Hillary Clinton and the Female Politician's Double Bind

While discussing the coverage of Sarah Palin during her vice presidential run, Miss Representation featured a clip form a Saturday Night Live sketch that imagined Hillary Clinton and Palin coming together to call out the sexism both had faced. Here's the whole video.

Although I am not sure exactly what the makers of the documentary were trying to show with this clip, I think it shines a light on how the objectification of women we see in the media hurts female politicians no matter what route they try to take to success. After listing off a few of their political differences, the fictional Palin and Clinton take turns listing off the sexist insults that have characterized of both women's campaigns--sort of. Tina Fey/Palin recalls being called "pretty" and "attractive," among other things, while Amy Poehler/Clinton lists off some less kind words. There's plenty of other stuff to analyze, but I found this part most interesting.

The contrast between the language thrown at the two women is partially meant as a joke that brings out the frustration the writers believe Clinton must have felt; she was the more serious politician and faced more sexist vitriol, yet this imaginary event showed her and Palin as equals. However, much as I dislike Palin--I'll never forget hearing her say in 2011 that Obama could be reelected because the majority of the U.S. is made up of takers--but comments about her looks do represent a problem. Miss Representation shows the extent to which women in movies and TV are attractive, shallow people, so if all anyone can say about a female politician is that she is attractive, odds are that politician will not be getting respect. No one would want the generic pretty girl character as president, so if they see a candidate that way, they are probably not going to vote for them.

Images of media hurt Clinton as well, in a more obvious ways. When we are constantly seeing images of beautiful, digitally enhanced women in the media, a normal looking woman like Clinton becomes an object of ugly, sexist vitriol. TV and movies have told us that women should be a certain way, and while being that way may not make you presidential, diverging from it makes you someone to be avert your eyes from. As the documentary points out, women beyond their twenties who are not incredibly attractive are typically not shown, and when they are, if they are ambitious, they are mean, annoying people who must be humbled in the end. This is not an easy image to overcome, and I wonder how it may be affecting this year's election.

Who cares about votes?

Hillary Clinton has gotten a lot more votes than Bernie Sanders, and yet she is losing the social media primary by quite a bit. Demographics certainly play a role in this phenomenon; Bernie's supporters are generally younger (promising everyone free college will do that) and thus more likely to express their voices over the internet, but I think gender may play a role. We have no shortage of old, white-haired male heroes--Dumbledore, Gandalf, and others--but powerful women in their sixties? Not many. As a result, even for people who support her policies, it is not as easy to get excited and rally around her; the media has not given us many leaders who look like her, so it is hard to no how to go about supporting one. The fact that people are voting for a female candidate shows that we have made progress, but the way social media has discussed the election may be a sign of our lingering prejudices.

The Generic Attack Ad Strikes Back

Darrell Steinberg may have the most money in the race, but he is not immune to attack. When I got home from school today, these images were awaiting me (or really my parents because they can vote, but they already did so whatever. I can pretend.)

If the purpose of advertising is to provoke an emotional response, I guess this one worked in a sense because it made me laugh a little. I don't think that was the intent. It felt like a half-hearted imitation of the political attack ads used by local and national candidates all over, with the same appeals and fallacies but somehow lacking punch.

The first accusation is of a category I think may be required for these types of ads: Political Junkets and Gifts. There is a little facts and figures appeal in there, but it falls down under closer examination. In many contexts, $23,000 is a lot of money--you could buy a car with that--so presumably whoever made this thing hopes people will see a candidate who took that much money as corrupt. However, in the context of gifts and travel expenses over the course of his 6 years as Pro Tem, $23,000 is not much; a couple trips or so. In addition, I wonder if anyone really pays any attention to attacks like this one when they have become so omnipresent; every political attack ad seems to make the same claims about candidates' acceptance of various things, so can you really differentiate them that way?

The next attack was an excellent example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in real life. Even the most hardcore cultural relativist would be hard-pressed to defend a culture of corruption, but do they really have anything here? There have in fact been 3 Senate Democrats charged with crimes in recent years, two for fraud and corruption, but drawing a line from them to Steinberg is tricky business. The assumption we are supposed to make is that everything that happened while Steinberg can be blamed for everything that happened when was the leader of the Senate, but no reason is given as to why. The actual argument: Steinberg became Pro Tem, bad things happened, and thus Steinberg caused bad things to happen. Yikes.

