This art icle was downloaded by: [ UVA Universit eit sbibliot heek SZ] On: 03 Oct ober 2014, At : 02: 31 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Critical Studies in Media Communication Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rcsm20 Dr. Phil Meets the Candidates: How Family Life and Personal Experience Produce Political Discussions Liesbet van Zoonen , Floris Muller , Donya Alinej ad , Mart ij n Dekker , Linda Duit s , Pauline van Romondt Vis & Wendy Wit t enberg Published online: 07 Dec 2007. To cite this article: Liesbet van Zoonen , Floris Muller , Donya Alinej ad , Mart ij n Dekker , Linda Duit s , Pauline van Romondt Vis & Wendy Wit t enberg (2007) Dr. Phil Meet s t he Candidat es: How Family Life and Personal Experience Produce Polit ical Discussions, Crit ical St udies in Media Communicat ion, 24:4, 322-338, DOI: 10.1080/ 07393180701560849 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 07393180701560849 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2007, pp. 322
338 Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 Dr. Phil Meets the Candidates: How Family Life and Personal Experience Produce Political Discussions Liesbet van Zoonen, Floris Muller, Donya Alinejad, Martijn Dekker, Linda Duits, Pauline van Romondt Vis, & Wendy Wittenberg In 2004, the main contenders in the American presidential election, incumbent Republican president George Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry, appeared with their wives in two separate episodes of the Dr. Phil show. They talked with America’s most popular television therapist about their families and how they combined family life and political career. Campaign and political issues were purposively kept out of the conversations. Analysis of the audience’s responses to these two shows, posted on a website, shows that the political relevance of the private and family lives of the candidates was heavily contested. However, the family life and values of the discussants themselves were seen as a legitimate point of departure for their political positions. Thus, the Dr. Phil forum functioned both as a place of deliberation and dialogue, and as a site for articulating political viewpoints. Keywords: Politics; Popular Culture; Personalization; Deliberation; Candidates In 2004, the popular television therapist Dr. Phil dedicated two episodes of his daily talk show to the Republican and Democratic candidates for the US presidency. On September 29, Dr. Phil McGraw and his wife Robin interviewed George and Laura Bush at their ranch. On October 6, they talked to John and Teresa Kerry in their home. Both conversations focused almost exclusively on the candidates’ family lives; they were meant to show, as the DrPhil.com site stated, ‘‘the other side of the Liesbet van Zoonen is Professor of Media and Popular Culture at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, University of Amsterdam. The other authors are students at the University of Amsterdam. Correspondence to: Liesbet van Zoonen, Amsterdam School of Communications Research, University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CE Amsterdam, Netherlands. Email: e.a.vanzoonen@uva.nl. The authors thank Cornel Sandvoss, Linda Steiner, Neil Washbourne, and anonymous CSMC reviewers for their comments. ISSN 0739-3180 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2007 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/07393180701560849 Political Discussions 323 Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 1 candidates, what kinds of parents they are and what their true values are.’’ The interviews were framed in the context of Dr. Phil’s regular treatment of family predicaments and his step-by-step plan for ‘‘creating a phenomenal family.’’2 Aired in most of the USA and Canada,3 the nationally syndicated and immensely popular show features Dr. Phil advising ordinary people on family problems and various other quandaries of everyday life. Although this talk show typically is produced in a studio with a studio audience, these two episodes were taped at the candidates’ houses and included Dr. Phil’s wife Robin. The candidates and their wives were asked about how they grew up, how they raised their children, and whether they managed to maintain a normal family life. They were examined as potential role models for American families*an exam both candidates passed easily, Dr. Phil said. At the end of the interviews, Dr. Phil suggested that audience members go to the DrPhil.com site, and share their thoughts on the family issues that arose during the show. The DrPhil.com site contains a link to message boards where the topic of the day can be addressed, and message posters can discuss, among other issues, parenting, weight, or health. After the shows with John Kerry and George Bush, the question posed on the message boards was: ‘‘How do you handle similar issues in your own family?’’ Some 324 comments were posted after the Bush episode, and 946 comments were posted after the Kerry episode.4 These postings constitute the core material for this article. They enable empirical exploration of two key issues in contemporary political communication: the impact of infotainment, soft news, and personalization on the way people make sense of politics; and whether and how internet forums function to revitalize political dialogue and deliberation. Popularization Although elements of popular culture have always been present in political communication, the 1992 US presidential campaign, and especially Bill Clinton’s saxophone performance on the Arsenio Hall Show, was said to mark an important shift in campaign strategies and coverage. Morning television, MTV, and radio and television talk shows are only a few of the ‘‘non-traditional’’ media that have become common channels for politics (Johnson, Braima, & Sothirajah, 1999; McLeod et al., 1996; Weaver & Drew, 1995). Scholars debate whether such combinations of popular culture and politics are evidence of crisis or of the rejuvenation of political communication. Van Zoonen (2005) argues