The 2016 election, as seen through one overstuffed mailbox
The political fliers mailed to a Durham home tell an interesting tale of the 2016 campaign
By Rebecca Iannucci - November 8, 2016
Avoiding campaign ads during the 2016 election has been futile. Even if you turn off your TV, political ads pile up in a place you can’t ignore: your mailbox.
But there are some surprising findings in all that political mail. The fliers are more substantive than we expected and at least some of them have more positive claims about candidates than attacks on opponents.
Along with student researcher Hank Tucker, I analyzed 40 pieces of political mail that were sent to Bill Adair, director of the Reporters’ Lab and a Durham resident, beginning in late August. Of these mailers, 11 related to the presidential campaign; 20 to the U.S. Senate seat held by Richard Burr; and five to the gubernatorial race. One involved the North Carolina State Treasurer race, and three applied to multiple races.
We started with a hypothesis: Despite the elaborate graphics and eye-catching text, these pieces of mail wouldn’t actually say much about the candidates, their platforms or their political experience.
That wasn’t the case. Although several fliers did grab readers’ attention with ominous sentences — a Senate race mailing said, “‘My mom taught me to respect myself, to work twice as hard and to stand up to men like Richard Burr’” — a majority of the mail did integrate candidates’ policies, positions and voting histories. Only eight did not.
That same attack on Burr goes on to cite his votes against equal pay, against extending the Violence Against Women Act and against funding to reduce North Carolina’s rape kit backlog.
Another piece of mail accuses Deborah Ross of opposing the creation of North Carolina’s sex offender registry. The mailing reads, “As a radical political activist working for North Carolina’s ACLU, Deborah Ross opposed the bipartisan plan… Her concern? It could make it hard for dangerous predators ‘to reintegrate into society… and could lead to vigilantism.’”
Not every ad was negative. Of the 40 mailers we examined, 16 portrayed candidates in a positive light, while also touting their views on particular issues. For example, a postcard from the For Our Future PAC says that Hillary Clinton will “fight for climate change policy and has a plan to make equal pay for equal work a reality, invest in pre-K and make college affordable for all.” Another pro-Clinton mailing, paid for by the Democratic Party of North Carolina, shares details of her plans for the economy, international relations and paid family leave.
It’s worth noting that some pieces of mail weren’t specific in their description of a candidate’s policy plans. A door hanger from Donald Trump’s campaign managed to lay out his plans for the country without ever explaining how he’ll accomplish his goals. Using phrases like “America first,” “ending political corruption” and “safer, stronger America,” it fails to detail how Trump would make the country more secure or prevent politicians from lining their own pockets.
Also, some big and important issues were missing from the mailings, including Social Security, the federal budget and Medicare. Only one of the ads we looked at — which came from the nonpartisan Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund — mentioned Medicare, citing Burr’s support and Ross’ opposition of privatizing the system. Social Security wasn’t mentioned on any of the 40 mailings, nor was the federal budget — although one pro-Clinton ad claimed that “Trump’s tax plan would add trillions to the national debt.”
Many of the fliers were reruns that cycled through the same talking points (Deborah Ross raised taxes by $3 billion! Richard Burr voted to defund Planned Parenthood!).
Though many Americans are likely throwing these mailings directly in the trash, they offer something that TV and radio advertisements cannot: a slightly more substantive look at a candidate’s experience and values. Whereas televised campaign ads only have 30 seconds to get their points across — and viewers are often distracted by any number of variables — a tangible piece of mail allows voters to sit down and absorb the information.
Still, voters should be wary. We didn’t fact-check all the claims, but students in Bill’s newswriting and reporting class checked a sampling of the claims and rated them using PolitiFact’s Truth-O-Meter. The average rating: Half True.
Bullies, vanishing parents and a candidate flexing for the camera
The Duke Ad Watch team chooses the best and worst commercials of the 2016 campaign
By Rebecca Iannucci - November 3, 2016
For the last three months, student researchers in the Reporters’ Lab have watched hundreds of campaign commercials as part of our Duke Ad Watch project.
The goal was to save time for fact-checkers. The students watched ads for the presidential, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial races and identified claims journalists at PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and other organizations could check.
Students also wrote blog posts throughout the semester, analyzing different trends that cropped up again and again in campaign ads.
With Election Day fast approaching, Bill Adair, the director of the Reporters’ Lab, sat down with the Duke Ad Watch team to discuss what it’s been like to watch hundreds of campaign ads.
He spoke with student researchers Hank Tucker, Amanda Lewellyn, Julia Donheiser, Asa Royal and Sam Turken, along with project manager Rebecca Iannucci. Here is an edited transcript.
Bill: When you tell people, “My job is to watch campaign ads all day,” and they say, “Wow, what’s that like?” — what’s your response?
Asa: It’s fun! Some of the ads are well-made, some are corny and some are horribly misleading, but almost all of them are worth watching. Eventually, you can predict what you’ll see in an ad just by seeing who’s made it and who’s mentioned in it.
