Media manipulation by the right-wing to influence public perception has been a decade-long tactic to undermine voter registration in America. While the current media frenzy surrounding the community organization ACORN is only partly related to voter registration efforts, it is important to note that the attacks have been built on a foundation of misinformation and media manipulation by the right wing over several years, largely surrounding the myth of “voter fraud.”
How this strategy has played out was the subject of a recent independent academic study, “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why Acorn was the News, and What the News Got Wrong.” Conducted by Peter Dreier, director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Center at Occidental College and Christopher Martin, professor of journalism at the University of Northern Iowa, the report examines how “the little-known community organization became the subject of a major news story in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, to the point where 82% of the respondents in an October 2008 national survey reported they had heard about ACORN.”
In a press release, the authors say that “…repetition of unverified allegations and distortions was the rule in national reporting of a purported ‘voter fraud’ scandal involving the community organizing group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) during the 2008 presidential campaign.”
According to the study, 647 ACORN-related news stories published in 15 news outlets between 2007 and 2008, many of which parroted a plethora of unverified allegations from conservative parties.
“The academic study found that news-media coverage of the voter-fraud charges failed to distinguish between problems with registering voters and actual voting irregularities, which are rare,” wrote Chronicle of Philanthropy writer Suzanne Perry, who recently covered “Manipulating the Public Agenda.”
“It also found that 80 percent of the stories failed to mention that Acorn was reporting registration irregularities to the authorities; 85 percent failed to report that the group was acting to stop incidents of registration problems; and 96 percent failed to provide deeper context, especially about efforts by Republican Party officials to use voter-fraud allegations to dampen voting by low-income and minority Americans.”
A prime example of conservative framing coloring the news, the study notes, is the widely reported August 2009 release of White House and Republican National Committee transcripts and emails. All major news outlet reports on the transcripts – which revealed that former Bush senior advisor, Karl Rove, helped orchestrate the firing of former New Mexico U.S Attorney David Iglesias “for failing to help Republican election prospects by prosecuting alleged instances of voter fraud by ACORN” – failed to discuss Rove’s overt plan to attack ACORN’s voter registration efforts in New Mexico and other states.
According to the study, this “demonstrates that there are indeed intensive political efforts to influence the national news agenda and to frame news stories by special interest groups.”
In the study, Dreier and Martin note that, while the current frenzy is about ACORN, the pattern of manipulation has important ramifications for organizations across the country. “Although the 2008 presidential election is long over, conservative opinion entrepreneurs and the conservative media echo chamber remain fixated on ACORN, and poised to inject their frame about ACORN as an issue in the 2010 and 2012 national elections.”
“Were this simply an isolated example of media complicity (witting or unwitting) with political organizations, the attack on ACORN would be of interest only to ACORN, its allies and detractors. But this case has wider implications. Our analysis of the narrative framing of the ACORN stories demonstrates that—despite long-standing charges from conservatives that the news media are determinedly liberal and ignore conservative ideas—the news media agenda is easily permeated by a persistent media campaign, even when there is little or no truth to the story.”
In an Oct. 21 feature, the San Francisco Bay Guardian outlined the conservative agenda of using the mainstream media and playing on the public’s psyche to promote the Party and its special interests. Bryant Welch, a clinical psychologist, author, and expert on political manipulation, tells the Guardian that “the right-wing commentators’ success lies partly in their ability to harness core human emotions such as paranoia or envy.”
“This is very, very sophisticated propaganda,” says Welch. “I don’t think progressives really get it that it’s a technique being used all the time.”
Republicans approach issues as a marketing challenge, according to George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley and author of Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. In the Guardian, Lakoff says that to “counter this tactic…the left would do well to learn how to frame things in moral terms instead of playing defense against right-wing spin masters.”
According to the Guardian, Lakoff’s advice is to “define the moral imperative behind empowering the people and their government to create a better world, then aggressively push a campaign to do so.”
“It’s the ‘this is the right thing to do’ approach,” he says.