that only situated analyses of particular cases of popularization can demonstrate the specific relevance of popular culture to political communication. The appearance of the presidential candidates on the Dr. Phil show enables such a situated analysis, especially with respect to the question of how soft news and infotainment influence the way people make sense of politics. Baum (2002) defines soft news as lacking a public policy component, and having ‘‘sensationalized presentation, human-interest themes, and an emphasis on dramatic subject matter such as crime and disaster’’ (p. 92). On the basis of a secondary analysis of US polls and ratings, Baum concludes that although people do not watch Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 324 L. van Zoonen et al. soft news programs with the intention to learn about politics (his focus is especially on foreign policy issues), soft news does make them more attentive and knowledgeable about it, especially if they had little interest before. In an extensive rebuttal that relies on different data, Prior (2003, p. 162) concludes that such attention and learning effects are only short-lived and do ‘‘not translate reliably into a learning effect.’’ Baum (2003) responds in turn that, although long-term factual knowledge may not increase from watching soft news, attitudes and voting behavior may be affected. In the scholarly debates about infotainment, one important question is whether the personal biographies and lives of politicians should be part of citizens’ political decision-making (see Corner, 2000). In these debates personalization is often defined very generally, in terms of a focus on the performance of politicians as human beings, and as the complete opposite of political content. Meyer (2002), for instance, contrasts ‘‘body politics’’ to ‘‘briefcase politics’’: body politicians rely on their physicality and hold on the media while the briefcase politicians devote their time to reading, studying, and negotiating. Van Zoonen and Holtz-Bacha (2000), however, assert that such a dichotomy does not encompass the concrete hybrid personal and political performances of politicians. Analyzing the appearance of Dutch and German politicians on talk shows, they demonstrate that politicians speak from both political and personal positions and use political and personal styles of discourse interchangeably, with the particular articulation depending on the nature of the talk show. The Dr. Phil interviews with the two presidential candidates present an exceptional case through which to investigate the issues of infotainment, soft news, and personalized politics. The interviews concentrated entirely on the candidates’ personal experience of family life. Both were shown as a series of edited segments in which the candidates discussed a variety of issues relating to family life and experience. Dr. Phil’s human interest approach, moreover, ensured that the interviews did not include questions about political issues. Nevertheless, George Bush talked about his leadership style, and John Kerry discussed what family policies he would propose. The two shows are therefore a particularly salient example of media popularization, and constitute an ideal context for investigating whether and how audiences use the personal lives of politicians to make sense of politics. Digital Deliberation Parallel to the popularization of political communication, by the early 1990s the Internet offered a widely available forum for political presentation and debate. The emerging digital democracy produced several debates that involve, according to Coleman (2005a, p. 178), crude dichotomies of utopia versus dystopia, choice versus determinism, and direct democracy versus politics as normal. At stake in these controversies is the quality of online dialogue and deliberation. Building on the work of Jürgen Habermas, among others, theories of deliberation focus on the norms and practices of public debate; the goal is to suggest concrete ways in which to enhance deliberation among publics and in public institutions. Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 Political Discussions 325 Dahlberg (2001) writes that deliberative communication results when participants attempt ‘‘to come to an understanding of their interlocutors and to reflexively modify their pre-discursive positions in response to better arguments. In the process private individuals become public-oriented citizens’’ (p. 167). Ackerman and Fishkin (2004) offer deliberation as a means to avoid media manipulation; they propose a ‘‘Deliberation Day’’ in each US presidential election year as a national holiday on which people can gather and discuss the candidates’ positions. The crux of deliberation theory and the core of academic contestation is how such deliberation should take place, what the rules and procedures of discussion are, and what constitutes perfect deliberation. Mansbridge, Hartz-Karp, Amengual, and Gastil (2006) argue that early deliberation theory, as seen in Habermas’ work, is rooted in abstract principles of rationality, liberty, and equality. Deliberation, from these perspectives, demands reasoned and detached discussions, and aims at consensus and the common good. Feminist theorists, in particular (e.g., Fraser, 1990; Young, 1990), criticize the elitist bias of these perspectives; they have developed more inclusive ways of thinking about deliberation, that acknowledge the unequal positions of participants in deliberations, the diverse kinds of knowledge that people bring to deliberations, and the different modes of exchange that are possible besides reasoned conversation. In a sophisticated translation of these critiques into working norms for more inclusive forms of deliberation, Alison Jaggar (2000) claims that multicultural literacy, moral deference (defined as weighing the credibility of people from subordinated groups), and ‘‘openness to reconfiguring our emotional constitutions’’ (p. 40) are necessary requirements for engaged discussion. However, these critical reworkings of deliberation