Rebecca: For me, it’s two things. On one hand, it’s actually helped me to be more informed, because I’ve found myself researching whether or not the claims in these ads are true or false. I feel like I’ll be walking into that voting booth on Nov. 8 with a pretty clear picture of who these candidates really are. But it also makes me sad to watch so many attack ads. I know there are so many people being influenced by these ads, for better or for worse, and they’re blindly believing false claims. And just watching these politicians attack each other for months, instead of focusing on why they’re good for the job or what difference they would make in office — it can be really disheartening.
Julia: It makes you a little crazy and very frustrated. I say crazy because campaign ads are the epitome of low production value. But the frustration comes from the claims that campaigns and PACs continuously make, and the way that candidates and their opponents are characterized in the process. The people making these ads are only concerned about whether their candidate — and quite frankly, their party — wins. It leads to a “gotcha” style of attack ads.
Bill: So, you’re seeing the same candidates using the same ads. But are you seeing the same candidates using the same lines?
Amanda: A lot of candidates use the same B-roll. You’ll see a kind of mix-and-match between advertising. They’ll use [Republican Chuck] Grassley [of Iowa] shaking hands with people outside of a small business in different ads. And Americans for Prosperity and J Street put together multiple ads [in different states] that were pretty much the same, just with a different candidate in the hole.
Rebecca: Yeah. They were identical. I haven’t seen a lot of candidates across different states saying the exact same lines, as if they were reading from a script that was just given to a bunch of different states.
Bill: Interesting.
Rebecca: I’ve just seen the same type of factual claims get said. But from state to state, I don’t see identical scripts being used.
Sam: Also, they all respond to each other now. Or at least, a lot of them do. There was one [series of ads] where you had this bicycle delivery guy. I forget who that was for, but then the opponent introduced another bicycle delivery guy in their ads saying, “That first guy’s wrong.”
Amanda: Katie McGinty.
Rebecca: Shady Katie McGinty! [Laughs]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty7XYCCJBJ0
Hank: And Ted Strickland’s response to [Rob] Portman [of Ohio]: “He criticized me for draining the Rainy Day Fund, but it was raining pretty hard!”
Rebecca: He admitted that!
Asa: I think that ads have gotten repetitive, but that’s probably what candidates want. If a message gets played once, people will forget it. If it’s played twice, attentive people will remember it. If it’s played 40 times, nobody is going to forget it.
Bill: Does seeing all these ads make you more cynical about politics?
Hank: [immediately] Yeah.
Bill: Why?
Hank: You’ve heard “race to the bottom” a lot in the presidential campaign, but I think that’s what all the campaigns this year are getting to be. I don’t think there’s any ad that is all positive about their candidate. They can be half-negative, and then they pivot to the positive. Or a lot of them are just all negative. But there’s always an attack. It’s not like they’re running on their positions and their values. They’re saying, “This person screwed everything up, so you should vote for me.”
Julia: It’s hard not to think that politicians treat campaigns and policy like a game when you’re constantly seeing them attack their opponents with falsehoods. The political climate is so bad right now that most of these political ads seem like they could be from a comedy show. And the voters that these ads are meant to target aren’t always going to go to PolitiFact or Factcheck.org. The campaigns know that, and they take advantage of it.
Rebecca: I have found I’m also very cynical about what on Earth gets done in Washington, after seeing all these different races. If you focus on [Democratic Senate candidate] Catherine Cortez Masto, she tried to tackle sex trafficking in Nevada. But then you look at the Senate race in another state, where a different candidate talks about sex trafficking, and they couldn’t get anything done, even if Catherine Cortez Masto made a little bit of progress. You look at how many people are running for so many different offices, and you think, “What’s the point of any of this?” They go into Washington and they’re up against such partisanship, they’re just pushing their own agenda — what on Earth is actually getting accomplished there? Despite how important my one vote is said to be, that’s not always how I feel. I feel like no matter what we do, nothing is going to get achieved, because of watching all these ads and seeing how everyone is so conflicted in what they want.
Bill: What’s the production quality of these ads? Are they good? [to Rebecca] Now, you’re the former TV writer. Do you feel like they’re well-produced?
Rebecca: [Laughs] No. I don’t feel that way.
Sam: Some of the graphics are kind of cool.
Rebecca: Some of the graphics are interesting. Those are very creatively done sometimes. The ones that make me cringe are the ones where the candidates themselves show up, and they do some cheesy little skit with their constituents, or with a friend, or their husband or wife. There was one recently with [Sen.] Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and he used his grown daughters and his wife. The women say to each other, “We didn’t want him to run for another term, but now we’re glad he’s doing it. You need help in there, honey?” And Ron Johnson is changing his grandson’s diaper in another room, and the grandson pees in his face. Then at the end, he comes in with the baby, and he dunks the diaper in the trash can, and they’re like, “Nice shot, Dad!” It’s so painful to watch. Those are the moments when production value is bad; it’s so cheesy. Why on Earth would you try to be relatable in this way when it makes you look very awkward?
