How does the use of images impact voters, even on a subliminal basis? The Wall Street Journal ran a story on fundraising for the candidates the week of July 14. Obama was beating McCain in the statistics. Note how Obama is pictured with the photograph image of him higher than the viewer. That is how we see leaders, as "up above". McCain, who was losing in the money numbers, is pictured as shot from above. Look at the contrast of these photos. They are the same side (balance, equal weight, presented by the newspaper in the layout) but yet one is a winner and one is a loser, just by the graphics of it all.
I bring this up because I found in doing a political communications study of the The New York Times, The Atlanta Constitution and the Washington Post hard-paper newspaper photos of Bush and Kerry in the 2004 campaign in a project for one of my media grad classes, the use of images makes a difference because we are primed to see everything in black and white; a duality that pits a winner against a loser. We are a war society and we see things in front runners, horseraces and that is how the media plays the stories.
The media plays it this way, in editorial decisions both consciously and unconsciously, because this is how we construct things neurologically. We see things through the frame of our viewpoint as either/or. Fair and balanced?
Controversy sells. Duality creates tension and interest. Contests get attention.
When Obama got out front quickly by questions about his non-flag pin
wearing habits, he quickly donned one and his backdrop became the
American flag/s. Boom. He became, by backdrop, patriotic. His image was portrayed as presidential. Gone? The backdrop of words like Change. Because they are already embedded in our minds. Obama was in front of the flag, yet again, in the staged setting last weekend, image at right, when he spoke by video to the Netroots Nation gathering in Austin last weekend.
Now the presidential seal has popped up in front of him (next post). No wonder McCain's campaign has brought in the best Republican campaign experts to revise his backdrops and get his talking points linking words with images. W. Bush perfected the use of the talking point but now the graphics are soaring in importance and campaigns can't necessary control how these images get played.
This week images of McCain in a golf cart w/ a Bush ran on cable programs juxtaposed with images of Obama on his World Tour. Powerful digital image contrasts. How many will be subtly impacted by these structured vignettes and how the media plays them and how they go viral? Will McCain's golf cart become Dukakis in the tank, a Willy Horton moment, or the Kerry tacking to-and-fro on his sailboard, stamped through oppositional communicastion tactics by his opponent's party with an image which helped the branding of Kerry as a flip-flopper?
update: Is the media favoring one candidate over the other? The LATimes reports that "The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign."The New York Times' refusal to publish John McCain's rebuttal to Barack Obama's Iraq op-ed may be the most glaring example of liberal media bias says one article. We no longer operate with the Fairness Doctrine (as the U.K. does), that required "fair and balanced" coverage. The rise of opinion journalism (especially in blogs) and biased news in major media. So, media consumer, beware. Is my focusing on Obama showing a bias, or is it, as the article points out, "journalists are defending their bias by saying that one candidate, Obama, is more newsworthy than the other"????? In some areas, I find that the latter applies here. I am coming from a media studies, journalism, marketing, advertising and p.r. background. So I write through my frame and filter.
Coming Up Next: Hottest Political Art for the Presidential Campaign
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