Infotainment and Political Advertising

For this week’s blog, the prompts I was forced to choose between were “Political News” and “Political Advertising.” I smirked a bit when I saw these, as I consider the two topics to be chief contributors to the problem of voter ignorance and misinformation on the true issues. So in trying to find a good source to write this blog, I figured I would look to what I consider to be the two biggest names in punditry; FOX News (http://www.foxnews.com/) and MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/). Leading the charge in today’s political “news,” or what I like to call ‘info-tainment’ (used from here on out without quotations and without the hyphen in the middle, as its use here is mainly to emphasize the two words it combines), the websites for these two entities offer a look at the major political news sources, which conveniently enough double as political advertising for the respective political parties that they insist they do not favor. As you will see, a brief trip around even just the home pages for these two sites and the stories attached to them can tell us a great deal about the key platforms and issues of the Democratic (MSNBC) and Republican (FOX News) Parties. As almost everybody knows, these outlets are both also television networks, which along with their websites allows them to reach an astounding number of people, especially now since the average American spends more waking hours watching TV than they do communicating interpersonally (Hollihan, 108).

The first thing that caught my eye on the two sites was the issue of health care. No issue has been more widely discussed over the past several weeks than health care, and specifically the bills that have been written and re-written over the past few months in an effort to reform the system. Surprisingly enough, FOX only has one story about health care reform on the front page of their website, compared to five links to stories about health care on the MSNBC. Furthermore, the language that is used in headlining the articles on health care is worth noting. On FOX, the headline can be read as “Dems Pile on Health Insurers over Critical Report.” This headline sends very specific communications messages. First, using the phrase ‘critical report’ is an attempt to remove responsibility from the health insurers, inferring that the criticalness of the report was outside of their control, when in reality there were probably some things the insurers could have done differently if they wanted to receive a better review. Some may consider that to be a bit of a stretch, but the other part of the headline I feel is even more obvious language. The term ‘pile on’ almost universally in the English Language carries a negative connotation with it. For a conservative news source to say the liberals are ‘piling on’ a group that they are also painting as a victim in the headline almost certainly is trying to send a message. Similarly, the liberal MSNBC uses strategic wording in their article headlines designed to make Republicans look bad. One headline suggests that a Republican senator has ties to a major insurer (insurers are evil on this site). When one reads the article, the facts supporting this claim are severely lacking, but the headline is what most people see first and how many will form their opinion, especially those who choose not to read the whole article. Another article praises a man for treating any and all patients that come to him without any form of health insurance, but does not once mentions the repercussions of doing so or the burden that it could potentially cause tax payers.

But health reform is not the only issue where these two sites show their support along party lines. On the FOX News site there are two separate articles discussing gun rights and one touching on immigration reform. On MSNBC’s site, one can find articles about gay rights and global climate change. What these articles are really doing is outline the top issues for the parties that each of these infotainment sites ‘unofficially’ represent. Democrats like to push the agenda of global warming and gay rights while the Republicans, ever conscious of homeland security like to keep the second amendment front and center along with the issue of border patrol. This is where in America we see news networks doubling as political advertising. They build up their own sides’ positions on their favorite issues while doing their best to malign the other party’s, or dismiss them altogether, as is the case with many of these articles (they don’t even mention the other sides’ position in most of them).

But perhaps the most issue that was the most telling (and the most interesting) of the issues that revealed these two infotainment giants’ political alignment is their stances towards the ongoing military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. All-told, there were no less than five stories on each of the two sites’ front pages about the war on terror and military action across the Middle East. What I found interesting about this was the way that the two sites aligned themselves. FOX’s stories featured almost universal negativity when discussing the events going on overseas. Bleak headlines focused mainly on terror-related deaths and stories that seemed to be suspicious of the Obama administration’s plans to continue the same military actions that they condemned Republicans for in order to get elected last fall. Oppositely, MSNBC’s view painted a picture of an administration making careful decisions in the Middle East and having open minds to new ideas on how to handle the current military climate overseas. What I find interesting and ironic about the take on both sides is the obvious flip-flop from the staunch positions they had during the previous administration, where the liberal side of infotainment endorsed the notion of getting completely out of the Middle East as quickly as possible while the conservative side advocated staying as long as it took.

This kind of hypocrisy promotes the kind of partisanship that both Republicans and Democrats in office claim to be trying to transcend, yet neither party seems to be making much of an effort to distance themselves from these infotainment outlets. I’m sure their reasoning behind it is to allow these networks to attack their opponents for them, so as not to expose themselves to criticism for running negative ‘attack ads’ (Hollihan, 158). Furthermore these news media sources are doing more than ever to keep themselves connected to their respective parties. MSNBC uses phrases in their headlines and articles like ‘the administration’ and ‘the GOP’ while words like ‘Democrats’ or ‘liberals’ are rare to come up. The reason is that they are trying to act like they are on an informal basis with the Democratic Party and their language is geared to suggest that they are simply ‘one of them.’ FOX does the exact same thing, calling out the ‘Obama Administration’ and ‘Democrats’ while almost never mentioning ‘the GOP,’ ‘conservatives,’ or ‘Republicans.’

After all of this, it is easy to see how and why political news and political advertising are so intertwined. These news outlets are two of the biggest that the American public turn to for their information about politics, and yet even a simple glimpse around their websites reveal that they are little more than political advertisements for the key issues of the parties they support, in effect ‘priming’ voters into seeing in the news again and again what they think that the public should be voting on come election time (Hollihan, 120). The beauty of this form of political advertisement is that it can have the effect of bypassing Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s “news-room guide” for thinking critically about political ads, mostly because most people reading into these infotainment outlets don’t realize that they are advertisements (Hollihan, 165). One can only hope that the continued growth and access to technology will help Americans in the future to be able to differentiate between news and infotainment political advertising, and that in the future there will be more credible news sources that have as easy access as these two media giants.

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Hollihan, Thomas A. Uncivil Wars: Political Campaigns in a Media Age. 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. Print.