Sam: The one with Kelly Ayotte playing baseball.
Amanda: Oh my God.
Sam: She’s like, “Oh, I smacked bills out of the park just like balls.”
Hank: Total pandering.
Amanda: With her Sox cap on.
Julia: The only ads I’ve seen with good production value either come straight from the campaign or are really, really weird.
Asa: As far as bad production value, I’d focus on a big bulk of ads that I just call “exceedingly mediocre.” Joe the Plumber/Doctor/Construction Worker appears on the screen, talks down on one candidate’s record, talks up another candidate’s record and then concludes the ad with a tagline. The only thing that can make an ad like that worse is if Joe never appears and you’re just forced to listen to a monotone narrator for the whole ad.
Amanda: Then there’s an ad for [Iowa Senate candidate] Patty Judge where you can tell it’s important, because she’s got the guy who voices Prairie Home Companion [Garrison Keillor] in there, and they’re challenging [Grassley] to a debate. But it’s such terrible quality. It’s tilted. It’s just an iPhone video. And you compare that to Trump or Clinton, who are never going to release something along those lines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p80fgKsItg
Bill: How are the presidential ads different? It used to be that campaigns would put out dozens and dozens of individual ads, and I don’t feel like we’ve seen that many different ads from the Trump and Clinton campaigns, have we?
Hank: There aren’t that many Hillary ads, but she knows which ones are working. We’ve seen [Trump] attacking the veterans, and one of Hillary’s ads shows veterans watching what Trump says about them. It’s also easier that they’re running against a very unusual candidate who might not be as sophisticated as a lot of presidential candidates. You can just keep doing the same things. He’s said a lot of stuff. It’s working.
Bill: What’s the best Trump ad?
Amanda: They just throw out words: “Power.” “America, great again.” That’s it.
Sam: There’s no policy. No policy.
Rebecca: The only ones that did have policy were the series of ads called “Two Americas.” One was about immigration, one was economy, one was veterans. And they all say, “In Hillary Clinton’s America, it’s more of the same… but worse.” [Bill laughs] “But in Donald Trump’s America…,” and it gets happy. But there’s no specific numbers. It doesn’t really say how he will go about doing anything. They’ll just say, “Everyone gets more affordable child care. Everyone gets more this or that.” And that’s it.
Bill: What’s the best ad?
Amanda: I got teary-eyed at one the other day. I don’t even remember what it was — [to Rebecca] — but I remember I told you about it.
Rebecca: The bully one. From Clinton.
Amanda: The bully one! She mixes in clips of Trump speaking and bullying people with bullies from movies. The guy from Back to the Future…
Rebecca: A Christmas Story, Regina George from Mean Girls…
Amanda: And then it flips to a young girl asking Clinton what she’s going to do about bullies in America. And then Clinton has a heartwarming response. It’s really cute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ6BfkqUWkw
Rebecca: I would say the series of ads that Clinton put out — like you were saying, Hank — with the kids watching the TVs, veterans watching the TVs. There was one specific ad where they actually interviewed one of those veterans and did a full minute-long ad with just him. He talked about how the horrors of war still stick with him, and he started crying and saying, “How dare Donald Trump say that he can relate to this.” I found all of those really emotionally stirring. It’s one thing to see the clips of Trump over and over, being such a jerk and saying all these things, but to see those people react and be so sad and scared — that’s what really gets me. And the “Mirrors” ad that Clinton put out, too. That was probably the most effective.
Sam: Yeah, the Hillary ads that just have Trump clips. It’s so easy to do, so easy to put together, and the message is just so clear. You really don’t need anything more complicated than that. It just reinforced everything, all the negative things he’s said.
Bill: What’s the worst ad? I’d be particularly interested at the state level — worst for production value, most annoying. What’s the worst one?
Rebecca: Oh my gosh. I have to think about this. I’ve seen so many bad ones.
Sam: That comic one with Hillary.
Bill: What was that one?
Sam: It was this weird comic thing. She was a cartoon. Everybody was a cartoon. Talking about Russia.
Rebecca: She went to go visit Putin and handed over uranium, and the whole thing was voiced by impersonators of Putin and Clinton. It was so weird! It was so weird.
Asa: I wish this weren’t so easy. Donald Trump’s attempt to appeal to the BJP Hindu vote in America. If the ad was supposed to make me cringe and laugh, I guess it worked. If it was supposed to appeal to my half-Indian identity and make me think better of Trump, I don’t know what to say.
Hank: There was one that was just goofy. [Christine Jones] was running for Congress, a Republican businesswoman. There was a white background where she was standing, and there was a crowd of old white guys around a microphone, and she says things like, “I’ve never taken funding from special interests. Can they say that?” and they all start chanting, “More, more, more!” Just weird.
