Ad ran in a Sarasota, Florida newspaper. |
Although perceived as deceptive and ingenuous, spin can be just another tool in advertising the candidate’s brand. I have not campaigned for candidate in a few years, but today’s class readings made me think of who is orchestrating the presidential campaign spin, and specifically the 140 character spin that I have been seeing on Twitter each night, and what Americans can do.
Other tweets and links that I have received since the conventions also exemplify the high level of spin and cherry picking of information coming out of the campaigns:
·
Tweet from the GOP, “Household income down 8.2%
since Obama took office, study shows” with a link to a Fox
New Story which characterized a Sentier
Research study on household income trends. The study actually reports on
household income from June 2009, five months after President Obama took office,
and acknowledges that the United States did not start to come out of the
economic recession until June.
·
YouTube video, uploaded by GOP
Political Action Committee Republican Study Committee, which intermixes a
speech by Ronald Reagan on small government and American success with clips by
Democratic liberals, taken out of context, to make the Democrats (e.g. Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama) sound
like they are for big government and against free enterprise.
·
Tweet from Barack Obama’s campaign, “President
Obama: "We’ve doubled the amount of renewable, clean energy we generate from
sources like wind and solar"” with no source or link.
· And finally, the Huffington Post recently tweeted
about a Sarasota, Florida, newspaper ad paid for by the Newt Gingrich Political
Action Committee. The ad uses President Obama’s current policies to extrapolate
some outrageous claims of what policies to expect America to move towards.
The Sarasota ad is the ultimate in
spin and the saddest part of political campaigns. Degraded to the point of silliness
I just hope that voters can exercise caution when reading the tweets and
messages of both campaigns because they are, in essence, carefully crafted propaganda.
I encourage everyone to find the source of the campaign’s information before
accepting it as fact. You may be surprised by what you find.
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