theory also remain, as Mansbridge et al. (2006) express it, ‘‘relatively unleavened by the direct experience of deliberation practitioners’’ (p. 6). They therefore propose a bottom-up method for deliberation theory in which the practices, norms, and experience of lay participants in actual deliberation are examined and acknowledged as valuable understandings of deliberation. It is in this bottom-up approach to deliberation theory that we position our Dr. Phil project, especially because the Dr. Phil message boards do not constitute a formally deliberative environment. The discussions are not aimed at any kind of public decision-making. Nevertheless, as argued earlier, the appearance of presidential candidates on the Dr. Phil show is a concrete case of the popularization of politics and the ensuing online discussion in particular may foster the dialogue that recent deliberation theorists have identified as a crucial component of deliberation (Burkhalter, Gastil, & Kelshaw, 2002). The Internet is regarded as the exemplary medium to facilitate such deliberation. Coleman (2005b), for instance, argues that the Internet invites more people to political debate than other forms of political communication and facilitates speaking up in public from the relative safety of the home. In addition, some online discussions of popular culture could be considered typical of deliberative norms, albeit in a completely different setting and with rather different aims. Baym’s (2000) analysis of the online conversations about the daytime soap opera All My Children is a case in point. She identifies several communicative behaviors*mitigating offense Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 326 L. van Zoonen et al. and building affiliations through partial agreements and acknowledging others’ perspectives*that together produce an ‘‘ethic of friendliness’’ that makes new and old members feel comfortable enough to express their opinions online and collaboratively work towards a collective interpretation of the show. Baym ascribes these patterns of communication partly to the fact that the group’s participants are women. Her research is consistent with other research showing that news groups and bulletin boards dominated by women tend to be open and working towards consensus, whereas groups dominated by men tend to be impersonal, argumentative, and rude (e.g., Herring,1996; Savicki, Kelley, & Lingenfelter, 1996; Soukup, 1999). However, Baym adds that it is also the subject matter of the news group and the particular ‘‘personal’’ knowledge elicited by All My Children that produces the ethic of friendliness. In other words, the articulation of gender and genre underlies the communicative patterns of the news group. Dr. Phil also entails such an articulation of gender and genre. It is a talk show about subjects that are coded ‘‘feminine’’ in traditional gender relations: family matters, weight loss, and psychological dilemmas. In addition, daytime television is generally understood to draw a mainly female audience (Craig, 1993). Thus, the particular articulation of gender and genre in the Dr. Phil show could produce an ethic of friendliness similar to that Baym found among the fans of All My Children. Such an ethic of friendliness complies with the Jaggar’s requirements of deliberation (multicultural literacy, moral deference, and emotional openness) and opens up the possibility that Dr. Phil discussion boards offer a space for deliberation about the qualities of the presidential candidates. Design and Method Since the research reviewed above about popularization and deliberation involves many issues and controversies, our qualitative analysis was aimed at developing theory rather than testing it. We raised three broad research questions: 1. How do audiences use candidates’ personal experiences, as shown in the Dr. Phil shows, to make sense of politics? 2. Which kinds of knowledge do audiences use in discussing politics? 3. What rules of discussion do they establish? We used MaxQDA, a software program for analyzing qualitative data. Our analysis focused on the 1270 individual postings, and on subsequent threads of discussion. These were categorized, coded, and analyzed by a team of six MA and PhD students under the supervision of the main researcher. On the basis of the literature and an initial reading of the postings, a pilot coding tree was developed, which each member of the coding team applied to an arbitrary selection of all postings. The results of this pilot coding were collected and discussed by the research team in order to make the necessary adjustments to the coding tree. Each team member then worked with one or two specific codes and analyzed them on the basis of all postings relevant to Political Discussions 327 Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 that code. Team members kept extensive memos, which were discussed weekly. From these memos and discussions a final code logbook was produced. A subsequent round of coding looked at the threads and the rules of conversation that the posters established. We used a constant comparison method, in which ‘‘the cycle of comparison and reflection on ‘old’ and ‘new’ material can be repeated several times. It is only when new cases do not bring any new information to light that categories can be described as saturated’’ (Boeije, 2002, p. 393). To prevent idiosyncrasy, our criterion for including a quote or a thread as illustrative was that it could be replaced by at least three other similar ones, unless the quote was used to demonstrate an exception. The latter is made explicit in the text. Findings The intensity with which people participated in the discussions varied enormously. The most active posters were someone called ‘‘KVDuck’’ (34 postings) and someone using the name ‘‘Lizyounger’’ (33 postings),5 who together account for 10% of the postings. The third most active poster had 24 postings. All three of them are apparently women, as are most other active posters.6 A fifth of the posters only commented once. Compared to other