I didn't find the back side quite as entertaining, but its claims did not escape my skeptical eye. My favorite is the tying of McKinley Village to increased carbon emissions. For about a second, it makes sense: people will live there and drive there, something people did not do when it was a bunch of grass next to the highway, so there will be more carbon emissions, right? Actually, that doesn't even sound very convincing. Unless McKinley Village is actually going to create new people and cars that otherwise would never have polluted anything, it is not going to increase emissions. In fact, infill projects that allow people to live close to where they work, rather than long drives away in the suburbs, should decrease fossil fuel emissions. The ad has to use vagueness to try to connect Steinberg and pollution because if it were to fully explain its argument it would not make any sense. That's probably the case for a lot of ads. 

One common theme in the documentaries we've watched in class this semester is the overload of media messages in today's world and the need to stick out in one way or another. Try though advertisers might, it is not easy to get people's attention for very long with an ad, and something tells me this one is not destined to break through. 

Archery is Cool, But Not Quite As Cool As I Thought It Was 2 Hours Ago: Lars Andersen and the Need to Satisfy Curiosity

A little over a year ago, while browsing youtube, I came across a video called "Lars Andersen: a new level of archery." At the time, I did not new what the level of archery Andersen purported to replace was, but given that it is an olympic sport I figured it would be interesting to see what a new level would entail. I was not disappointed.

A deep, gravelly, very serious voice narrates the video, which intersperses clips of Andersen doing amazing things with pictures and occasional videos to back up its thesis: that Hollywood archery is a lie and Andersen is bringing back the real thing. I found it almost mesmerizing; the dramatic voiceover, historical references, and incredible trick shots were entertaining from start to finish. I felt like I had gone from knowing nothing about archery to being right on the cutting edge. I did not forget the video, but I didn't think much of it until this morning when it popped up on my computer. I decided to watch it again because I remembered enjoying it the first time, but something was changed. The first video youtube suggested I watch next: "A Response to Lars Andersen: A New Level of Archery" by a channel called skepticallypwnd. I had been fooled.

I didn't really want to watch the response, but I realized that if I was going to write a media blog about the video, I needed to have both sides. I slogged through 15 minutes of rebuttals to Andersen's video, with the conclusion being that while the guy can certainly shoot, he is no revolutionary and his claims of historical support are flimsy at best. I finished the video and wondered how I had been fooled in the first place. I tend to be skeptical of anyone saying that there is a better way to do something than the way everyone else is--articles about how "high intensity interval training" is superior to all other methods drive me nuts--yet I did not conclude that this video was probably a little off. I think it shows the power of the need to satisfy curiosity.

Archery is perfect for satisfying this need, as for me it is shrouded in multiple layers of mystery. As a combat discipline it is a relic of a time of knights, castles, Mongols, and a host of other cool historical things packed with fun facts. A glimpse at what exciting things people did back then is always interesting to me. In a more modern context, it is equally opaque to me; I have no idea what qualities allow an olympic champion archer to be so much more accurate than an amateur. As such, seeing something that addresses both mysteries arouses my curiosity, and my lack of knowledge about the subject means that I have a harder time discerning what is true and what is false.

I suppose advertisers already know what I so sadly discovered today, because if not I would not have learned about the need to satisfy curiosity as a basic need used by commercials. However, I think my foray into archery through the ages reveals a problem with the appeal: it takes a special medium to deliver on it while avoiding skepticism. Andersen's video was cool, based on a subject I knew nothing about but had interest in, and perhaps most importantly was not trying to get me to do anything. As far as I could tell, it was a guy who had spent years researching and practicing his craft spreading what he had learned, so I had no reason not to believe him.

Creating those circumstances is near impossible for advertisers, but I think there is one way they can, and perhaps do, achieve it: perfect product placement. If a company could seamlessly integrate its product into a something like Andersen's video, my experience tells me it could probably be very effective. However, I have no idea how they would do it, and watching The Persuaders gives me the feeling that they have tried. My only suggestion to companies would be to look back in time: perhaps somewhere deep in the historical record is the forgotten technique of perfect product placement.

