The Game of Misleading Political Advertisements
With the presidential election only a few days away, it seems impossible to avoid seeing political advertisements while watching television. This campaign has been especially brutal, with both sides running advertisements that are factually questionable and almost entirely negative. The cable news channels, which are watched my millions of voters, have to decide where and when to take sides when campaigns stretch facts or lie.
Fox News tends to take the conservative side on most issues, while MSNBC steers liberal, which hints at which campaign each is most likely to fact-check on their programming. However, CNN goes to great efforts to put itself in the middle ground, hoping to get viewers from both sides and independents. If CNN seems to be off balance, as in they scrutinize one campaign noticeably more than the other, then they risk alienating a significant portion of their viewers.
Recently, a new advertisement (see link below) from the Romney campaign claimed that Jeeps were going to be manufactured in China. This advertisement is blatantly misleading to voters, and as CBS states, “The company says no U.S. jobs would be affected and in fact it is expanding at home. The consensus among analysts is that Obama’s 2009 decision to provide government loans to GM and Chrysler while they went through bankruptcy likely saved the companies and more than 1 million jobs.”
CNN has a choice when situations like this happen. They can hammer the Romney campaign on their 24/7 news cycle for this inaccurate, misleading advertisement, or report on another topic and let MSNBC or other news agencies report on the misleading ad. This can be summarized in a game, where one side is the Romney Campaign and one side is CNN, and payoffs are in terms of votes for the Romney campaign and viewership for CNN (in percentages). If the Romney Campaign runs the ad, then CNN rips it apart with fact checks, it is rather damaging for Romney. However, if CNN does this, they will perhaps lose some conservative viewers (say to Fox), so there is a negative payout. If CNN remains neutral, there is no gain for CNN, but if Romney runs the ad then they see some gains in the polls, since voters might be turned away from Obama (wrongly).
| Romney Campaign | |||
| Run Ad | Do Not Run Ad | ||
| CNN | Fact Check | -3, -10 | -1, -3 |
| Remain Neutral | 0, 5 | 3, 0 | |
With these assumptions, it seems that CNN has a dominant strategy to remain neutral no matter what the Romney Campaign chooses to do. Since they will always remain neutral, the Romney Campaign chooses to run the ad, hoping that some portion of undecided, middle of the road voters will not be exposed to fact checking media.
Sadly, the election is so close this year that this can be a winning strategy. There simply is not enough time for many voters to get the facts, so advertisements like this work well. CNN and other news agencies that attempt to remain neutral are put in a position between having the most viewers and providing the public service of fact checking, and for these companies having more viewers is the ultimate goal.
-jayemare435
Sources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVv6w0EC7Qs (the ad)