Documenting history as it happens.
CNNspiracy
If you watched last night’s presidential debate on CNN, you may have noticed the squiggly lines at the bottom, indicating the dial testing of 32 supposedly objective, or “uncommitted” voters who dialed up when they agreed with a candidate, and down when they disagreed. These 32 voters, in turn, had the opportunity to influence millions of viewers on who was winning. Clearly, throughout the night, the dial testing favored Obama, especially during those lofty speeches that make the women faint and the men cry. Later, CNN released the results of further polling data, concluding Obama was the winner of his second debate with John McCain. The numbers subsequently released call the debate 54-30 in favor of Obama.
What do the experts think of this dial testing phenomenon? University of Chicago psychologist Howard Nusbaum says your brain can’t devote its full attention to what the debaters are saying and what you’re seeing. “There’s cognitive capacity devoted to those graphs that is not devoted to what they are saying. The information that is available to you becomes thinned out, so it becomes as if you’re skimming the debate,” he says.
Viewers may also be swayed by the human desire to seek consensus, says Washington, D.C.-based psychologist Alan Lipman. ”It’s kind of like the difference between watching a movie and watching a movie with commentary,” he said. “It’s going to affect your perception and beliefs.” Lipman also said that television’s competitive push to be fast rather than deep “drives people to believe that the way to make decisions about political candidates is the instantaneous gut responses.”
I watched the debate and thought John McCain did well, although I will agree with CNN that it “was no game-changer.” I thought McCain had a slight edge on Obama in the debate, and I watch these debates waiting for my candidate to screw up, so I will know from where the attacks will come. It didn’t happen. I thought Obama looked angry when McCain exploited the ideology driving his policies, while CNN thought he looked cool and collected throughout the debate. Which one of us is wrong?
I found the following CNN Transcript interesting, as it documents CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien’s honest candor with the dial-testers, which, as Anderson Cooper points out, is very interesting given the supposed outcome of the debate:
O’BRIEN: A final show of hands if you will, if you were – you all came in persuadable. But if you had to vote today, how would you go, raise your hand if you would vote for Senator McCain. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14. Do I assume the rest of you for Obama? That would be 11. So a slight advantage to Senator McCain if they had to vote today, that’s our folks who are persuadable.
You know you only have 27 days left until you actually have to make a decision. And many of you are still undecided. Anybody make up their mind tonight? Raise your hand if you are no longer an undecided. We have got a few, one, two, three, four five, six, seven people. So of our panelists, 25, seven now say this debate was enough to convince them one way or the other – Anderson.
COOPER: Soledad, it’s interesting because if you judge them by their dial testing, their dial testing seemed to go up much more for Barack Obama than it did for McCain and yet clearly they prefer John McCain in that crowd. Interesting to see the decisions that they have reached.
Soledad, thanks very much, always interesting to see. We’ll have a lot more of that ahead in the hours ahead.
So why, in “the hours ahead,” does CNN.COM proclaim Obama obviously won the debate? That’s not what it sounded like when the same individuals who supposedly dialed up and down were surveyed. Whatever history CNN had as an objective news source is waning with the use of these squiggly EKG-style lines. If these lines averaged out between the candidates at the end of the day, it would be a different story, but they did not, and therein lies the sway.
The fact of the matter is America is about to elect, to quote Fred Thompson at the Republican National Conference, “a history-marking nominee for president. History-making in that he is the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee to ever run for president.” Thompson went on: “Apparently they believe that he would match up well with the history-making Democratic-controlled Congress. History-making because it is the least accomplished and most unpopular Congress in our nation’s history.”
History is on John McCain’s side, even if recent history is not. Obama’s refusal to relinquish his trillion-dollar proposals during this historic economic slump will inevitably render a tax hike on nearly all Americans, which is what Herbert Hoover did eight decades ago. A simple equation for you at home: Tax Hike + Recession = Depression. This is no time for rhetoric. We stare into an abyss, both at home and abroad. But we are in the trenches of political silly season, with 27 days to go. I am unsure if CNN has taken on the task of deliberately trying to sway voters, but on the face of it, their analyses have veered away from objective. This subliminal dial testing stunt furthers my suspicions.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” – Albert Einstein
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CNN said Obama clearly one the debate because their polls (not of the tiny focus group, but of the viewing audience) so clearly indicated judged his performance more positively. The polls reported on the other networks also indicated an Obama win. The focus group was tiny and non-representative of the general voting or viewing public, so CNN would hardly proclaim an Obama win based on who they said they would vote for especially when the “who will you vote for?” hands did not match the “who did better?” hands or the dial test scores. It’s not hard to guess why the dial testing would not match the voting decision. An obvious reason would be the group deciding their vote for reasons other than the actual debate performance by the candidates. Another reason could be that, because the shown dial graph displays a total response from the group, maybe the group members who responded well to Obama’s answers were fewer but responded VERY highly while McCain inspired much weaker postive responses but in a larger number of the group.
As to actual perfomance, I would say Obama’s was considerably stronger. He came across poised, confident, steady and unflustered. He explained his points well and did a good job of talking policy decisions and rationale in a way people can understand without talking down to them. McCain moved and spoke awkwardly, and seemed old in a bad way. His jokes fell flat. He sounded cranky in general, and hostile and snide towards Obama. He repeated a lot of lines from the first debate. He didn’t explain things well. He raised the subject of a plan to spending billions to buy back houses from homeowners but didn’t explain the plan at all.
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There are two different kinds of people that watch these debates. Some people turn on the tube already thinking that John McCain is clueless and Barrack is going to win just for the fact that they think they agree with him politically. Then, of course, there are always those people that just watch the debate because they find all the political buzz to be interesting but know nothing about either McCain or Obama. Those sheeple (love your picture by the way) will listen whatever the media decides they need to know. My point is that not only will people assume that Obama won the debate, but they will also go on believing that what that biased liberal media has to say about the issues is true and that McCain is old, clueless, and balding.