Rebecca: That’s the vibe I got from so many of these cringey, I’m-embarrassed-for-you kind of ads. You laugh at them, and then you remember: These are people running for office. They are running to be in the Senate. They’re running to be in Congress. And — [laughs] — it’s just so stupid!
Amanda: It makes you take the race less seriously, and the position itself.
Hank: There’s another ad that weirded me out. It implied that parents of young children would be dying. [Everyone groans and laughs, recognizing the ad] It showed this picture of a mom in her bed with her young daughter, and then the mom vanishes. Fades into nothing. And then there’s a dad with his daughter, who’s wearing a wedding dress. And they’re standing together, but then the dad vanishes and it’s just the daughter alone. And then there’s a dad with his kid on a tricycle… but then the kid vanishes.
Rebecca: You think the dad’s gonna vanish, but then the kid has died!
Hank: And then it says something like, “Pollution creates so many premature deaths every year. Senator Ron Johnson voted against the clean energy something-or-other. Don’t vote for him.”
Bill: So if he gets re-elected, people are going to die.
Rebecca: Yep. That little 5-year-old.
Hank: A lot of times, you can tell who’s losing.
Sam: Yeah, who’s desperate.
Bill: How so?
Hank: They seem more desperate. It seems like they feel more of a need to defend themselves against attacks from the other candidate. Like in Ohio, Ted Strickland is losing to Rob Portman, and you can tell that [Strickland’s team] is kind of on their heels, having to defend themselves and make these extreme, radical claims against whoever. Same with [Russ] Feingold — he’s beating Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. And Feingold, a lot of his ads are more traditional, saying, “I did these things in the Senate.” The losers don’t seem as on-message. They’re just all over the place, ads trying to attack everything. The desperation — it’s not obvious in all the cases, but you can tell.
Sam: Yeah, like Michael Bennet in Colorado. He’s had an easy lead in Colorado.
Rebecca: Who’s he running against? [beat] Oh, Darryl Glenn.
Amanda: Darryl Glenn!
Rebecca: That’s the worst ad we’ve ever seen!
Sam: Is that the one with him working out?
Rebecca: Yes! He’s doing, like, P90X for three minutes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFt6ixD7Mdo
Sam: Michael Bennet hasn’t attacked once. I’ve seen 10 ads for Michael Bennet, and not one of them has an attack in it.
Rebecca: Yeah, he has run a very positive race.
Amanda: Until Darryl Glenn released that ad, I don’t think we even knew who [Bennet’s] competition was.
Rebecca: We didn’t, yeah! We were like, “Is he running uncontested?” Because nothing bad was coming out about him, and he’s not saying anything bad about other people.
Duke Ad Watch: Gender stereotypes play a role in commercial narrations
Campaign ads feature more male than female voiceovers and use gender to elicit different reactions
By Sam Turken - November 3, 2016
With Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee for president, and women a critical voting block in this election cycle, you might have expected to see more female-narrated political advertisements on TV. But no: Men are still controlling the airwaves.
A Reporters’ Lab analysis of 256 presidential, senatorial and gubernatorial campaign ads in the last two months found that political ads feature male narrators more frequently than female narrators.
And the use of male and female voiceovers often conforms to gender stereotypes. Campaigns seem to employ male voiceovers as a default option in both positive and negative ads about candidates’ policies and plans. Female narrations, however, are relegated to attack ads that rarely discuss strategy — which aligns with patriarchal beliefs that women are less knowledgeable about policy.
Our analysis reviewed ads that included voiceovers or testimonials from constituents. We didn’t count the ads that featured a candidate as a narrator or involved both male and female voice-overs.
Since September, 138 ads have used male voiceovers to either promote a politician or attack someone else. The male narrators discuss anything from a candidate’s policy achievements and goals to corruption scandals involving another politician. The voiceovers are usually low and strong, possibly to convey a politician’s might or to create an ominous tone in attack ads.
For example, take a look at the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s “Money Tree” ad. Aside from its creepy use of fairy tale elements to criticize Senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), the ad employs a voiceover that is unusually deep and seems artificial.
The female voiceovers, by contrast, have appeared in 118 ads and mostly question other candidates’ character. While 29 male voiceovers were positive, just 12 female narrations promoted a specific politician.
The ads often feature hopeless, worried women talking about their personal experiences with a candidate and why voters should not support him or her. In an ad called “Fix This,” a teacher in North Carolina criticizes Gov. Pat McCrory for trying to cut education funding. Toward the end of the ad, the teacher seems desperate as she calls on someone “to fix this.”
Women’s narrations also rarely appear in ads about policies and other traditionally “masculine” topics like national security and foreign affairs. Rather, female voiceovers usually discuss “feminine” issues, such as abortion, child care and education. Campaigns likely believe that ads about such topics will be more credible and striking with female voiceovers.
The disparities in the use of male and female voiceovers are nothing new.
