With the political campaign season poised to go into high gear next month it is important that voters become aware of the various propaganda techniques being employed by the candidates and their surrogates. Having taught logic for many years I am familiar with the standard rhetorical techniques used to persuade audiences to accept conclusions by means of invalid or fallacious arguments. In this political season there is already plenty of name-calling, fear-mongering, oversimplification, distortion, half-truth, false dilemma, misquotation, ad hominem and ad miseracordiam arguments, and other classic informal fallacies being bandied about. But in the digital age political propagandists have invented some novel forms of deception that employ juxtaposed visual imagery, audio cues, and other media techniques designed to mislead audiences into drawing conclusions for which there is no evidence and believing what is not true.
A fun campaign party-game involves getting a group of friends together and watching the evening news to see how many fallacies and propaganda techniques you can spot. For a useful primer on the new kinds of techniques developed for TV and digital media, I recommend the Patterns of Deception pages on the Annenberg Public Policy Center's website Flackcheck.org. Here you can find descriptions and examples of techniques such as deceptive dramatization, photo-shopping, visual vilification, and glass housing.
I was particularly interested in glass housing, a propaganda technique which I had observed but did not have a good name for. Basically, glass housing involves accusing your opponent of something which you yourself have done. The name derives from the saying, "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones," which suggests, of course, that the mud one slings at one's political rivals may also end up on oneself. This pattern of deception relies on selective omission of crucial information, namely that the speaker is in fact guilty of the very same supposed heresy. It is a confusional technique, since it creates the impression that the speaker is against something he is actually for. Using this technique may invite the charge of hypocrisy, but only if someone in the audience bothers to fact check the claim against both the target's public record and the speaker's own record. Courting a charge of hypocrisy appears to be an acceptable risk to many politicians who seem to place no value whatsoever on logical consistency. In the example on the Flackcheck site there is a snippet of a Santorum Michigan TV attack ad accusing Romney of not supporting the automobile industry bailout, while conveniently failing to mention that Santorum did not support it either.
I believe that I have also observed examples of an interesting variant of glass-housing, which I will call preemptive glass housing. This is a particularly cunning technique if used carefully. Preemptive glass housing involves accusing your adversary of doing something that you or your surrogates are about to do. For example, in the last few days the Romney-Ryan campaign has been putting out statements claiming that the Obama-Biden campaign has been "driven by division, attack, and hatred," in other words, he is accusing Obama of "going negative." I suspect that this is an example of preemptive glass housing designed to inoculate the Romney-Ryan campaign against similar charges when they come out swinging with millions of dollars of negative advertising following their upcoming convention.
Preemptive glass housing allows one to appear to be the moral and honest character in the mud fight by inviting audiences to believe that the speaker could not possibly be in favor of the tactics he is criticizing his opponent for using. It works like a vaccination against possible future counterattacks as well, since it has primed one's audience to regard retaliation as evidence for the original charge, whether that charge had any truth or not at the time it was published. My reading is that by stating now that the Obama-Biden campaign has become harshly negative (which it hasn't), the Romney-Ryan campaign is preparing its audience for it doing just that. When the Obama campaign returns the fire, the Romney camp will just say "I told you so." They will also be in a position to claim that "They started it." But, if Obama-Biden refuse to take the bait, then the smear will stick. Pretty neat, eh?
Why do I think that the Romney-Ryan campaign is going to go harshly negative on Obama? Well because that is basically how Romney secured the Republican nomination. Whenever any primary opponent began to outpace him at the polls (which was often), the Romney camp unleashed a torrent of negative campaign ads against them ahead of the next primary election. This use of negative campaigning worked well against the likes of Gingerich and Santorum, and now Willard is planning to use the same strategy against Obama. Romney's donors and Super-PAC backers understood this all along, which is why they have been stockpiling millions of dollars for negative ad buys in the last two month before the election.
Romney's choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate provides also evidence that he has decided that his best chance of winning the White House is to mobilize a lot of angry Republicans to turn out on election day while his political allies in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida suppress the Democratic vote, particularly among black, Hispanic, and working class voters. He seems to have reached the conclusion that Obama's favorable likability numbers, as compared to this own, make it unlikely that he will be able to pry loose the votes of many independents, who are the traditional targets in presidential elections. He probably also figures that those primary voters who supported other Republican contenders during the "anybody but Mitt" primary period will come out to vote against Obama, but only if he can get them excited and angry enough. So, he is feeding the Republican base its red meat with Paul Ryan, and will be playing to their baser instincts to get them to the polls in large numbers.
So that is why my money is on the Romney campaign turning fiercely negative in the next few weeks following the Republican convention. If you think this campaign has been dirty, dishonest, and deceitful thus far, "Baby, you ain't seen nuthin yet."
