When you point out something inaccurate about it, it corrects itself. That the hallmark of journalism. To the extent journalists talk about that they are discrediting their own enterprise because they are suggesting they dont honor the norm, in the face of evidence they have been wrong about something. I like the ds and vacuum. I want people to think venereal disease. I dont want to catch or transmit it. Bible deception focuses on the virality of it, and factor on the ground and focuses on reception. We are not talking about news but deception. When something comes into our news feed we need to be critical about those things we are supposed to agree with so if someone is a supporter of a candidate of one party one is more likely to be uncritical about anything about that candidate, so instead of attacking we defend even if the attackers are journalists. We are also wanting about the opposing candidate to believe anything said about the person even if it is not legitimate. Even if it is inaccurate and not likely to hear the positive. If you want to test say to someone who is a democrat and whether Hillary Clinton supporter for president tell me 3 positive things donald trump has done and note the amount of time it takes to give an answer. You can do the same with president obama. Ask yourself when someone is confronted with information about a candidate they did not vote for how difficult it is for them to process and report back positive information. What that is telling you is inside likeminded communities you have to reinforce the loop in which it is harder to hear those things. How should we deal with viral deception . Listen carefully to what the Available Evidence says about what is good about the candidate we dont like or the party we dont like. Instead of thinking of candidates and parties we dont like, we would like them to Work Together on things we do like but we need to ask ourselves how critical am i about things consistent with what i believe . Before sharing something with our likeminded community we should take a careful look and ask do i know the source of it . Do i know it is my friend . Do i know my friend got it someplace reliable . By sharing material with others we are putting our credibility behind that material. If we put the brakes on about sharing problematic political content we could do our part in minimizing the likelihood that it spreads. Host next call for Lashonta Jackson comes from ray in arizona. You are on booktv. Caller professor Lashonta Jackson, i would like to know what the modern excuse for the Electoral College is and how do you become an elector . Host why do you ask that question . Do you think its outdated . Caller im pretty sure trump didnt get the majority of the vote in the election from the people. What do you think people think of the Electoral College . Host Lashonta Jackson wants to address that. Guest difficult to explain the Electoral College to high school students. It is handed down by the founders for a reason, trying to balance out all state interest and there is a compromise involved in all that. The problem is, given that it is inside our structure, the process of getting rid of it is all but overwhelming. I would like us to start looking at the process of getting rid of it even though it is overwhelming. I think the advantage in having a popular vote system in the country is great regardless of the outcome, in part because when you are working in any Electoral College structure theres an advantage in ignoring a lot of states. People should be able to see the candidate. The candidate should address the interests of states that are solidly red or blue, but they dont have to because for practical matters the electoral votes are already baked in and cast. If you think the electoral process is trying to get the electorate as a whole about how it wants to governance also to make a decision that says regardless who wins or loses i am committed to that outcome because we collectively voted. It is not very functional. For practical purposes the battleground socalled states get an entirely different election than the rest of the country because all the communication is flooding those places and they have a disproportionate impact but are also disproportionately likely to have a lot of time on television affected by political ads. I would like to see states that dont have all the electoral intent share the burden in the last month of the campaign of watching that stuff. Host i read that 30,000 commercials in ohio in this one city at the same time if i were a candidate i would hang out in la is new york city because even though they are very democratic there are more republicans in those cities than the whole state of iowa. Guest there is a secret to microtargeting. You can swing states by finding your vote in the state and mobilizing in a blue state or red state based on the electorate that has been voting but in a country in which more than 40 dont cast the vote variable you can reconfigure the electorate to be more red or blue if you give it more attention. Donald trump demonstrated that has a candidate. His campaign very smartly moved to wisconsin, michigan and pennsylvania largely ignored by Hillary Clinton until it was too late and some of those states and one of the reasons i thought this election was up for grabs with the Trump Campaign went to minnesota it turned out to be closer than people expected. The possibility we mobilize more people by campaigning is also an argument for why we shouldnt have an Electoral College because what is happening in places that are being ignored you to all those people would like to get some mobilization and get more involved. I am not a fan of the Electoral College but we