When Worlds Collide: the Comment Section

On Wednesday, the New York Times published an article titled "Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch". People freaked out.

New York Times articles about Sanders tend to attract droves of commenters, but this one managed to stand out; by the time the moderators closed the comments section there were 6,430. Why? The article's title was a little misleading. While one could certainly draw the same conclusion the headline expressed, this article was a news story, not an opinion piece. It was saying that Bernie Sanders' campaign had said it was fine with harming Clinton's, but its only actual quote was a senior advisor saying that he was "not worried about"the possibility of hurting Clinton this fall.

So many comments!

The difference between the quote and the headline was not a huge one, but it was enough to confirm a number of peoples' suspicion that the entirety of the media is conspiring against Sanders. It also gave one person a chance to warn against "the grand Clinton family traditions of giving everyone a free puppy while they ravage the economy" and another to remind us that "it is obvious that it should be a Bernie/Hillary ticket," with the former being the president and the latter his running mate. In fact, it seemed that for every comment criticizing the article's language there were another 4 stating the poster's opinion with no reference to another comment.

The comment section on this article, as well as just about every other political article by as big of an entity as the Times, shows just how differently people see the world, and how impossible it seems to be for them to communicate. Normally, the commenters who squabble with each other would never come into contact with each other, but online forums change all of that, and as a result vitriolic, ad hominem-filled arguments that could never have happened before take shape. However, I wonder if the internet does more to bring people of opposing viewpoints together than it does give people the support they need to become sure of the opinions they ride into battle with.

New York Times comment sections and those of other major news outlets may be vast, but they do not account for the majority of comments posted online. My forays into Instagram's "Explore" page have allowed me to discover a multitude of political accounts with relatively large followings who share pretty similar opinions. Some express opinions one could always find broad bases of support for, but others push beyond what would previously have been possible. Pro Bernie accounts can now bring together hundreds of people who think he will win 75% of California's votes, anti-Bernie accounts bring together people who think that he is an evil communist, and anarcho-communist accounts bring together lots of teenage boys who favor overthrowing the government and allowing the proletariat masses to seize the means of production.

In any given area, none of these opinions are likely to be widely held, but when you allow everyone with a cell phone and a shared belief to communicate, suddenly fringe opinions can seem not only right but downright mainstream. As a result, when one migrates from an area where debates feature two sides that the majority of the general population would disagree with and people generally agree with each other to an area where a sizable chunk of commenters disagree with one's basic principles, things get heated. The more you break up people within a certain group, especially large ones like Democrats and Republicans, the easier it is to forget that other large groups even exist, so coming into contact with them can be shock.

No, You Can't Show Off That Temporary Tattoo: Nick Symmonds vs USATF

The vast majority of you have never heard of Nick Symmonds, and he is not okay with that. Unlike most other professional runners, he is greatly concerned with things beyond running--so much so that his company sued USA Track and Field, the national governing body for road, track, and trail races. Why did he do it? What does it have to do with critical thinking? Let me explain.

You don't think critically at this point in a race

Symmonds has always been an unusual figure in the running world. Unlike most pro runners, who starred for powerhouse programs like Oregon and Texas in college or went pro out of high school, Symmonds ran for Division 3 Willamette, putting up fast times in races that even most track fans weren't paying much attention to. He burst onto the scene by winning the 800 meters at the U.S. Olympic trials in 2008 and has since won a silver medal at the track world championships and run the third fastest 800 ever by an American--yet still he does not fit the mold.

For quite a while now, Symmonds has been locked in a battle with USATF and its primary sponsor, Nike, over his and other athletes' ability to advertise whatever companies they wish. In 2012, Symmonds auctioned off a piece of his shoulder for a temporary tattoo, and Hanson Dodge paid him $11,100 for the privilege. However, there was a problem: USATF and International Olympic Committee rules forced him to cover up the tattoo at competitions they hosted.

What's that tape on your shoulder?

