How One Letter Can Tarnish a Political Brand
Posted on Wednesday, February 13, 2008by Greg Schneiders
Saturday’s New York Times carried a front page, above the fold story with an accompanying college photo of Barack Obama and the headline: “Old Friends Say Drugs Played Bit Part in Obama’s Young Life.” I wonder how many readers, like myself, reached the fifth paragraph before discovering that the three letter word in the headline was “BIT” and not “BIG.” More importantly, I wonder how many readers never got that far in the story and will forever believe that Obama was a serious drug abuser as a youth.
There is plenty of research on reading, cognition, and comprehension that suggests that readers “fill in the blanks” with what they think they already know. If you’re quickly scanning headlines, there are likely to be a lot of “blanks.” Before carefully reading the full NYT headline, the information I have is: 1) NYT; 2) Front Page; 3) Politician/Candidate; 4) Drugs; 5) Dated Picture; 6) African-American. Given only that information and asked whether the accompanying story is more likely about the candidate’s abuse of drugs or the fact that he did NOT abuse drugs, how many readers would choose the latter?
Here’s what Dr. Gerald Grow, a journalism professor at Florida A&M University, has to say about reading and cognition:
“When faced with a new text, readers do not begin by “reading” in the sense of starting at the first word and moving sequentially toward the last word, they first predict what the passage will mean. Prediction, which plays a key role in Frank Smith’s cogent account of reading, can be understood as “the prior elimination of unlikely alternatives” or “questions we ask the world.” …Such predictions may be simultaneous with the first decoding of the letters on the page, and, since a reader can be led to know what to expect by illustrations, the nature of the publication, or other contextual cues, such predictions may even precede reading. Most of this activity is unconscious and appears to be part of the way we orient ourselves in the world. (Read more http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow/StrategicReader/StratModel.html)
I am not big on conspiracy theories – whether they be “vast right-wing” conspiracies or “liberal media” conspiracies. So, I suspect this was just a failure to notice that the entire meaning and import of the headline hung on a single letter. But for Senator Obama or anyone concerned with their reputation or brand, it is worth remembering that what people THINK was said about you is just as important – and potentially harmful – as what was actually said.