face daunting challenges trying to move to another system. Host back in the 80s there were a couple famous ads. I want to show you a video of some ads, let it live Lashonta Jackson. We will come back and get her reaction. Governor Michael Dukakis vetoed mandatory sentences for drug dealers, vetoed the death penalty, his revolving door present policy gave firstdegree murder is not eligible for parole. Many committed other crimes like kidnapping and rape are many at still at large. Michael good caucus once to do for america what he has done for massachusetts. America cant afford that risk. Michael dukakis has opposed every Defense System we develop. He oppose new aircraft carriers, he opposed antisatellite weapons. He opposed four Missile Systems including purging to. Dukakis opposes stealth bomber, Emergency Warning System against nuclear attack. He even criticized the rescue missions in grenada and our strike on libya. Now he wants to be our commander in chief. America cant afford that risk. I would like to respond to the suggestion there isnt anything inaccurate about the revolving door at. That is problematic for me and the press as it is in fact literally accurate, it shows people who are actors passing through a turnstile in a prison in utah rather than convict in massachusetts and i can see how you would have trouble getting real convicts in an ad. He is a is a different question but as the announcer says, number 268 goes up on screen. Roger ailes or george bush never said 268 sk but the announcer said many committed Violent Crimes. In the context of dukakis really governor, not eligible for parole. A statement which is true for which dukakis out to be held accountable. The problem i have consists in the typical person viewing the ad in our focus group says 268 firstdegree murderers escaped and went on to commit Violent Crimes which a reporter is afraid to say that because the reporter doesnt want to look at this inferential judgment appearing to be biased in favor of dukakis. I have never seen a reporter appearing to be biased but go ahead. I saw plenty of them because i said for three weeks that is in inferential falsehood is the dukakis ad which carefully worded its claim about Social Security to draw the inference that bush wanted to cut Social Security when what he had done was not favor and increase. Technically literally that ad was true too and was a false that he. The president is uncomfortable saying dukakis is on Social Security. To the extent the press saw factual inaccuracies the press moved with a vengeance against the tank ads. The president did a superb job pointing out factual inaccuracies saying dukakis approved the stealth bomber, the press was in with a vengeance because the press knows what a fact is. As a result, if you step out of line the press will never intervene to point it out at all, not even once in the brilliance of roger ailes was to stay in inferential falsity and overstepped in a tank at and i said he thinks he can get away with this because nobody how can this media genius make such a dumb mistake you give the press will come after him with a vengeance and i thought the press did. The press may have done that but i considered running the tank and with no copy and no script, would have had almost a more devastating effect. I wish now i had done it with no copy, no script, just a little music. I rest my case. Host back to 2019. What does that invoke . You need a haircut. That was the point we were beginning to see a very clever move in advertising on both sides were claimants were factually literally accurate, very effective at getting the audience to hear something implicit in a message. We confronted a situation in which the press really was being torn because it thought it was biased, went in and said that is in the ad because people were more comfortable saying factual statements, that is wrong. And the inference you are drawing is wrong, they cant prove your drawing the end first. That sounds quaint by todays standards because stating things that arent true is more normal than it was then. Host was roger ailes good at what he was trying to accomplish . Guest i met roger ailes when i was writing rupatha. The echo chamber talking about fox news and Rush Limbaugh and the wall street journal editorial page. I was a student of the art of roger ailes. He was extraordinarily effective and had an Important Role electing Richard Nixon president. Host we have not had a chance to talk about echo chamber Rush Limbaugh and the conservative Media Establishment, if Rush Limbaugh, the editorial pages of the wall street journal, key players on fox news were confronted by a serious republican president ial contender whose path deviated from reagan they would marshall against the candidate. Is that true . Incorrect. In part theres an argument made by a book produced by colleagues at harvard thats just fox moved to the right to respond to breitbart being able to attract part of a natural audience. It is an important, complex and interesting argument. The natural impulse, we were studying this in multiple elections where Rush Limbaugh was to maintain basically a traditional reagan republican perspective on the field and play an Important Role in helping to that primary contenders for the nomination but once you got to the general election, to move behind republican candidate. The question becomes when did the transition occur with Media Outlets . I didnt watch it carefully enough to see how it occurred. There may have been truth to those outlets being behind traditional republican candidates but it was not clear donald trump would do well. Host Rush Limbaugh offered segments as entertainment. Guest we did a survey that gave a list of