Dr. Phil shows, the Bush and Kerry episodes attracted a relatively high number of discussants.7 At first glance, it seemed as if family life, notwithstanding Dr. Phil’s invitation, played no role in the two message boards opened after the interviews with the candidates. The discussions focused mainly on political issues, with the war in Iraq or connected matters of foreign policy, abortion, and the deficit occurring most frequently. Issues that were discussed occasionally included health care, education, the environment, and social security. However, when discussions of these issues were analyzed in greater depth, family and personal life did feature prominently. The personal and family life of the candidates was an issue to some extent, but, more importantly, the personal and family life of the posters themselves appeared as a main source of knowledge. In addition the concept of ‘‘the family’’ was often evoked as a rhetorical instrument. Below we address the way in which the personal and family lives of the candidates came up on the message boards. Then we demonstrate how the personal lives of the participants and their families functioned as a source of knowledge, and finally we establish the explicit and implicit rules of discussion on the boards. The Personal and Family Life of the Candidates The appearance of the candidates on the Dr. Phil show as family members outside of the political context evoked an array of different comments on the boards. The first reaction on the Kerry board, entitled ‘‘chairs,’’ dealt with the difference in the seating arrangements that the candidates offered to Dr. Phil and his wife. George and Laura Bush offered hard, straight-up chairs, while John and Theresa Kerry presented comfortable armchairs: 328 L. van Zoonen et al. Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 I could not help but wonder if this could serve as an analogy of how each of the couples view their relationship with the common man that makes up the majority of the American public. I understand there is a wealth of production that occurs with a show of this kind. This difference in chairs could have been pure coincidence. It just struck me as one of the tiny, tiny things that can contribute to our perception. I know these interviews were not intended to be a political vehicle (wink, wink) but I believe these interviews supported the decision I will be making in November.8 This posting, like other posts discussing the style, intimate behaviors, and details of the candidates’ personal lives, was both endorsed and criticized by other participants, who claimed that neither chairs nor family lives are relevant to politics. I watched both interviews. I sensed more authenticity and genuineness in the dialogues between the Kerrys and Dr. Phil, in fact, I noticed that Robin was more at ease as she asked her own questions of the Kerrys more spontaneously, than when she was with the Pres. and Mrs. Bush. The Bushes felt like they were rehearsing a script and a speech and I did not sense they were connected at all to what we Americans need. It is as if they have been so far removed from what are our real concerns. Other posters said, however, that they wanted to learn about policies, not hear about fishing trips (as one poster expressed it). Alternatively, they articulated fear that the undecided voters who watched daytime television would decide their vote on the kind of information the Dr. Phil show offered. Honestly, is this what our election has come down to . . . chairs? I listen to every issue and weigh everything said on a daily basis. Good Heaven! Deciding who to vote for by the chairs they were sitting in? This is a sad commentary. My vote is for George Bush . . . strong America in a very important time. Do you want Edwards running this country in case of Kerry’s death? That is scary! Kerry will pull our troops and leave that region in a mess. Trust me . . . . . . he WILL pull out. These quotes are representative of a wider discussion, demonstrating that the two shows provoked discussion among audiences about whether and how the personal and the political should be articulated. Posters who connected their political preference to the candidates’ personal qualities and their family lives could not do so without being reprimanded by other posters who emphasized the need for what they would call substantial assessments. One general exception to this tendency concerned the wealth of both candidates. Those posters who compared their own social-economic status to the candidates criticized the candidates’ wealth: These posters attributed both candidates’ lack of understanding of how average Americans live to this wealth. Again, both Kerry and Bush were discussed in this manner: I respect your opinion, but tell me, do you really think John Kerry has even the foggiest idea of what the lives of the middle and lower class are like? When is the last time he had to think where his next meal was coming from? They are worth 600 odd million dollars! Neither candidate can understand what it is like. Although some posters responded that contemporary politics offers no opportunities for candidates with an average or low income, they and other posters nevertheless Political Discussions 329 Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 accepted that participants in the boards found the candidates’ financial status relevant to their political profile. In contrast, the political significance of the way the candidates received their guests, their authenticity with their wives, or other aspects of their personal and family lives was a cause of immense controversy among the posters, as the discussion following the chair posting showed. This suggests that different aspects of the personal and family lives of political candidates do not have a uniform or unidirectional impact on political sense-making. Rather, the financial dimensions of their personal lives and the private or intimate dimensions of their personal lives have dissimilar relevance for audiences. Kinds of Knowledge: The Personal and Family Life of the Poster Whether and how the family lives of the candidates should be part of political discussion and political sense-making was, as the previous section demonstrated, heavily contested. Nevertheless, using one’s own family and personal experience or those of others to make sense of concrete political issues was common and uncontroversial. Iraq, 9/11, and other matters of foreign policy dominated the forums, despite Dr. Phil’s attempt to retain a focus on family issues. One common way for posters to insert their own family into the board discussions was to write from their role as parent. One of them said, for instance, that she was not willing to send sons to Iraq for a war which ‘‘didn’t have to happen.’’ Another would teach her/his son that ‘‘freedom isn’t free and evil reigns when good men stand by and do nothing.’’ People with relatives in the military or who were active in the military themselves also spoke from family experience. They discussed the pros and cons of the war, and in these discussions their family roles and personal observations played an important role. The two postings below are typical: I have a daughter in the military and a son-in-law who is getting ready to be deployed to Iraq. My son was in Desert Storm in Kuwait. My daughter volunteered to go to Afghanistan and was upset when she was told it was time to leave. These people volunteer for dangerous deployment because they are taught to defend our country. They understand that if we don’t fight terrorism in other countries we will be fighting it on our own soil. Paleeze. My b/f is in Iraq as a Marine and he’s voting for Kerry. And dear god he’s had to keep that a secret for fear of what could happen to him. Those serving over in Iraq are more confused than those over here are. These kinds of postings offered people’s first- or second-hand experience as the ultimate knowledge, a steadfast, self-observed, reliable truth. People also used their personal expertise to disparage other comments. For instance, one person wrote: ‘‘AND I guess Maria, You don’t have two loved ones over in Iraq, like a lot of us.’’ This premium on personal experience not only emerged regarding the war in Iraq, but also with respect to other issues, such as health care, budget cuts in the public sector, or taxes. Religion, a particular type of personal experience, regularly entered the discussions. With both candidates presenting themselves as sincere, practicing 330 L. van Zoonen et al. Christians, religion was a visible part of their biographies and was addressed as such on the boards. The messages on the boards show that, as a fundamental aspect of personal experience, one’s religious understanding and values were seen as reliable resources for making political judgments. I am a faithful person. I love God but I don’t get this war. And I don’t think God is on our side on this one. I don’t get Christians who support this war. Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 Such postings provoked reactions from other posters about the way both candidates live up to the ideals of Christianity, but also about the desired separation between church and state: CHURCH IS CHURCH AND Wonderful . . . AND GOVERNMENT IS GOVERNMENT . . . Government should not Be Run by any church . . . if so, we would all be forced into being Southern Baptists And Church has nothing to do with faith or values. If you want to understand Bush’s faith you will need to read the Bible and study God’s word, not listen to what the priests, rabbis or pastors of the churches have to say. You’re right Church and Government are separate, but faith is personal. You are right! Church and Government are separate but they do have something in common: They can both be very corrupt at times! I think any responsible religious figure would leave politics out of his Sunday service. Thus, posters used all kinds of personal and family experiences to make sense of politics. All these experiences were sources for other posters to express support for, elaborate on, or disagree about, usually also on the basis of their own personal experience. When posters brought religion into their arguments other participants in the boards would question whether religious experience should be part of political discussions at all. First-hand and second-hand experiences were also contested, but their legitimacy as a resource for debate was not. Kinds of Knowledge: The Rhetoric of ‘‘The Family’’ In contrast to the postings discussed above, which deploy images of posters’ own families, messages also contained more abstract references to families. One poster rebuked such rhetoric: I am reading a lot of posts which read ‘‘our sons and daughters’’ when referring to the soldiers. I am wondering how many of you have family in the military.9 The posters making abstract references to children, sons, daughters, or families mostly did so to make their position more convincing and evocative. Often, in such messages, visions of the future of ‘‘our,’’ ‘‘your,’’ ‘‘America’s,’’ or ‘‘the country’s’’ children were described, together with a plea to make better decisions for the children. Such everyday rhetoric was used by posters along the ideological spectrum. Posters against the war in Iraq often wrote about Iraqi families, especially women and children. Some pointed at the pain of Iraqi mothers losing their children, others at Political Discussions 331 children losing their parents. Posters used terms such as ‘‘Iraqi families,’’ ‘‘Iraqi women and children,’’ and ‘‘babies and children’’: Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 So they [American soldiers] are fighting this war to protect the babies and children that were killed on 9/11? Do you realize how that sounds? While they are fighting a war in a country that had NOTHING to do with the attack on our country, they are murdering babies and children in Iraq. Supporters of the war on Iraq similarly evoked the image of families suffering. They asked other posters to imagine what it must have been like to live in Iraq under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The following post sarcastically responded to people who think the United States should have stayed out of Iraq: They were wondering whose son, daughter, father, mother, aunt, uncle, etc. was going to die next at their ruler’s hand. But that is none of our business. Let him kill anyone he wants that is his country. Do you not realize that all people yearn to be free like the U.S.? The images of family and children that these rhetorical strategies evoke also enabled one poster to connect the forum’s discussions about Iraq to abortion. S/he reacts on a posting about innocent war victims in Iraq: Let’s talk about the death of 4000 innocent Americans each day!!!! Kerry stands for it, President Bush fights against this slaughtering . . . 