The election is now less than two weeks away. It’s why airwaves and social media feeds are flooded with ads for candidates and causes, and politicos are picking up interview opportunities across platforms to share their closing arguments.
This cycle, those messages increasingly rely on inflammatory language, embellished details and sometimes a blatant disregard for truth.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Abby Llorico spoke about this trend with professor Natasha Casey, a media literacy educator at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Illinois, and with the Media Education Lab.
Abby Llorico: I imagine your job has evolved quite a bit over the years.
Natasha Casey: You're right. There was a point in time where media literacy, maybe to its detriment, focused almost exclusively on fact-checking. I used to spend a lot of time in class with students just looking at articles and dissecting them line by line. But in recent years, it’s shifted.
Llorico: How so?
Casey: The National Association for Media Literacy Education now has a little component about understanding how emotion works in terms of receiving information. When you look at political messages, they're all running on emotion, right? And so people need to understand how those messages work, whether it's the voiceovers, whether it's the music used, whether it's the kinds of snippets of conversations or things taken out of context, and media literacy can help people skillfully become more aware of those kinds of things. And for me, this has become a bigger part.
Llorico: Does that kind of change what baseline truth even is for someone? Because people live in their truth – or maybe what they feel to be real in their life.
Casey: There was a study this past summer in the American Journal of Sociology. It shows that voters provide moral justification for politician statements even when they know their preferred politician is lying. And they call this “factual flexibility,” which is a lovely oxymoronic term. The same study used this other term, called “moral flexibility,” whereby voters justify fact flouting as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant truth. So even when people know the politicians are lying, they're OK with it. If this candidate is supporting what I want, ultimately, it's justifiable.
Llorico: This has happened recently, with Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance saying he made up stories about Haitian migrants in Ohio to generate media coverage, as well an RNC committee member refusing to back down after sharing an AI-generated image because she said was indicative of the real situation following Hurricane Helene.
Casey: Yes, and this study suggested that even if you did fact-check, a lot of people are willing to override the fact that it's a half-truth, a partial truth, that it's AI. And I think this is one of the reasons that you're seeing this sort of erosion of trust and authority.
Llorico: The Federal Trade Commission has something called truth in advertising laws. These are supposed to prevent companies from making false claims about their products and ads, but those rules don't apply to political ads. The Supreme Court has ruled those are protected political free speech, so it’s only really required to clarify that the person or group paying for the ad. Even the sources cited in small print aren’t legally required. Do you think that understanding of what these rules are, and what certain forms of media have to abide by, or don't have to abide by, has an impact on how people process that information?
Casey: Yeah, absolutely. I think if they’re able to understand how these processes work, how these laws work, I think people would have a better understanding. But I think the average person is unlikely to know that broadcast television stations are prohibited from censoring or rejecting political ads that are paid for and sponsored by legally qualified candidates.
Llorico: What impact does that have?
Casey: Pew Research did some work on this a while ago, finding that a large percentage of Americans don't trust mainstream media anymore. There's lots of complicated reasons why that is the case, but the younger you are, the less likely you are to trust so-called mainstream media. And that's also terrifying, because when I ask students how they know what they know – which is the first kind of basic question of media literacy, how do you know what you know about the world? – they’re not able to answer that question. But I'm not sure many of us can answer that question this age either. It's quite complicated. No easy answers.
Llorico: In this election cycle, we've seen a graphic commercial from a third-party presidential candidate featuring what are apparently images of aborted fetuses that some local television stations have to air because of FCC laws. We've also seen a Republican primary candidate for Missouri secretary of state, Valentina Gomez ultimately getting banned from Instagram because of her aggressively anti-LGBTQ speech. Those examples show just how different the rules can be over different types of platforms.
Casey: One of the challenges with this is political advertising online is not regulated at all in the same ways. Really, the regulations are pretty loose even in television and radio. The United States has some of the least restrictions and regulations on speech, and certainly political speech, anywhere on the planet. Things that are said here wouldn't fly in most other so-called Western democracies around the world. But in those online spaces, I think we can't even understand the impact that they're having. They're able to micro target audiences in a way that television and radio are not. They're seeping into all of our social media, whatever platform you're on. And unfortunately, I think what we see is those on Capitol Hill, lawmakers, tend to be very slow in reacting to newer kinds of media, and the regulations are difficult to agree on in a bipartisan way.