A study published in Political Communication by Patricia Strach, an associate professor of political science and public administration and policy at the University of Albany, examined 7,000 campaign ads during the 2010-2012 congressional elections. Strach and her team of researchers found that 63 percent of the voiceovers were male, 28 percent were female and nine percent used both genders.
Strach reviewed different variables that could have factored into campaigns’ decisions to use male narrations, and surveyed participants about which types of voiceovers were most influential. Although she concluded that female voiceovers are more credible in ads about feminine issues, Strach found no evidence that male voiceovers are overall more effective than female narrations.
“It seems it’s a default or a bias that campaign managers have or the availability of these voices and not something that’s strategic,” Strach told the Reporters’ Lab.
The study also determined that female voiceovers appear most often in negative ads. Strach said that could be because female voiceovers seem to soften the blow of attacks and minimize backlash.
“You can say really mean things, but it doesn’t come across as harsh when women are saying it,” Strach said.
Why campaigns use voiceovers in the way they do isn’t something we’re going to decipher with the election finally coming to an end. But it’s clear that even an election cycle as crazy as this one has not changed how campaigns use gender to promote and attack politicians.
Duke Ad Watch: Gary Johnson bucks traditional use of actors in attack ads
Libertarian candidate uses “Dead Abe Lincoln” to rethink actors’ roles in campaign commercials
By Amanda Lewellyn - October 31, 2016
In August, the pro-Gary Johnson PAC Balanced Rebellion released an ad on Facebook and YouTube that clocked in at upwards of five minutes. The main character is “Dead Abe Lincoln,” played by a twenty-something kid dressed in a top hat and overcoat, with what looks like some dead animal’s hair glued on to his cheeks.
Lincoln walks viewers through both Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s flaws. In doing so, he goes out of his way to use non-traditional language that might appeal to millennials: Clinton is “a Monopoly player who’s using her get-out-of-jail-free card, then a rig-an-election card and make-millions-on-political-favors card.”
And Trump? He’s what would happen “if your racist uncle got drunk and ran for president, then the nation got drunk and said, ‘That guy should have nuclear bombs.’”
The pro-Johnson ad capitalizes on the unusually high number of dissatisfied voters in this election cycle, highlighting the pressure to choose between two unappealing candidates. Lincoln points out another option: Libertarian Johnson (or, as Lincoln later refers to him, “freakin’ Batman”).
Because Johnson has had little success swaying any of the major parties’ voters, he uses Lincoln to introduce the Balanced Rebellion. It’s a program that matches disillusioned Republicans with their disgruntled Democratic counterparts. The idea is that if both of them vote for Johnson, neither is “giving their vote” to the opposition’s candidate.
Using actors to play candidates is not uncommon. But the Balanced Rebellion’s use of this top hat-wearing, insult-slinging former president is not the norm. For starters, none of the commercials in the Duke Ad Watch database that contain “candidates” exceed 30 seconds — less than a tenth of the Johnson ad’s length. There are several more key differences, which I’ll illustrate using a few ads.
All the “candidate” ads attack at least one politician. But unlike the Johnson commercial, actors usually play the real-life candidate under fire. Using that technique, the producer has more leeway to criticize their opponent. Plus, the attacked politician can’t immediately respond or contradict any claims made.
In “Town Hall” from End Citizens United, we watch from behind Senator “Kelly Ayotte” (R-N.H.) as she fields questions from dissatisfied constituents. After each constituent raises a concern — about Medicare, big oil — special interest groups signal to her how to respond. As a result, the real Ayotte appears to be a puppet representing donors’ concerns and not her own district’s.
Perhaps because of the ads’ tendency to attack, we never see the actors’ faces. In Senate Majority PAC “Koch Call” commercial featuring Senator “Joe Heck” (R-NV), we barely even see that much — just the corner of Heck’s trademark rectangular glasses as he answers a call from the Koch brothers.
Instead, “candidate” ads shoot from over the actor’s shoulder, behind them or from too far a distance to make out their features. That’s a stark contrast to the five-plus minutes we spend staring into Dead Abe Lincoln’s dead blue eyes in the Balanced Rebellion spot.
In the Johnson ad, Lincoln is the focus. He explains the video’s message in full, often aided by headlines 
and graphics (like this one of Trump as the Joker from “Batman”). However, actors usually take more of a backseat role: they’re props, not the ones making the commercial’s point.
Take “Hypocrite Hillary Leaves You Defenseless” from the N.R.A. In it, we follow “Clinton” as she exits a government SUV, walks past guards with big guns and boards a cushy private jet. The combination of a narrator, sound bites from the real Clinton and the dark tone of the video make the argument against Clinton’s “hypocritical” stance on guns.
It’s apparent that Johnson’s ad follows none of the common practices seen in other groups’ advertising. And it might not be an arbitrary difference: The “candidate” ads containing those trends come from organizations affiliated with the major parties. It looks like we can add advertising strategy to the list of things that make the Libertarian an outsider in this election.
