I have commented in the past, here, about how campaign triva distracts from the real issues of the US elections. The best way to look at this is to analyze the commentary about the presidential debates. Talk show hosts and other pundits have been speaking a lot about the Bush smirk, his body language etc. Maybe it’s because there are limited things to say about made-for-TV debates that were useful in the older TV era of politics, and are somewhat irrelevant today with much more media and PR venues available to politicians.

I came across this Benson cartoon in the Arizona Republic, that captures this nonsense. It is based on a TV ad tactic for Geico insurance.

For those of you outside the US, Geico features a highly memorable character, a lizard (probably because the nearest word to Geico, is gecko.) Geico ads have this silly storyline of someone selling some typical informercial-type product, and the lizard suddenly breaks in, saying, “yes, but I did save a lot of money by switching to Geico..” I like to think of it as an ad that parodies advertising itself. Or ‘bait and switch’ humor with a purpose –to make consider switching insurance companies.

To get back to the Benson cartoon, the reporters on the left shove camera lenses and microphones at Bush. One of the reporters makes this long-winded statement on “more beheadings, increased American combat deaths, not enough troops on the ground, spiralling innocent Iraqis being murdered…” To which Bush, (with that ‘smirk’) replies: “But the good news is I saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico.”

On one level, one could argue that this is, in essence, the Bush strategy–ignoring the question and the reality, and switching to the product he wants to sell. But I think the cartoon actually makes a backhanded comment on the state of journalism, which covers the silly sound bite.

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The companion study on the Internet by UCLA’s Center for Communication Policy, released January 2004, challenges one of the basic findings of the Annenberg study (posted 09/25) in that TRUST in online content gets better rating!

“Clearly, use of the Internet is reducing television viewing around the world while having little impact on positive aspects of social life, most Internet users generally trust the information they find online and Internet use is having a major impact on life in urban China.”

What it found similar to the Annenberg findings, was that TV watching was greatly impacted by the Net –negatively.

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It had to come to this sooner or later. The Annenberg School’s Digital Future Project released data to show that online activity overtook that other screen activity a.k.a. television watching. And this was results about 2003.

Television producers, content folk, and even those like ad agencies who built their world over this television economy have to be worried.

Not all advertising people think of this as a negative. Some look to the shift away from television (for the likes of P&G) as a positive sign. Read a long, very thoughtful analysis of the tragedy of the advertising commons by Matthew Syrett here at MarketingProfs. Mat says that:

The owners of the mass media channels themselves seem more likely candidates for effecting positive changes to the rules by which the advertisers compete, and therefore altering the forces behind the tragedy of the commons. By playing with the ways that media is sold and placed, the media channel owners could radically rework the means by which advertisers relate to consumers and each other, which in turn could alter the entire dynamic of advertising for the better.

Before we start gloating over the positive news about online behavior, here’s a reality check: The Annenberg report also found that people don’t consider the Internet as a reliable source of news. The confidence in the Net has been declining over the years!

The report is available at this link.

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Dan Gilmore suggests that CBS should do a “60 minutes” on “60 minutes” to uncover the truth behind the memo scandal. See here.

Dan Rather did come around to apologizing, but that’s certainly not the end of the story

For the record, here is what the aboutface looked like:

I believe that the witnesses and the documents are authentic. We wouldn’t have gone to air if they would not have been. There isn’t going to be — there’s no — what you’re saying apology?

Dan Rather, on CNN –Friday, September 17, 2004

And then came:

“I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers,” he said. “We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry,” Rather added.
Dan Rather, CBS, web site, Monday, Sept 20, 2004

Bloggers will note the recurring theme behind this story, of the blogosphere vs the big media. See Jonah Goldberg’s article
Also, it’s good to see this controversy in the light of former CBS producer Bernard Goldberg’s book, BIAS. Goldberg recently suggested that Dan is behaving like Nixon, a president Mr. Rather helped bring down.

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Hardly surprising to read that a blogger first made the ‘superscripting’ observation in the Dan Rather memo controversy.

Also interesting how the journalist is now the one under scrutiny. See RatherBiased.com and RatherGAte. I made this point in a recent article for IABC’S CW Magazine, titled ‘Big Blogger is watching you.” Let me know if you need a link to this.

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Unlike Tuesday’s post, about the importance of text over image, the protester in Batman costume shows us how images grab us –and the media.

It is one of the most photographed ‘homes’ in the world, so it’s not just the media who were targeted, but all those tourists who fill rolls of film (OK, memory cards) at the palace gates. Interestingly Batman had used a digital camera himself to plan his PR stunt.

Camera stunts will no doubt increase as society gets enveloped by digital cameras embedded in phones. Interestingly, on the political side, two PR stunts have been back and forth in the news.

In July, the Drudge Report focused on John Kerry’s Vietnam controversy as a camera stunt, while last year, CBS and other news outlets once floated the theory that Bush’s Top Gun landing on an aircraft carrier was an event designed for the cameras.

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Poynter Institute has interesting new findings about how people read (browse?) Web pages of news organizations.

They tracked the eye movements of 46 people for one hour as they read mock news sites and real multimedia content. Most telling is that people’s eyes are drawn to text first (contrary to poplar wisdom about ‘image is everything’). Sites studied included such important news sites as USAToday.com, NYTimes.com, CNN.com, LATimes.com, Guardian.co.uk (even Phoenix’s AZCentral.com) and several others.

The usual suspects –subheads, short paragraphs, italics, bullets – still work, but it’s amazing how important design and layout is for Web pages. Small headlines and no hyperlinks got better read-throughs, for instance.

Check the study out if you are in content creation or design.

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