Kathleen Hall Jamieson, foreground, dean of Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, joins, from right, R. Laurence Moore, Cornell professor of history, and Kops Fellowship Program benefactors Daniel W. Kops '39 and Nancy Kops in a media discussion with students from the Cornell Daily Sun in the Yale-Princeton Room of the Statler Hotel, Oct. 26. Robert Barker/University Photography
Money equals speech in today's media world, an expert on campaign communication told her Cornell audience at the annual Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture Oct. 26, and she presented the facts and figures to prove it.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, is a frequent commentator on national programs such as CBS News, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer and on CNN. She is director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC), which recently launched a new web site that reports the center's findings as it tracks the groups that are spending an estimated $330 million on broadcast issue-advocacy advertising www.asc.upenn.edu/appc.
This influx of money for paid announcements that advocate one side of an issue is very problematic and challenging for the press, Jamieson said, since often the source of the ad is identified with a name that does not necessarily give an accurate depiction of just who is paying for the message. She called these "pseudonymous groups" and gave as an example the People for Health Care Justice, which aired ads during the 1993-94 debate over President Clinton's first health care plan and which was an insurance-group lobby.
"This is a troubling new social phenomenon, now protected as free speech by the Supreme Court," Jamieson said. "We don't know who these people are, but they have a loud voice because they have so much money."
The Supreme Court ruled in Buckley vs. Valeo in 1976 that advocacy advertising is protected under the First Amendment, a decision that eliminated limits on spending to publicize one side of an issue.
"I don't think the court envisioned what the byproducts of that ruling would be," Jamieson said, adding that she believes it resulted from the justices' "fundamental misunderstanding of human communication." Lawyers use words with precision, she explained, but most people don't. The APPC conducted tests on viewers' interpretations of certain ads and found that even when an ad did not explicitly tell viewers how to vote, 75 percent of viewers in some cases interpreted the ad to be advocating how they vote.
The danger of this comes from the anonymity of the message's sender, Jamieson warned.
"We discount information or give it credibility based on the source," she said. "But what happens when an environment is created where you don't identify the source?"
The "Harry and Louise" ad campaign that aired in 1993-94 about Clinton's health plan was "a masterpiece of public relations because it succeeded in conning the press," Jamieson said. The ads aired only in the districts of congressmen with swing votes, in Washington, D.C., and in New York City. Bill and Hillary Clinton attacked the ads because they presumed the ads were effective, even though APPC surveys done later revealed that most people were only confused by them. The news media started covering the ad campaign itself, giving it national exposure, because journalists -- without checking the facts -- believed it was a highly effective national campaign. The coverage, not the campaign, swung congressional votes.
"For the first time, we documented that buying ad time was a surrogate for lobbying," Jamieson recounted. The danger for a free society, she added, is that lobbyists must register, while advertisers can remain anonymous.
Another danger in issue ads comes when one side has all the money and the other side has little or none, like Big Tobacco vs. the American Cancer Society. In advertising against a tax on cigarettes, the tobacco companies outspent the other side 40 to 1, Jamieson said -- $50 million against the cancer society's $5 million. To make matters even worse, the tobacco companies' ads lied. The problem wasn't just the absence of another opinion, it was the absence of correction, she said.
Journalists can preserve a fair and complete discussion of issues if they exercise responsibility, Jamieson said. In the case of the tobacco tax ads, only the ABC network refused to air them because they were deceptive. Adding to the lack of scrutiny of the ads was the lack of adequate press coverage of the tobacco tax bill itself, Jamieson said, so that most people did not have enough information to judge the ads for themselves.
Broadcasters have a special obligation to the public to disclose accurately who advertisers are and to refuse to air deceptive ads, Jamieson said. She urged the audience to be energetic in scrutinizing issue advocacy ads and to complain loudly to broadcasters who neglect their public responsibilities.
Before beginning her speech, Jamieson congratulated Cornell President Hunter Rawlings for endorsing, in his Oct. 23 State of the University address, the Carnegie Foundation-funded Boyer Commission report on undergraduate education. She is a member of the commission.
"Cornell is the first Ivy to adopt the Carnegie report," she said. "That puts you ahead of the curve."
The report can be accessed at http://notes.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf.
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