Duke Ad Watch: Candidates continue to look for musical edges over opponents
As the campaign season enters its last leg, ads attempt to subliminally sway voters with jingles both cute and cutting
By Asa Royal - October 25, 2016
Overused as it might be during the 2016 election, music in political ads is powerful and here to stay. The proper soundtrack can transform a dry 30-second commercial into a convincing emotional argument. In volatile races with millions of undecided voters, it’s just another tool campaigners are using to nudge voters to their side.
Used properly, ad music should set an overarching tone that attempts to sway a viewer’s opinion. Consider, for example, the music in the ads “Batting” — in favor of Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.)— and “Senator Kelly Ayotte: At Bat for the Gun Lobby,” which is against her.
The first ad — pro-Ayotte — shows the candidate slugging baseballs with a smile on her face as she speaks about bravely fighting a political machine. Ayotte’s voice is accompanied by a cheery whistling tune which serves to build a positive image of her as a happy, graft-busting, personable politician.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPA3m2tcEOI
The second ad — anti-Ayotte — shows a similar clip of her hitting baseballs, but a female voiceover speaks harshly about Ayotte’s repeated votes against the closure of a gun loophole. This time a dark melody plays in the background, producing a decidedly negative image of Ayotte. The lesson is clear: music helps define message.
A few political advertisements have musically distinguished themselves by using tonal shifts — effectively playing multiple jingles during one video. Shifting tones allows an advertisement to color opinions on one subject in one way, while coloring opinions on another subject in a clearly contrasting way.
“Work Hard,” an ad released in September by senatorial candidate Pat Toomey (R-P.A.) exemplifies the effects of tonal shifts. The ad begins with Toomey speaking about the middle class while an upbeat jingle casts a kind light on his words. After 10 seconds, the music suddenly changes to a mysterious, eerie dirge as Toomey’s opponent, Katie McGinty (D-P.A.), appears on the screen.
The progression is jarring; McGinty’s candidacy is made to look creepy and strange because of the quick musical change. That shock factor is what candidates want, said Benjamin Schoening, associate professor of music at the University of North Georgia, in an email interview. “Tonal shift is used to change audience mood… to reset [them] emotionally in[to] the correct frame of mind,” he added.
A second ad, “Leadership,” employs the tonal shift tactic more subtly with the same effect. The advertisement, which laments the supposed failure of Democratic foreign policy and the resulting rise of terrorism, begins with a monologue by former mayor Rudy Giuliani.
As Giuliani discusses the faults of President Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a cello-dominated orchestra plays a low-toned dark theme. As he slowly transitions to speaking about Republican nominee Donald Trump, the cello section fades out and is gradually replaced by a stronger, higher-pitched and more positively themed violin section. The two Democrats are ultimately associated with darkness and danger while Trump is associated with light and hope.
The musical deployment is slight but powerful. It may not win an election, but it doesn’t have to. It’s just one small instrument in the grand orchestra of a campaign.
Fact-checking comes to the Amazon Echo
New skill from the Duke Reporters’ Lab allows users to 'ask the fact-checkers'
By Erica Ryan - October 21, 2016
The Duke Reporters’ Lab has created a new fact-checking app for the Amazon Echo.
The app is a spin-off of Share the Facts, a project that has expanded the reach of fact-checking. The launch partners are PolitiFact, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker and FactCheck.org.
With the new Share the Facts skill, owners of the Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices, including the Tap and the Dot, can “ask the fact-checkers” about claims they hear from presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as other candidates and politicians who have been checked.
Share the Facts is now available in the Skills section of the Alexa app. (To find it, open the Alexa app on your smartphone, click on the left navigation panel, and then select “Skills.” From there, you can search for “Share the Facts” and select “Enable Skill.”)
We encourage you to try checking candidates’ claims from your couch after watching a campaign ad or during a discussion around the dinner table.
To begin a query, say: “Alexa, ask the fact-checkers.” (If you’re using the Tap, you’ll need to press the microphone button first and then say, “Ask the fact-checkers.”)
We have found it often works best if you wait for Alexa to reply, “Welcome to Share the Facts. We consolidate fact-checks from some of the most respected journalists in the U.S. Ask me to check a fact you’re wondering about” — and then ask your question, such as:
- “Did Donald Trump oppose the war in Iraq?”
- “Was Hillary Clinton right that her email practices were allowed?”
- “Is it true that 300,000 Floridians have lost their health insurance because of Obamacare?”
Try to use the most important keywords in your question, following the examples above.
Share the Facts uses natural speech recognition to analyze and answer your questions from our database of roughly 2,000 professionally curated fact-checks. We scale our results so that they are timely and have the most consensus among our partners.
We welcome your feedback on our new Echo skill Share the Facts. Please send your thoughts to Share the Facts project manager Erica Ryan.
Lessons from our first experiment with pop-up fact-checking
More than 380 people tried our pop-up fact-checking during the presidential debate.
