidents cannot—contrary to popular belief—control opinion. In fact, presidential approval ratings never permanently shift after ordinary presidential addresses to the country.

The most basic reason for not worrying about manipulation is that the public has to be paying quite close attention without anything else competing for its attention in order for it to be manipulated in the first place. Yet citizen attention to public affairs is episodic. When the public suddenly does pay close attention to some new aspect of public affairs, when President Bill Clinton was impeached in the House of Representatives and tried in the Senate, for instance, the public also receives a lot of new and conflicting interpretations about the events that suddenly fascinate them.

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