Culture, Rhetoric, and Voting: The Presidential Election of 2012 by Douglas M. Brattebo & Tom Lansford

Author:Douglas M. Brattebo & Tom Lansford [Brattebo, Douglas M. & Lansford, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781629220406
Amazon: B01CK6M0YK
Barnesnoble: B01CK6M0YK
Goodreads: 36686542
Publisher: University of Akron Press
Published: 2015-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

This proposal, if adopted, would give candidates the opportunity to offer in-depth analysis of issues, not only for the sake of the analysis itself, but also to give viewers the opportunity to view each candidate’s ability to participate in a sustained exchange, as opposed to delivering prepackaged and memorized mini-speeches, an ability that has little correlation with the characteristics needed to be an effective president.

A further benefit of such a format is that candidates would have the opportunity to explore nuances. Televised campaign commercials are notoriously poor conveyors of information because they routinely make another candidate’s policy positions (past or present) sound ridiculous by not including important facts or leaving out relevant context. Debates should not replicate that, but they do. The result is the sort of “he said, he said” confrontations that were so typical in 2012. Unfortunately, the analysis rarely goes beyond that. If a candidate attempts to explain such issues in depth, he or she is usually met with an exasperated moderator who complains that “we’re out of time” and must “move on,” sometimes together with promises that “you’ll have plenty of time” or “we’ll get back to that.” The candidate’s “plenty of time” must then be given to other issues and the debaters either do not “get back to that” or have, at a later time, forgotten, along with the audience, the particular point at issue.

Finally, a word on doing away with the studio audience. Although routinely advised that they are not to react with approval or disapproval, audience members frequently do. Research has demonstrated that audience reaction can be vital in molding perceptions of which candidate won a debate, just as television producers of situation comedies know that viewers will laugh at things that are not funny with strategically placed laugh tracks. The situation highlights, unfortunately, the entertainment aspects of the debates.

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