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After these many months, the campaign season is finally coming to a close. All of the angles have been explored, all the polls parsed and the candidates thoroughly vetted. Or not. Politico’s Kenneth Vogel rounds up a list of documents that the so-called candidates of change never did produce.
On election day, whether you pull the lever, touch the screen or punch the card you always pull the curtain. But a number of people this year are advocating you make your vote more public
by photographing it and uploading it to the web.
David Ardia
of Harvard’s Citizen Media Law Project explains why this year your vote should be worth a thousand words.
For more information on recording your vote, please visit:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/documenting-your-vote
Despite the billions spent on elections, there's little research on how effective commercials, phone calls, or door-to-door efforts are at producing votes. Professor Donald Green, who's conducted hundreds of studies over the past decade, found that advertising and robo-calls do very little but that a novel, if slightly disturbing, approach actually does increase turnout.
If passed, California’s Proposition 8 would “change the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry.” Prominently featured in a pro-Prop 8 ad is video of schoolchildren attending the same-sex wedding of their teacher – video originally published by the San Francisco Chronicle. Whatever you think of Prop 8, is it fair use for news footage to be expropriated for political purposes? Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig weighs in.
The bad news for traditional media is seemingly unending. From The Christian Science Monitor to TIME Inc. to ABC News to Radar magazine. In fact, when Radar folded last week, reporter Ana Marie Cox found herself with credentials to cover the McCain campaign, but no funding. Instead of giving up her seat on the press bus, she went all public radio on the problem and launched a pledge drive. From a Palin press van, Cox says the pledges poured forth.
As the election comes to a close, many campaign reporters are looking back at their time on the trail. Michael Hastings, who was writing for Newsweek but quit out of disgust with the whole ordeal, explains why he couldn't take it any longer.
In addition to being a chronicler of the renegade biker gang the Hells Angels, a vocal proponent of drug use and an autobiographical magician who turned his own fear and loathing into at least two American classics, Hunter S. Thompson was a campaign correspondent. William McKeen, author of Outlaw Journalist, talks about the original gonzo reporter.
Highlights from Past Shows
Everyone's speculating on whether this election will produce a Bradley effect, a phenomenon where white voters tell pollsters they'll vote for the black candidate but actually pull the lever for the white candidate. The term comes from Tom Bradley's 1982 California gubernatorial run, but Democratic and Republican strategists who worked on that campaign tell us there was no Bradley effect even for Bradley. And Nate Silver of the blog 538 says the misnamed phenomenon hasn't been observed since the early 90s.
This election cycle has seen the proliferation of new organizations devoted to fact-checking, as well as new fact-checking desks at established media outlets. But has this increased scrutiny done anything to quell the untruths? The Politico's Daniel Libit says all these truth-squaders might drown each other out and have little effect on keeping the campaigns honest.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
