Sunday, October 12, 2008
A+E, In this Issue..., Politics

Pop the vote

How much influence does popular culture have over politics? 

BY KEVIN FOREST MOREAU 

The current presidential election can be boiled down to one image, and it isn’t one of Barack Obama or John McCain. It’s not even Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whose entry into the race back in August booted a messianic Obama out of the spotlight and galvanized both the media and the electorate. For most Americans, the defining image of this race is “30 Rock” actress Tina Fey’s portrayal of Palin on “Saturday Night Live.”  

But a poll released last week raises the possibility that Fey might be more than just the current embodiment of the election—she may, however unintentionally, be exerting some influence over it, as well.  

A national study conducted among 314 self-declared Republicans, Democrats and Independents by HCD Research found that Sarah Palin’s favorability rating dropped slightly among all parties after they viewed a video of Fey impersonating the Alaska governor. Republicans’ positive view of Palin budged ever so slightly, from 80 percent favorable before watching the video to 79 percent afterward. Among Democrats, the drop was more severe—from 24 percent favorable before the video to 17 percent after—while Independents’ favorable impressions of Palin dropped only 4 percent, from 37 percent to 33 percent. 

Taken by itself, one study isn’t much cause for concern among Palin supporters. But a gaffe made by a newspaper in Quebec a couple of weeks ago might be. The Le Soleil newspaper reportedly accompanied a story about Palin with a photo of Fey as the governor and “SNL” cast member Amy Poehler as Katie Couric; the photo caption referred to the real Palin’s performance in her recent interview with Couric.  

“One cannot sometimes tell the original from the copy,” says Andrew Goodwin, a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco and author of the blog Professor of Pop.  

Partisans could be forgiven for wondering if Hollywood insiders are trying to affect the current election. “An American Carol,” produced by, and starring, a number of entertainment industry Republicans, opened last weekend, mere weeks before the election; the film caters to an underserved conservative audience, mainly by taking potshots at liberal documentarian Michael Moore. And on Oct. 17, Lionsgate will release “W.,” a biography of President George W. Bush directed by Oliver Stone, whose political leanings do not favor the current Republican administration.  

The timing of both releases is clearly meant to capitalize on public interest in the election. But could they also sway undecided voters? 

Joseph Knippenberg, a professor of politics at Oglethorpe University, doesn’t think so.

“At this point, this late in the season, there’s a very small percentage of people who are genuinely undecided,” he says.  

Liesbet van Zoonen, a professor of media and popular culture at the University of Amsterdam, is equally skeptical. “What we see in the U.S. is an electorate polarized so deeply that voters on both sides will use popular resources to make their points,” she says. “But it is very unlikely that [voters] will change their minds because of pop culture.” 

COULD TINA FEY HELP SARAH PALIN? 

Does popular culture change minds? Perhaps not. Make up those minds? Well, that’s a different question altogether. Conservative critics have argued for years that Hollywood uses its products to spread the liberal philosophies held by many of its executives and movie stars. And if one looks for examples of that bias, they aren’t exactly hard to find. (Hello, Whoopi Goldberg and Tim Robbins!) 

Fey herself has told reporters at the Emmy Awards last month that “I want to be done playing this lady [Palin] Nov. 5.” And while Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” skewers the follies of Republicans and Democrats alike, even a casual viewer knows that host Jon Stewart is no fan of the Bush White House.  

Of course, few among us would be willing to admit that our beliefs and feelings about important political matters could be affected by something as trivial as entertainment. “There is a famous finding in media studies about the third-person effect, which shows that people never attribute influence to media content when it applies to their own ideas and behavior, but always see others [as being] affected,” van Zoonen says. 

But Goodwin, who finds Palin “genuinely frightening,” says that pop culture can influence politics in subtler ways. “Tina Fey’s brilliant performance could … help to take the edge off Palin’s crypto-fascist populism,” he says, making her more palatable to undecided voters.  

What’s more, he says, the selection of Palin as a candidate can also be laid at the feet of popular culture. “It seems that the Republicans have adopted a high-art position, in a way. Their choice of Palin assumes that the [larger] culture is degraded by the values of mass culture … the ceaseless search for immediate pleasure, the default to a consumerist attitude in all things, the populist attitude that hates educated ‘elites,’ etc.”  

Whatever one’s political leanings, the idea that a person’s political beliefs, or his vote, can be shaped or manipulated by what we call pop culture assumes that there is only one popular culture.  

“The media market is so fractured now that ‘popular culture’ is in some ways a misnomer,” says Knippenberg. “There are many different quote-unquote ‘popular cultures,’ and what grabs one demographic won’t grab another demographic. I talk to students, and most of them really don’t like Sarah Palin. But when I go to church and talk to people, most of them really do like her. It’s partly a cultural thing and partly a generational thing.” 

As for Tina Fey deciding the election, one way or another?  

Bob Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University in New York, says we shouldn’t count her out entirely. “Whoever loses this election will lose for an incredibly complex recipe of reasons,” he said in an article on the ABC News Web site last week. “Tina Fey may be one of the ingredients. Like that little bit of salt in a chocolate chip cookie, she’s not insignificant.” SP