4000 a day since 1973 is so many more lives than will ever be lost due to war. If you support Kerry, then you knowingly support the efforts to undermine the miracle that has been given to women and to kill thousands every day through elective abortion. This message generated both intense support and powerful opposition and made abortion the second most discussed issue on the forum, after the war on Iraq. All discussants confronting abortion used similarly strong words: I do remember the question on the death penalty. People who receive the death penalty have committed a terrible crime of killing someone else. I also remember that John Kerry supports partial-birth abortion. What have these children done to deserve the death penalty? If a person can support killing innocent babies, how can they have any religious faith or compassion for the common people? As an adoptive father I am firmly in the court of helping women to choose birth and placement, but the fascist control of others’ bodies is just that. It is a short step from denying abortion rights to taking control of your womb and forcing you to act as a surrogate for some ‘‘deserving family’’ who doesn’t want to adopt. The next obvious step is forced abortion of babies those in power do not want born. Strikingly, posters writing about the war in Iraq frequently reported that they had a brother or a sister in Iraq who, thus, had first-hand experience with the war; but, during the abortion discussions nobody mentioned having had an abortion, or a sister or a daughter who had, or family members working in an abortion clinic. Only one woman said she considered abortion when she was much younger, and she reported now being very happy with her daughter. Parenthood and having and raising children were common themes in the messages, but personal experience with 332 L. van Zoonen et al. abortion seemed taboo. Instead, the discussions of abortion relied mainly on the rhetoric of ‘‘the family’’ and on personal religious convictions. Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 Rules of Discussion With respect to the rules of discussions the posters developed for the boards, a first finding is that the messages contained political, personal, moral, and rhetorical dimensions, and combinations of these. Examples of postings with political dimensions were those that referred to the war in Iraq, abortion, or the deficit. Postings with personal dimensions concerned the personal lives of candidates, or posters’ own personal lives or those of relatives were used to make sense of the political issues under discussion. Moral issues emerged when posters used Christianity as a guide to their political understanding. Rhetorical dimensions occurred in cases when posters used the concepts of family, children, and/or youth as the main instruments to underline their position. However, none of these four dimensions were uncontested. Indeed, some posters were disappointed that other posters discussed politics but did not respond to the question posed by Dr. Phil: ‘‘How do you handle similar issues in your own family?’’ I am so disappointed in the message boards for both the Bush and Kerry interviews. Instead of focusing on how both couples have dealt with raising their children in the difficult environment of politics, and how they handled many common parenting issues, the boards turned into political bashing and the same arguments that you hear (back and forth) every night on the news. However, criticism of the inclusion of political issues in the postings was rare. Postings discussing the personal lives of the candidates received more critical comments, especially with respect to the relevance of the candidates’ personal lives for their political positions. The validity of religion as a source of political opinion was contested, with some posters finding religion relevant to politics and others insisting on a strict separation between church and state. The legitimacy of the posters’ own direct personal and family experience being used to make sense of politics was rarely contested, although the mention of personal experience did cause other posters to submit accounts of their own experience. The style of some exchanges resembled Baym’s ethic of friendliness, using communicative facilitators like ‘‘I respect your opinion, but . . . ’’ or ‘‘I mean no disrespect, but . . .’’ However, other debates became condescending and even aggressive. For instance, the person who posted comments about the arrangement of the chairs during the Bush interview received the following reactions: I suggest you stay at home on Nov. 2 and fluff your couch pillows. Leave it to a democrat to make a major political decision based on the type of chair one sits on. Political Discussions 333 And a comment on John Kerry’s handsomeness evoked the following exchange: What do you mean handsome? His eyes are sunk into his face so far you can hardly see them along with his sunken cheeks and he’s skinny as a rail. He’s one of the homeliest men I’ve ever laid eyes on. Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 Well, that’s it! I’m changing my vote. We can’t have a skinny man with sunken eyes running the nation. Wow, thanks for pointing that out-we could have been in real trouble! Such exchanges would often lead a participant to stand up and reprimand the fighters. ‘‘Calm down’’ was a familiar remark on the boards, as was: ‘‘You might try calming down, taking a deep breath and decaf.’’ The most important prerequisite on the boards, according to participants, was to post on the basis of reliable information. A very frequent outcry in the forum was: ‘‘Do your homework,’’ ‘‘Check the facts,’’ or similar advice. Please do your homework. ‘Would you rather he waited and have them bomb us again and kill more of us?’ DO YOUR HOMEWORK! Iraq never NEVER bombed American soil. LEARN BEFORE YOU TAKE A POSITION. Although posters agreed that discussions should be based on facts, what counted as fact and where one can find facts were different matters. Information from news media, and especially Fox broadcasts, were highly controversial among the posters, as the following postings from a heated exchange between several discussants show: You only see what the media wants you to see. Tune into Fox to get a balanced view. You have got to be kidding when you tell someone to watch the fox news channel to get some balanced view. They are so pro Bush, it is ridiculous. I would believe CBS before I would believe FOX! You would believe CBS before Fox because CBS is backing up your own liberal slant. You watch Fox because it tells you what you want to hear. This exchange suggests that trust in news media depends on one’s political position. However, more general doubts about the media were raised. One poster asserted that ‘‘all articles, stories, websites, etc. are biased to some degree.’’ Another one put it more cynically: ‘‘[M]ost of the time we are lied to by the media.’’ The Dr. Phil show itself was not uncontroversial. Dr. Phil was regularly complimented*‘‘riveting interviews,’’ ‘‘it was great television and important’’*but others claimed Dr. Phil went too easy on the candidates. One of the posters, having apparently just learned from a website that Dr. Phil is a Republican, therefore claimed not to be surprised by the ‘‘fluffball questions’’ he asked Bush. In discussing the reliability of the news media, posters often referred to Internet sites that they claimed were more trustworthy. However, these references produced deep disagreement, with people resenting some sites (e.g., ‘‘Please don’t send me a link from moveon.org’’) but recommending others. Some posters referred to the BBC 334 L. van Zoonen et al. or other European news media as reliable sources of information (none of the posts about European news media attracted direct criticism): Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 I JUST RETURNED FROM 21 DAYS in Europe, I have Newspapers from Britain, Belgium and Germany, and They Are Able to tell MORE of the truth there, because they are not censored by the very political system that we are supposed to be hearing the truth about. Generally, there was deep contestation about factual evidence. This context of distrust and suspicion perhaps explains why so many posters considered their direct personal and family experience as unmediated and incontestable evidence. The way posters described themselves in their alias (e.g., ‘‘momof2’’) or in their postings (e.g., ‘‘as a father’’) implies that they often speak from lived experience. Media makes changes in intelligence information look like lies from the Bush Cheney administration. Now more than ever, we need to be responsible to get the FACTS and not be swayed by media spin and political games. I am a military spouse and I guarantee that the majority of the military community supports our President BUSH and his choices. Such personal observations were frequently countered by other posters with their own personal evidence, leading to confrontations that demonstrate the diversity of personal experience but do not convince other posters that they provide the reliable information they desire. Consider the following, differing personal assessments of two posters about what Europeans think about the war in Iraq and the policies of George Bush: Trust me to know what most of Europe thinks I live in Belgium. . . . . . At Ramstein Air Base, where the gate guards are all German . . . most of them state they wish they were helping in Iraq. And most Germans feel bad that our country is in such turmoil. Well, you must be living in the same bubble Bush is living in. I am Dutch. My whole family is Dutch. I travel in Europe frequently. The Europeans do NOT like Bush. At all. And they do not understand why people would support him. All in all, the discussions on the boards show strong, explicit disagreement about the rules of discussion, especially with respect to the appropriate topics to discuss and which sources of information can be trusted. Yet there seems to be implicit agreement about the value of personal experience as a resource for making sense of politics; posters speaking from their personal observations were never reprimanded by their fellow posters for providing only individual truths. Discussion We located our study of the Dr. Phil episodes featuring George Bush and John Kerry at the intersection of two debates in political communication: one centering on the question of whether popular culture’s treatment of politics enables people to make sense of politics, the other concerned with the question of whether online discussions of politics revitalize political dialogue and deliberation. Analysis of messages posted Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 Political Discussions 335 on the Dr. Phil boards demonstrates that dichotomous perspectives on popular culture as either detrimental or beneficial to political sense-making, and on online discussions as either invigorating or eroding political deliberation, do not do justice to the multifaceted exchanges and processes taking place on these message boards. On the one hand, Dr. Phil’s interviews with the candidates about their personal and family lives lead to engaged debates on the message boards about traditional political themes such as the relationship between the personal and the political, the