Last summer, Symmonds' conflict with the powers that be came to a climax: the apparel limitations USATF placed on athletes were so strict that Symmonds refused to sign their contract and stayed home during the world championships even though he had won another USA 800 title. The consequences of that decision have not stopped him from continuing to push the boundaries of the advertising rules: he sold a piece of his shoulder to T Mobile for $21,800 and just had a lawsuit that sought to allow all companies to compete for space on athletes' bodies dismissed. 

So what does all this track stuff have to do with critical analysis of media? I think that Symmonds' efforts represent a rare instance of openness about what the purpose of advertising is. The lawsuit focused on fairness to advertisers, allowing all companies an equal shot at putting their name out there, but Symmonds makes no secret of the fact that his interest in the matter is a little different. Pro runners not named Usain Bolt don't make anywhere near as much money as basketball or baseball players, so they need advertising to keep a steady income. They are not alone in this regard; it is the openness that sets Symmonds apart.

The Persuaders discusses the quiet, somewhat uncomfortable alliance between TV and advertising; neither entity completely trusts or understands the other, and they do not want to be too open about how much advertising has crept into TV, but they need each other to stay afloat. That same dynamic now exists in magazines and all kinds of websites; in the digital age, you need sponsorships to survive, yet still sponsored content carries a negative connotation. Perhaps as time passes and product placement becomes so obvious and so omnipresent that you cannot ignore it everywhere, things will change: perhaps Nick Symmonds' advertising-positive attitude is the future.

Wet Hot American Summer, Parody, and Advertising

As I mentioned in my first blog post, I don't watch much TV. However, there is one show I am determined to finish: Wet Hot American Summer. It is only one season, and the whole thing covers one day of plot, but I tend to spend 1-2 months in between episodes, so I have a lot of time to think about (or forget) each one. After recently finishing the sixth installment, I started to think that the way the show's humor makes the viewer feel is not so different from what advertising tries to make us think, and the following text will attempt to make that make some amount of sense.

Michael Cera, the great lawyer

The show, in addition to being a prequel to a movie with the same title, is an attempt to parody every teen movie trope the writers could think of, often blatantly. We've all laughed at actors who are clearly too old to be playing teenagers, but this show takes it to the next level, having Amy Poehler play a character I completely forgot was supposed to be in high school. Legal scenes often seem contrived and unrealistic, but changing the outcome of a case based on a piece of paper that does not appear to even say anything makes it clear this time it is a joke. Although some of the things the show parodies are so obviously ridiculous that making fun of them seems unnecessary, for the most part I find the jokes funny. However, I think the writers are trying to do more than just make you laugh.

Parody relies on the viewer or reader having some knowledge of what is being made fun of, and Wet Hot American Summer is no exception. This kind of humor not only makes the viewer laugh, but says "we know that you know what we're referring to," and in this case, "we know you can see through those silly plot devices." In doing so, the show makes you feel a little smarter and more aware of the tricks the media is trying to play on you, even if it means that you are just more likely to watch someone else's show. Likewise, many companies try to advertise to people by making them feel good about themselves; messages like "you deserve better" are all over the place. Perhaps to really understand a parody, one must not only know what the parody is referring to but why its writers want to show that they expect you to get the reference.

Gatorade Makes You Part of the Dream...and the Nightmare

Gatorade has been omnipresent in the world of professional sports for quite a while. First made for the University of Florida football team in the 1960s, it was the first sports drink to hit the market and has used its head start to stay at the top ever since. Today, images of professional athletes drinking Gatorade pop up all over the place, and the company's advertising seeks to exploit that success. One recent ad series uses the concept of athletes' nightmares to put Gatorade and the viewer into the game as much as possible.

Like any minute-long ad, the one I attached above features a few different appeals, but to me the most interesting was the way it tried to satisfy the need to achieve. The beginning nightmare sequence is not a normal view of a basketball game but rather a bunch of scenes cut together so that you move with Kevin Durant as he gets to the basket. All the court sounds are magnified, and at a certain point Dwyane Wade, in this ad the defender, stares the camera in the face so that the viewer gets the experience of being stared down. All of this serves to make it so that instead of rooting for Durant, you are him; you are the one trying to win the game. However, Wade blocks Durant's shot (your shot), and your desire for glory gets crushed.