individuals and asked about journalists. A surprising percentage considered Rush Limbaugh to be a journalist and i understand that on some level because what he does is offer a great deal of accurate factual information that is the basis from which we can get a consensual argument so to that extent he is performing a journalistic function. It and put his interpretation, his perspective, his spin as do people on the left. What he is doing is something i thought was important when he was doing it across the clinton era. He was providing a coherent ideology for those who were trying to see the opposition to clinton. Very valuable to get coherent ideology wellformed out there for people to see the relationship of ideas to each other. It was a coherent ideology to the extent fox and Rush Limbaugh and the wall street journal were within the boundary and educated, a large constituency to think from that perspective and the question, we made the transition to the trump presidency, is the coherence there to explain in comparable kinds of fashion . The phenomenon of the Media Establishment in contrast to the more media more traditionally effective is very important which it had a counterbalancing function and we are seeing within those areas people were building up their base of knowledge because the under structure of what Rush Limbaugh puts together is about the actual Unemployment Rate, the actual gdp as we lose that in traditional it doesnt articulate it and building interpretation on top of it and that is a coherent basis for people who listen and watch regularly to engage in forms of argument that can go to second and third level of arguments from that point of view and whether you agree with that or not that is a valuable function. Host next call from Kathleen Hall jamieson, thanks for holding on booktv. Caller can you hear me . Listening to you, Kathleen Hall jamieson, i have been on the show many times. To refute what you said would have happened if obama had declared sanctions on russia in the month of october. Lets not forget everybody held hostage with the Supreme Court nomination and he said, quote, ive got it political. The sanctions on russia, it would not have mattered. I want your thoughts on one important fact in i was listening to a lecture one time estimating 70 of the population in 15 states represented by 30 senators and 30 of the population. In this context how would you break up the Electoral College gridlock we have got so far . Host we are going to leave it at those two points and see how Kathleen Hall jamieson wants to respond. Guest it is an important point. We are so polarized that it is completely plausible for president obama to believe had he made a strong statement without the support of senator mcconnell and the republicans it would have been viewed as political and an attempt to tip the balance of the dialogue toward Hillary Clinton it is a sad state of polarized politics that one would have to be concerned when making an announcement of russian intervention and attempt to stop at one would fear that doing so might have an effect on the electoral process itself rather than our vigilance about russian intervention. As for issues of the Electoral College in one way or another, passing that to those people who spend more time looking at it there have been people who put together alternatives who are worthy of segments in their own right at which point i hope they will engage host when you talked about being polarized, political communication cause that . Guest we experience politics as a result of communication of politics. We treat each other with respect in a lot of ways, people we dont want goodwill of integrity to. We have a problem. And studying the breakdown stability function. And trying to restore confidence. They are not on that side of the senate for. To the extent, the center on one side or the other. And beach we did process, try to find this. To retreat and they took the same type of standard. The standard discourse applied in the house of representatives. We looked for things such as one side thing another person on the other side was identified with hitler. We had a rally in which scott walker was alive with hitler and obama, now we have paired instances, republican and democrat being pictured in hitler ask fashion. When we look at how more liberal cable stations and more conservative cable stations play those things and what they did tells us something important. Instead, this is an instance, not common across all of the rallies by all the democrats and republicans. One isolated instance was made to look typical when being treated on the stations that did not happen on both sides. There is a tendency to say our side is not reaching discourse standards. It is typical they do that to our candidate where you havent noticed it because it is not featured on your side and it is stressed on your side. We created a Communications Structure was the tendency of how to communicate in like minded space plays to licensed forms of discourse by virtue of seeing it over there. They did it and we should be able to do it too at which point respond in kind. We are mirrors as communicators. Call me a nasty name im more likely to call you a nasty name and it escalates so you escalate up and do something more inappropriate and i do something more inappropriate. It has become appropriate because we have normalized it. It has been there for a while. It is problematic because it is not a good way to have communities. If we cant have the goodwill and integrity people when we disagree politically how are we going to hold together our cities and neighborhoods . Is also creating tension inside families, you have situations in which we have republicans sayi