By Bill Adair - October 20, 2016
Several hundred people who watched the presidential debate last night got a preview of what fact-checking will look like in the future.
More than 380 beta testers of our Reporters’ Lab browser extension saw fact-checks pop onto their screens in near-real time. The pop-ups were actually tweets from PolitiFact that said when statements from Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump were true, false or somewhere in between.
The “FactPopUp” tool, built by Reporters’ Lab student Gautam Hathi, used the notification feature in the Chrome browser to display the PolitiFact tweets. The pop-ups appeared over a livestream of the debate. They were generated by Aaron Sharockman, a PolitiFact editor who was tweeting links to items that had been previously published.
Viewers saw 29 pop-ups with messages such as “Trump said Clinton would double taxes for Americans. False.”
We had modest expectations. We knew that the success of the test depended on Sharockman’s speed finding previous fact-checks and the time delay for the NBC News livestream we were using. It turned out that Sharockman was quite fast and the NBC livestream was slightly delayed, which made the pop-ups appear very quickly for most users.
I was so pleased at one point that I tweeted:
I’ve seen the future of fact-checking… pic.twitter.com/3wJ5VXWczl
— Bill Adair (@BillAdairDuke) October 20, 2016
Still, there are many lessons and plenty of things we can improve:
Ease of installation. We tried to make it as easy as possible, but we were relying on Chrome’s notifications and Twitter for the pop-ups, so the sign up and installation was more complicated than we wanted. Users needed a Twitter account to activate the browser extension. Next time, we probably should build it as a standalone tool that doesn’t rely on Chrome or Twitter.
Type size. This was another challenge because of our reliance on Chrome notifications. We’d like to increase the size of the type (we had to rely on the standard font size) and the length of the messages (we were limited to about 80 characters). Building it as a standalone tool would allow us to make the type larger and the fact-checks slightly longer.
Location of the pop-ups. We discovered a difference in the location of the pop-ups for Mac and PC users. On the Mac version, they appeared in the upper right, which sometimes blocked Hillary Clinton’s face when NBC was showing a split screen. On the PC version of Chrome, they appeared in the lower right, which seemed less obtrusive.
Dwell time. We had tinkered with how long the pop-ups stayed on the screen. They need to stay long enough that people can read and digest them, but not too long. When the pop-up is in the lower right, you could have a a slightly longer dwell time because it doesn’t block anyone’s face.
Other functions. It’s worth exploring other functions such as the ability to save a fact-check to read later or immediately share it with others. Two of our testers suggested synchronizing the pop-ups with a video recording so users could go back to them later or see where they occurred in the debate.
Overall, we’re quite pleased with our pioneering effort at pop-up fact-checking. It shows great promise not just for future debates but also for live events such as major speeches. We’ll be making it available in GitHub for others to try and build on.
We’d love to hear your feedback. You can write to me at bill.adair@duke.edu.
Duke students track the facts in this debate ‘live slog’
Journalism class monitors claims as the candidates face off during Wednesday's presidential showdown in Las Vegas.
By Mark Stencel - October 19, 2016
The facts were flying in Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump — and a team of 18 student “watchdogs” from an election reporting class at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy were among those watching. Our class was on the lookout for the statements that had been scrutinized by independent media fact-checkers, before and in some cases during the 90-minute debate in Las Vegas. The class shared links to those and some other findings the students thought were relevant in the live blog below. (Please note: This was a breaking news exercise done in real time for educational purposes. We’ll be discussing these posts in our class on Thursday — including the value and reliability of the sources we selected and linked to. So we would encourage you to read our postings with that in mind and to check the links and carefully evaluate those findings for yourself.)
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Reporters’ Lab to experiment with pop-up fact-checking during debate
The beta test of the Chrome extension will allow viewers to see real-time fact-checking with a livestream of the debate.
By Bill Adair - October 17, 2016
On Wednesday, the Duke Reporters’ Lab will test a new tool that will provide on-screen fact-checking during the third presidential debate.
The tool, a free extension for Chrome browsers, will provide real-time fact-checking from PolitiFact. Users will see a livestream of the debate with occasional messages that will pop onto the screen showing PolitiFact’s Truth-O-Meter rating for statements by the candidates.
We welcome your feedback. To try the tool, you must have the Chrome browser and download the extension. Follow the directions to get a personal identification number to activate it.
The “FactPopUp” tool was built by Gautam Hathi, a Duke computer science student who works in the Reporters’ Lab. The pop-ups will be generated by a PolitiFact editor watching the debate. When the editor hears one of the candidates make a claim that PolitiFact has checked before, the editor will quickly publish a tweet with a summary and the Truth-O-Meter rating. The summary and the rating then pop up on the livestream.
Our private tests in the first two debates have been encouraging. The fact-checks pop up relatively quickly after the candidate makes the claim. It is reminiscent of the VH1 show Pop Up Video, which provided sometimes irreverent annotation to rock videos in the 1990s.