This device differentiates the commercial from typical scenes of glory, as well as setting up a storyline that allows for a more satisfying finish. We see Durant wake up from the nightmare, and when the inspirational music cues we know that it is time to get to work. The training montage, interspersed with footage of Durant drinking Gatorade so that he can continue with his quest, keeps you in the ad as well. The noises of heavy breathing, weights moving, and feet jumping up and down on the ground are loud enough that you could be there in the oddly dark, garage-like gym. The shots are all close-up so that it is clear that you are not observing from afar, but a part of the road to glory, using your Gatorade to reach some greater goal. In addition, the workout scenes do not show anyone but Durant, so that no one is as intimately connected to what he is doing than you. When the game Durant was dreaming about finally arrives, only you know what it took to get there, and so when he dunks on Wade you are as wrapped up in his success as anyone else; having participated in the whole thing from beginning to end it almost feels like you were the one on the TV all along. However, the ad takes a sharp turn as soon as it reaches the climax: as soon as the ball slams through the net Dwyane Wade wakes up in a feverish sweat. Putting aside the questions this plot twist raises about whether or not anything is real, it delivers a clear message: everyone is fighting to get to the top, and everyone needs Gatorade to get there. Having been a part of the successes and failures, you know what you must do.

As effective as this ad may be in putting you into the story, it is still severely limited by the fact that you are sitting apart from the two-dimensional display Gatorade wants you to be part of. It works to a certain extent, but in the end you are still watching someone else do things. As virtual reality technology seems to be gaining in popularity, however, I wonder if the ads of the future will actually be able to make you feel like you are fully in the story. It may not be soon, it may not become popular enough to ever be the norm--remember Google Glass?--but it would be very interesting to see what advertisers would do if they were not so limited in their ability to make the advertisement about you.

Donald Trump Defeats the Graphs

In 2012, Nate Silver, America's favorite statistician, got some attention from outside the stat-geek community by correctly predicting the results of all 50 states in the presidential election. His model, based on the polling he had identified to be most consistently accurate, was not any kind of breakthrough in the field of statistics, but people think it is pretty cool when you get 100% on things in real life. Already a well-respected, established statistician, he parlayed his success in the election guessing game previous books and articles into an ESPN supported website: FiveThirtyEight. The website applies statistics to politics, sports, and other parts of our world, and its staff writes some pretty interesting articles--check the site out if you enjoy a good graph. They don't always predict things perfectly, but generally they do a pretty good job. This election cycle, however, that pattern did not hold.

This graph is very skeptical of Donald Trump

As late as November, Silver routinely wrote about Trump's prospects with an air of dismissiveness, explaining that those who proclaimed Trump's-really-got-a-chance! ought to calm down. Any time you ascribe an opinion to people by hyphenating what they might say and putting an explanation mark at the end, you are using language to dismiss them. The punctuation manipulates the written word to evoke some person yelling out a phrase devoid of analysis, and we typically don't respect people who do that very much. He followed by delivering a glorious array of charts, one shortly after another, reminding you that he is Nate Silver, King of the Graph, and in doing so justified his previous mocking of Trump believers. They now become people who yell things that barely mean anything (what does really really mean anyway?), while he presents so much data that disagreeing is pointless. I believed it, and having Silver, who seems more objective in his arguments than anyone else, using dismissive rhetoric made it much easier to believe. The body of the article was the most persuasive part, but that little hyphenated passage at the beginning went a long way as well, illustrating the power of language.

1 is the loneliest number...

Now, of course, the election has changed, and so has Silver's word choice. His latest article, Why Republican Voters Decided On Trump, is much more about how the man came to be the de facto nominee than a concession to Silver's incorrect predictions in the past, but there is some of both elements. The structure of the beginning of the article sets the tone: the first sentence, "Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination," sits atop a paragraph break, with nothing but a footnote to accompany it. The shortness and bluntness of the sentence, followed by the space that is bigger than the first section of text, gives the impression that it was forced out of Silver, then followed by a long, rueful sigh. No stats or analysis; those are relegated to the bottom of the page because they would distract from the style. He then launches into a relatively brief explanation of what he thinks got Trump on top and against all odds kept him there, and I would recommend that you read it, but it is all in the context of that first paragraph (sentence). Instead of being a masterful amassing and utilizing of data, I could not help but read this article as the thoughts of a confused, distressed statistician. Once again, the content was the valuable stuff, but the way Silver placed his words at the beginning dictated the lens with which I viewed it.

