Bruce W. Hardy

Did Fact Checking Matter in the 2012 Presidential Campaign

The new media environment raises two questions: Will campaign deceptions have traveled around the web before journalism has the fact-checking in place to ensnare them? And if diligent checking of claims does exist, will it fall on an audience too enmeshed in its own biases to see past them? This essay draws on evidence from the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s 2012 Institutions of Democracy Political Knowledge Survey to argue that long-form political fact-checking can increase the accuracy of voters’ perceptions of both candidate stands on issues and the background facts of the presidential race.

What Is Civil Engaged Argument and Why Does Aspiring to It Matter

To answer the question posed by the title of this article, we sketch what we mean by the concepts of civility and argument and engagement; note the ways in which the rise of partisan media menaces civil engaged argument; and close with analysis of an exchange between a prominent Democrat and Republican that illustrates the importance of common definitions and sources of trusted evidence.

Leveraging scientific credibility about Arctic sea ice trends in a polarized political environment

This work argues that, in a polarized environment, scientists can minimize the likelihood that the audience’s biased processing will lead to rejection of their message if they not only eschew advocacy but also, convey that they are sharers of knowledge faithful to science’s way of knowing and respectful of the audience’s intelligence; the sources on which they rely are well-regarded by both conservatives and liberals; and the message explains how the scientist arrived at the offered conclusion, is conveyed in a visual form that involves the audience in drawing its own conclusions, and capsulizes key inferences in an illustrative analogy. A pilot experiment raises the possibility that such a leveraging–involving–visualizing–analogizing message structure can increase acceptance of the scientific claims about the downward cross-decade trend in Arctic sea ice extent and elicit inferences consistent with the scientific consensus on climate change among conservatives exposed to misleadingly selective data in a partisan news source.

Deception in Third Party Advertising in the 2012 Presidential Campaign

In this article, we profile the advertising activities and deception levels of the top 2012 spending independent expenditure groups that focused on the presidential contest. From December 1, 2011, through Election Day, November 6, 2012, independent expenditure groups spent more than

The Impact of 2008 Presidential Campaign Media on Latinos A Study of Nevada and Arizona Latino Voters

360 million on presidential television advertising, according to Kantar Media CMAG. More than a fifth of the dollars spent by the top groups purchased ads containing at least one claim judged as misleading by independent fact checkers. The proportion of dollars that these groups spent on ads containing at least one deception was much greater during the primaries than afterward. During the primaries, the pro-Romney super PAC “Restore Our Future” led the pack both in dollars spent on ads containing at least one deception and in the proportion of its ads found deceptive by the fact checkers. During the general election, in the post-primary period, the pro-Obama super PAC “Priorities USA Action” devoted the most dollars and greatest proportion of its total dollars to ads in which fact checkers found at least one deceptive claim. During some but not all of the 2012 election year, the percentage of third party ads containing at least one deceptive claim was higher among those groups not required to disclose their donors than it was among those required to do so.

A Normative Assessment of 2016 Political Convention Speech Exposure: Perceived Political Threats and Anticipated General Election Legitimacy

To examine the effects of the 2008 Obama campaign’s targeted media effort aimed at Latino voters, we married 2008 campaign media data from multiple sources to survey data on registered Latino voters in Nevada and Arizona to examine the specific impact of advertisement buys on that population. In the presence of controls, Obama’s media spending advantage over McCain had a significant and positive relationship with an Obama vote. When looking at local broadcast, cable and radio specifically, we find a significant relationship between spending differentials on local broadcast advertising and vote intention but not between spending differentials on radio and cable buys.

Examining Differential Gains From Internet Use: Comparing the Moderating Role of Talk and Online Interactions

Political party conventions, rivaled only by general election debates, are media events that can affect democratic processes through their ability to reach a wide audience. Conventions hold a unique place in the American electoral system by serving as a pivot point between the nation’s primary and general election phases. From a normative perspective, the current study focuses on the degree to which consuming major political party convention speeches mitigates negative perceptions generated from the primaries on what citizens are anticipating for the general election. A national pre–post conventions panel survey of U.S. adults (N = 562) is utilized to address five hypotheses. The consumption of more convention speeches reduces the negative impact of perceived primary election threat on the anticipated legitimacy of the general election (i.e., positive normative effect), but also increases threat ambivalence associated with the conventions (i.e., negative normative effect). In addition, convention speech exposure generates a strong, positive direct effect on perceived general election legitimacy (i.e., positive normative effect). When judged from the standpoint of republicanism as a type of democratic theory, the positive influences of convention speech exposure outweigh this activity’s negative effects.