connection between church and state, and the legitimacy of US foreign policy. Simultaneously, several posters used conversational techniques aimed at creating mutual respect and understanding. These two features of the discussions on the boards do warrant the conclusion that the message boards for the two Dr. Phil episodes invited political dialogue as envisioned in contemporary deliberative theory. In addition, the number of postings and the intensity of exchanges on the boards support Baum’s (2002, 2003) assumptions about infotainment stimulating attention to politics. Simultaneously, however, posters regularly addressed each other in sarcastic and condescending ways, virtually screaming and producing the opposite of dialogue* namely, confrontation and closure. Moreover, juxtaposed with the classic political themes, posters also paid considerable attention to seating arrangements, body language, and the appearance of the candidates. This would justify an opposite conclusion: the personalized treatment of politics as found in the Dr. Phil show counteracts the development of mutual understanding and moves people’s attention away from politics to the surface of visible individual features. Such a conclusion supports more culturally pessimistic perspectives and Prior’s (2003) refutation of Baum. The boards thus contain support for both optimistic and pessimistic views of the potential of popularization and digital deliberation for making sense of politics. One finding that transcended this optimist
pessimist dichotomy was that the posters shared a deep distrust of both mass media and the Internet, and had a strong belief in the validity of personal observations and experience as sources of knowledge and truth in common. On the boards, personal experience replaced the institutional information of news media as the main legitimate source for political discussion. This regime of personal truth exemplifies an epistemology rooted in the subjectivity of everyday experience (cf. Strange, 2006). In friendly conversations this epistemology produces support and elaboration, such as when two posters shared memories of their youth in born-again Christian families to comment on George Bush’s integrity. In more argumentative discussions, personal truths were confronted by other personal truths, as in the postings reported earlier about the way Europeans feel about Bush. Such exchanges were often supplemented by moral and rhetorical operations that suggested little desire on the part of posters to engage in the kind of dialogue envisaged in deliberation theory. Apparently, the message boards not only functioned as unexpected places for dialogue, but also as public spaces in which people could show others their political identity and their opinions without being very interested in those of others. The Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:31 03 October 2014 336 L. van Zoonen et al. boards thus also operated as a space for individual demonstrations, so to speak. Such explicit demonstrations may have become rare in everyday face-to-face contexts, as Eliasoph (1998) suggests. She found that local volunteer groups tend to avoid politics by not talking about it, and by refusing to label activities that could be considered political as such. In the fiercely polarized presidential elections of 2004, politics may have been too stirring a subject for common face-to-face conversation. However, the relatively extensive and active participation on the Dr. Phil boards suggests that people did feel a need to show others what they stand for. A final question is whether the presence of personal experience as the main resource for dialogue and demonstration on the boards is the effect of Dr. Phil’s popular and personalized treatment of the candidates. That seems unlikely, since such hybrid and personalized political discussions have also been found in other popular contexts. Gamson’s (1992) study of everyday political talk found that people frequently make their points by telling stories; ‘‘[T]he majority of them are anecdotes about themselves or someone they know personally’’ (p. 122). Similar personalized political discussions have been reported from birthday parties, popular magazines, and fan websites (e.g., Dahlgren, 1985; Savage & Nimmo, 1990; van Zoonen, 2005, 2007). Political dialogue and demonstration is personalized even in explicit political contexts such as online political forums (e.g., Cammaert & Van Audenhove, 2005; Hagemann, 2002; Wiklund, 2005). Rather than assuming, therefore, that the subjective epistemology underlying the dialogue and demonstrations on the Dr. Phil boards resulted from the way in which the show treated the candidates as private persons, we propose that it should be thought of as a particular type of knowledge with which people confront politics and candidates. In empirical terms, we know relatively little about why and how different media encourage or discourage such a subjective epistemology, what people are most likely to draw from this way of thinking, and how it relates to the way they make sense of politics. In normative and theoretical terms, a subjective epistemology has by and large been discredited as unable to produce well-informed deliberation and inter-subjective understanding (e.g., Habermas, 1995). However, since the everyday reality of making sense of politics is usually rooted in people’s subjective experience, political theory and research must to come to terms with those subjectivities. Notes [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] See http://www.drphil.com/show/show.jhtml?contentId3201_bush.xml (retrieved June 1, 2005). The book for this permanent feature of the show is Family first: Your step-by-step plan to create a phenomenal family, by Dr. Phil McGraw. 2005, New York: Simon and Schuster. Dr. Phil can also be seen in a number of European countries, such as the Netherlands, some Scandinavian countries, and the UK. These figures were reported on DrPhil.com on June 20, 2005. 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