I must admit, sometimes FiveThirtyEight articles are too dry for me; statistic after statistic about something I do not know much about with all kinds of restrictions on the conclusions made from the data for this reason and that--I can't always pay attention to them. However, having gone through the process of writing this blog, these articles are not just objective summaries of evidence; like just about everything else out there, they use words not just to explain things logically but to produce emotional responses in the readers. I look forward to reading what Nate Silver has to say about the general election because he is good at predicting things, but now I also look forward to trying to look for the words that set the tone for each article.

Let's Run...Or Troll?

As I may or may not have communicated in my first post on this blog, I am a major track nerd. I started running in 7th grade and my interest in the sport has grown continually ever since to the point where I probably spend more time thinking about running than any other specific subject. Other high school, college, and professional teams and runners interest me, as do the training methods used by the best runners. The site that delivers all of this boring-to-99.9%-of-people information in the highest quantity, if not always quality, is LetsRun.com. Founded by twin brothers who were college runners and coaches back in the day, it features coverage of high-level track events and countless forums, mostly distance running-related in one way or another. I have never posted on any of them, but I have read through quite a few, and found some interesting qualities.

There is a sort of ugly yet impressive egalitarianism on the forums. People can post anonymously, as many do, or register a name, so on any given thread you know who some of the people are and not others--there is usually a mix. Surprisingly, anonymity does not seem to play a major role in regulating people's behavior; plenty of anonymous users post only serious, constructive messages and plenty of registered users regularly troll and engage in personal attacks. No one is above these attacks; LetsRun users frequently mock one of the site's founders for grammatical errors in his posts and question how he possibly could have gotten into Princeton, and blast Renato Canova, coach of some of the best runners in the world and a relatively frequent LetsRun poster, for his training methods and alleged use of performance enhancing drugs among his runners. I do not know that this phenomenon is a good thing, but it is certainly unusual in the sporting world; imagine if Gregg Popovich or Pep Guardiola got into fights with basketball or soccer fans online.

There is an awesome variety in quality of the threads, sometimes within a single one; you might have a professional runner, renowned former coach, and exercise physiologist bantering back and forth about the importance of periodization in training with some random person who ran cross country in high school calling them all idiots. The good and the bad are both there a lot, and it is impossible to only see one side--you just have to look. The collective knowledge of users can be impressive at times; in one recent instance; LetsRun users figured out that Mike Rossi, who earned fifteen minutes of fame for a letter he sent to his son's school when the school would not excuse his kid to watch his dad in the Boston Marathon, had cheated in order to qualify for the race. Today, the thread discussing his previous race history and lack of photographs of him during the race is over one thousand pages long and littered with trolls, yet its posters still figured out what no one else would have bothered to investigate.

Finally, LetsRun illustrates the vast scope of the internet. It focuses on what I must painfully concede is a rather unpopular topic, yet it features thousands of posts every day. I do not know any of the people whose posts I read, and I would not want to meet many of them based on their content, but it is still kind of cool to see this mass of people all so interested in a subject that so few people I know care about. Some threads are funny, some interesting, many leave me wondering why I just wasted five minutes reading this stupid site, but the number of people it takes to create such variety is impressive in itself. LetsRun illustrates the good, bad, and the ugly of the internet, and does so in a 21st century way: displaying all kinds of facts, analysis, and nasty vitriol on a subject most people could not care less about.

Pizza, Beyonce, and the Need to Be Relatable

On one rare afternoon when I had a small enough amount of homework to engage in extended youtube-watching, my sister showed me a video that I think makes a good point about the way people on the internet try to be relatable. The video begins with a brief discussion of how annoying "relatable" people are, cut short by one such person bursting in and explaining that he was late because the desire to eat pizza and listen to Beyonce led him onto a small detour. However, when pressed for details on what song he was listening to and what kind of pizza it was, he breaks, and it turns out the story was all a lie; he was just trying to be relatable. I would recommend that you watch the whole video, but the first couple minutes that I just summarized make its point fairly clearly.