Most intelligent people believe they cannot be fooled by political advertisements.
Annenberg Public Policy Center Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson says that these people are flat-out wrong.
The Penn professor, who studies deceptive political ads, highlighted yesterday many of the techniques politicians use to alter voters' opinions -- whether the public likes it or not.
"Language and images create a very strong hold on our world," she said. "We know that [everyone] is susceptible to these inferences."
Jamieson began the lecture by showing two of Lyndon Johnson's ads from the 1964 presidential campaign, pointing out the powerful imagery used to try to manipulate voters.
One of the commercials showed a girl picking daisy petals followed by a nuclear explosion. The other linked Republican candidate Barry Goldwater to the Ku Klux Klan.
Both advertisements played on viewers' emotions and anxieties with threatening music and evocative images.
"We know that your judgments are affected by how you feel," Jamieson said. "What advertisements do is try to change that affective state. ... The use of music and the juxtaposition of images causes people to turn a positive into a negative."
Jamieson also focused on the 1988 election and advertisements criticizing Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. While Dukakis had legitimate concerns about national defense, she said, the campaign of George Bush took those concerns and used them against him.
"A real danger of advertising that is both effective and deflective is that we're not discussing the issues we need to discuss," Jamieson told the audience.
She also pointed out the deceptiveness of political ads, most of which she said are "literally true" but force viewers to make false inferences.
To illustrate her point, Jamieson showed an advertisement blasting Sen. John Kerry's record on terrorism by claiming that he cut funding following terrorist attacks. What it failed to include, Jamieson said, was the large time span of those cuts, the modest percentage of the budget that they encompassed and the dozens of Republicans who had also voted for the bill.
Audience members were shaken by the outright deceit displayed in the ads.
"You don't really think about the truth of these things," Temple senior Elena Gonzales said. "You just don't take the time to pick them apart and analyze them the way you should."
"It makes it harder for people to take the positions they ought to take [and] focus on an important issue," Jamieson said. "That's what I don't like about these advertisements."