Our Chrome tool has some limitations. You need to have your own Twitter account so you can receive the fact-checks from PolitiFact’s tweets. And the browser extension can only provide pop-ups for statements that PolitiFact has previously researched and rated. And its quickness depends on the editor’s knowledge of PolitiFact’s 500-plus fact-checks on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
The extension is being released as a beta for public testing, not as a final product. Hathi is optimistic that the extension will work well, but cautions that in some tests there have been delays in showing the pop-up.
Still, we’re hopeful that this will be a small first step toward the “Holy Grail” of fully automated fact-checking. Once we work out the bugs, we will make the browser extension available as an open source tool that can be used by others. Please send us feedback at factpopup@gmail.com.
The Reporters’ Lab, which is part of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy in Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, is exploring a variety of ways to automate fact-checking and expand the audience for this growing form of journalism. Earlier this year we unveiled the Share the Facts, a widget that provides a new way for readers to share fact-check articles and spread them virally across the Internet..
Duke Ad Watch: Clinton, Republicans find common ground against Trump
The Democratic presidential candidate is crossing party lines for attacks against her opponent
By Hank Tucker - October 16, 2016
Hillary Clinton is getting support in her attack advertising from an unusual source: Republicans.
Widely respected and ordinary Republicans alike are crossing party lines to attack Trump, with several Clinton ads featuring prominent GOP politicians denouncing their nominee. Most of the conservative attacks against Trump are not on specific policy issues, but instead on a lack of trust in a potential Trump presidency with access to the nuclear codes.
Hillary for America’s “Confessions of a Republican” ad, which first aired in June, echoes an ad by the same name supporting Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson during the 1964 campaign. Clinton’s simple commercial shows William Bogert — an old Republican actor — in black and white, sitting in a chair and talking straight to the viewer, just like a younger Bogert did 52 years ago.
Bogert, who is never named in the ad, claims to come from a family of Republicans, but attempts to distinguish Trump from Republican presidential nominees of years past.
“Donald Trump — he’s a different kind of man,” Bogert says. “This man scares me.”
Bogert raises his voice when he says Trump wants to be “unpredictable” with nuclear weapons, calling the nominee a “threat to humanity.”
There is no background music and no text for the majority of the ad, starkly contrasting with many of Clinton’s campaign ads in this cycle. But its simplicity may connect with moderate voters in their living rooms.
In the event a relatable Republican like Bogert cannot convince his peers to vote against Trump, the Clinton campaign has also used clips of conservative politicians and advisors trying to convey a lack of trust in Trump.
“Unfit,” a Hillary for America ad released in August, features sound bites from Michael Hayden, the former CIA director under George W. Bush; Max Boot, a conservative foreign policy analyst; and Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist for The Washington Post.
All three right-wing voices question Trump’s judgment and plant fear in viewers’ minds about what he would do if he had access to nuclear weapons, an issue Clinton wants to keep at the forefront of the campaign.
“You have to ask yourself, ‘Do I want a person of that temperament in control of the nuclear codes?’” Krauthammer says. “As of now, I’d have to say no.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsIhFog4aJg
Hillary for America continued its bipartisan assault on Trump with a September ad titled “Agree,” using voices from such Republican politicians as Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake. As opposed to the bureaucrats that condemned Trump’s glib treatment of nuclear weapons, these are legislators suggesting to their conservative constituencies that Trump will not represent their views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZK14tyDCLE
The ad does not have much substance beyond a condemnation of Trump, but its power is in the magnitude of elected Republicans that have spoken out against him.
Politicians crossing party lines for endorsements is not a new phenomenon. Former Democratic governor and senator Zell Miller gave a fiery speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention endorsing Bush. Four years later, former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman — Al Gore’s running mate in his 2000 presidential campaign — endorsed John McCain for president at the Republican National Convention.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater alienated many moderate Republicans with his aggressive stance on the Soviet Union and nuclear weapons, prompting the original “Confessions of a Republican” ad. Goldwater’s candidacy also led to the infamous “Daisy” ad that showed a little girl in a meadow, pulling petals from a flower before an atomic bomb went off.
But no candidate has ever launched as expansive an advertising campaign with help from the other side as Clinton has this year. Trump is one of the most divisive presidential candidates the U.S. has seen, and Clinton — who is not viewed very favorably in her own right — is keeping the spotlight on Trump with this strategy.
By using Republicans to her advantage, Clinton is taking the focus away from wedge issues that divide the population, like gun control and race relations, and instead highlighting bipartisan foreign policy questions. Even if rural voters in swing states do not support Clinton’s liberal policies, many probably would be uncomfortable with the U.S. dropping nuclear bombs to solve the world’s problems. Clinton is trying to convince these voters that this would be a real possibility in a Trump presidency.
And if they don’t believe Clinton, they are likely to believe the Republicans they have lived with, respected and voted for in the past.