Speaker offers advice on sifting political fact from fiction

by DENISE MAHER

Not all fact is created equal. That is, at least, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the foremost expert on politics and journalism, and dean of the Annenberg School of Communication and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jamieson visited La Salle University’s Hayman Center on Thursday as part of the semester of civic engagement at the school and spoke about filtering fact from fiction in political discourse, with members of the audience coming from as far as Camden Catholic High School in New Jersey and Archbishop Ryan High School in Northeast Philadelphia.

Imagine you were Dick Cheney last week during the vice presidential debate. After a stinging Halliburton comment from Democratic rival John Edwards, Cheney asked the watching audience to go to the University of Pennsylvania’s factcheck.com to find out the truth.

The truth was, Cheney got his facts mixed up. The site he meant to propose was factcheck.org, and the small independent Web site owners of factcheck.com, knowing a site crash was imminent, re-routed the Internet traffic to George Soros’s — a leading critic of President Bush’s — site, where anti-Bush articles were the first thing Web surfers saw.

The next day, factcheck.org announced Cheney’s political snafu on its Web site. The lesson? It is sometimes hard to find out what the truth is in political discourse.

Jamieson’s advice was to be skeptical of advertisements that showcase bad motives on the part of candidates, and to keep up to date with possible fact checking news segments by watching network news and reading the newspapers.

Another surprise of Jamieson’s recent research at the Annenberg School was that young people who watch Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central are more in tune with politics than the general young public.

“Now, I’m going to show you sleazy ads,” Jamieson said to the audience.

With ad after ad bashing John Kerry and George W. Bush, Jamieson showed how misleading distorted facts can be, and how those facts back up what its audience already believes about a candidate.

“When almost 45 million people hear something untrue in a debate, they are more likely to believe that than the correction afterward,” Jamieson said.

It is a startling fact for which journalists are still trying to find a remedy.

“There is a lot more money behind ads than corrections to them,” Jamieson said.

Jamieson said that we must become aware of the things we most believe about both the Republican and Democratic parties, and then look out for those biases to be used by the people who make the “sleazy ads” that we watch six, seven or eight times in one TV sitting.

And although journalists are getting better at debunking those false claims in political ads, the message hasn’t been getting out to the right sized audience.

This year “there have been more issue-based stories. Journalism has improved this year … [it’s] the campaigns that are getting worse. The problem is the audience for that journalism is declining,” Jamieson said.

Jamieson ended her talk with heavy applause from the several hundred program attendees. A question and answer session followed the speech.

Jamieson is the author of several popular books on politics and the media, including The Press Effect and Dirty Politics, which can be purchased at bookstores all over the country.

A nonprofit site of the University of Pennsylvania, www.factcheck.org is dedicated to questioning facts in public politics for anyone who is interested in fact versus fiction in political discourse.