Slate: How Oprah and other infotainment programs encourage the mentally tardy to vote

[DeepModem Mom]

Democracy for Dummies
How Oprah and other infotainment programs encourage the mentally tardy to vote.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006


Oprah Winfrey

As a Slate reader, you probably also partake of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, or the Washington Post from time to time. I'd guess that your interest in politics and public policy leads you to consume editorials and columns in your local newspaper and supplement your news consumption with a few political magazines—the New Republic or the Weekly Standard, perhaps. You might even tune in the Sunday morning shows and a couple of the televised presidential debates.

For your labors, UCLA scholars Matthew A. Baum and Angela S. Jamison would type you a politically aware individual, as opposed to, say, your politically unaware sister-in-law who learned everything she knew about the 2004 presidential candidates by watching George W. Bush on Live With Regis and Kelly and John Kerry on The Late Show With David Letterman.

But Baum and Jamison aren't here to bust your sister-in-law's chops for scraping her civics lessons out of the infotainment bucket. Their new paper, "The Oprah Effect: How Soft News Helps Inattentive Citizens Vote Consistently," which appears in the November issue of the Journal of Politics, refutes the notion that soft news on talk shows dumbs down the political discussion. Using a data set from the 2000 presidential election, they determined that soft news helps the politically inattentive vote "consistently," i.e. for candidates who best represent their interests, compared with similar citizens who don't watch soft news. The soft-news viewer doesn't even need to know the candidates' policy positions, just riff off their "likeability" factors before voting....

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This paper delivers a delightful kick in the pants to all those political journalists who have only recently wrapped their heads around the cliché that young people get their news from The Daily Show. A certain class of political reporter could tolerate the notion that "youth" found greater relevance in Jon Stewart's sardonic treatment of events than their learned dispatches from the front, as long as nobody maintained the kids derived any utility from their viewing. The press release touting Baum and Jamison's paper notes that Barack Obama told Oprah Winfrey during a recent appearance on her show that if he runs for president he'll announce on her couch....

http://www.slate.com/id/2152777/