To me, my Mom was a pretty typical TV viewer; she liked what she liked because she liked it. While she was living in Connecticut, I would ask her what newscast she watched. She'd tell me and I would try to find out why.
"Was it the quality of the writing or reporting?", I asked, "The way the graphics looked?".
No, it wasn't any of the explanations I brought up. "I like that person," she would tell me. "She dresses well", or "He has a nice smile". She wasn't watching a newscast so much as inviting some old friends to visit each day. (This may be why she also enjoyed watching HSN and QVC).
Those running this year's political campaigns know the power of images all too well. The importance of imagery may be the only thing on which Chris Matthews on MSNBC and Bernard Goldberg on Fox agree. The campaign that exploits this power of images may be the one that wins the upcoming election.
Speaking of that, I was watching a news show that talked about the latest poll numbers in the presidential campaign, and it struck me how misleading those figures are.
We don't elect a president by simple majority, as Al Gore could tell you. A candidate has to win in the electoral college which may be why the candidates won't spend a lot of time stumping for votes in Alabama (they may come here for money, but that's a different part of the campaign). Alabama is expected to go Republican. Period.
Florida is a different story. It's
leaning Republican, but not entirely in that column.
Rasmussen Reports keeps track of voter preference in terms of the electoral college vote. Right now, Barack Obama is leading, but there are still months to go before the only poll that really counts, the one on Election Day.
