Welcome to the 1996 presidential election campaign.
Race for the Presidency is a ground-breaking new television series and an excellent resource for high school classes on American government, issues in American democracy, media communications, speech, television production, and English.
Each week, Race for the Presidency presents one hour of election '96 coverage. Roughly one-half of the program consists of uninterrupted candidate messages. Here you will find stump speeches, major campaign addresses, interviews, campaign advertisements, and portraits of the candidates that the candidates have chosen themselves. TeleCommunications Inc. (TCI) simply runs the candidate's messages without any editing, giving candidates an unprecedented opportunity to speak directly to America in any way they choose. What's more, you can tape these programs off the air and use them in class for a period of one year. Build your own library of campaign speeches and your own curriculum based on critical viewing, critical thinking, and media literacy.
Each program also features a roundup of the week's campaign news by host Clifford May, associate editor of the Rocky Mountain News. Bipartisan analysis of the messages and the campaign comes from such political veterans as former Governor Richard Lamm (D-CO) and former Reagan Administration Energy and Interior Secretary Donald Hodel. The show also features analysis of the media's performance during the campaign from Sanford Ungar, dean of the School of Communications at The American University, and Brent Bozell, founder and chairman of the Media Research Center. You'll also get campaign field reports from award-winning journalist Douglas Kennedy and "Democracy Online," a report on cyberspace from correspondent Katy Atkinson.
Use this guide to help your students develop a media-literate habit of mind. Strengthen their ability to analyze, evaluate, interpret, and create communications. Separating the substance from the sales pitch requires skepticism, not cynicism. Media literacy is an empowering skill. When you know the vocabulary, you know how to act.
Ask your school's media resource director to tape the programs off the air. To find out where and when the programs are airing in your community, call TCI at 1 (800) 218-8077 or check out the viewing schedule on the Race for the Presidency home page.
Assign a student or group of students to create a Race for the Presidency log in which they keep track of candidate appearances. This will enable your students to conduct comparative studies of how candidate views might change over time. Worksheet 1, which has been designed to serve as a standard note-taking form during the viewing of candidate presentations, could be used to establish and maintain the log.
Assign students to specific candidates. Ask them to select an issue discussed by their candidate in a Race for the Presidency appearance and to develop a one-page position paper that describes the candidate's basic stand on the issue. Challenge students to listen carefully for the specific actions that their candidate will take if elected. Have students present their position papers to the class and compare the positions of different candidates on the same issue. Next, have students review newspapers and magazines to check their position papers against other reports of their candidate's position. How do the reports compare?
Also on the Air -- a Different Bite of the Issues
Race for the Presidency spotlights the candidates. For a fresh look at the issues, introduce your students to TCI's Damn Right -- a public affairs program hosted by David Asman, senior editor of the Wall Street Journal. Damn Right looks at the world from outside the Washington Beltway, bringing a Main Street perspective to the issues. Look for it on NewsTalk Television or broadcast affiliates in your area.
Have students view a Damn Right program on a major issue and compare it to what the candidates say about the same issue in their Race for the Presidency messages. What is similar in the treatments of the issue, and what is different? How much of each is meant to be informative or persuasive?
The combination of images and sound offers many options for relaying messages. Consider a TV drama scene in which one character declares his love for another. If the scene occurs on a spring day, the sunshine, chirping birds, and the new beginning that spring symbolizes would probably make us feel good about the relationship. If it were set on a dreary, rainy day, we might sense a conflict between the words and the pictures. Similarly, heavy, broody music could give a different impression than a light, melodic tune. With few exceptions, all aspects of a television production are intentional and planned. Even in a live or news program in which the action is not fully under control, the camera's placement and angle, the direction of the microphone, and the editing of the images are determined, not random, and are selected to convey certain meanings. At the same time, however, the message intended by the producer might not match the message understood by the viewer, and different viewers might arrive at different meanings of the same message.
Political ads are meant to sway voters' opinions, but their impact might vary from person to person. Introduce students to each of the techniques described in Worksheet 2. Have them suggest or collect images or video clips from political print or television ads that use each of the techniques and tell what effect the technique has on the message. Then have them select the word in each of the word pairs below that best matches their impression of the image. When their opinions differ, have students discuss what might account for the differences.
| Strong | Weak |
| Angry | Happy |
| Honorable | Dishonorable |
| Honest | Corrupt |
| Conservative | Liberal |
| Responsible | Irresponsible |
| Compassionate | Uncaring |
| Individualistic | Social |
| Realistic | Unrealistic |
From time to time, a particular advertisement captures people's interest because of the intensity of its imagery. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson rebutted Barry Goldwater's statement that "the nuclear bomb is merely another weapon." Johnson's ad showed an image of a child holding a daisy, then faded into a nuclear mushroom cloud. In 1988, supporters of George Bush wanted to paint his opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, as soft on crime. Bush's ad featured a criminal who committed a violent crime while on a furlough from a Massachusetts prison. What key images have emerged from the 1996 campaign? What makes them intense? How are they being used to characterize a candidate by his opponents? How often have these appeared in Race for the Presidency?
Have students generate a list of campaign issues as you write them on the board; for example, the environment, abortion, business, immigration, taxes, school prayer, and so forth. Divide the class into groups of three to four students, and have each group select an issue for which it will create storyboards for two television advertisements: one in which a candidate takes a position in favor of the issue, the other in which the candidate takes the opposing position. A storyboard is a simple set of drawings -- each placed in a box that looks like a television -- that show sequentially what will be seen in the ad. The words to be said are written underneath. Have students use Worksheet 3 to determine what types of messages they want to present and what themes they will use. After the groups present their ads, compare and contrast them. Why were certain images, sounds, or techniques selected? What effect was desired? What would voters learn from their ads?
All campaign messages are arguments, even if the argument is as simple as, "Vote for me." Arguments contain these key elements:
Using Worksheet 4, introduce these concepts and apply them to a print-based opinion piece or editorial. Then see if students can evaluate the arguments in the Race for the Presidency segments. Select several candidate clips from the series -- you will want to preview them first and conduct your own analysis.
Turn the sound off and have students compare two candidate messages in Race for the Presidency using the following questions: What is the setting? What do you think the candidate is trying to convey by the selection of this setting? Is editing used to connect or associate the candidate with values or themes or issues? Who else is in the presentation and what symbolic weight do they carry? Are there ordinary people in it? What is their apparent racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic composition? What effect does that have on the message? If the message is a speech, who is in the audience? What does their presence tell you about the candidate? How does the audience affect the presentation? Students might find Worksheet 1 useful in conducting this activity. Show the segments again with sound, this time having students concentrate on the message. Compare their reactions this time with those in the first viewing.
Most candidates are using the Internet to support their campaigns. Have students research the candidates Internet sites by using the Race for the Presidency web site to find the links to the official sites for each candidate. These are available from the "Campaign '96 Links" button on the main page of the web site. Links also are included to other good sources of political information on the Internet. What kinds of information is available on the sites? How does it differ from candidate to candidate? How useful is the Internet in informing voters about positions? This also is a good opportunity to ask students to evaluate how the World Wide Web is being used by the candidates, and what things they could do to take advantage of the interactive nature of the Internet. What would students like to see on candidate web sites? Another part of the Race for the Presidencyweb site that has potential for class exercises is Election Central, a weekly collection of student writing about the campaign. Many of the columns featured in Election Central take a side in the campaign and argue for a viewpoint. You could hand out copies of one of these articles and ask students the following questions: What is the main point of the column? Do you agree with the writer? How well do you think the writer made a case for his or her argument? What is your position on the issue?
There are four worksheets used with this Teacher's Guide: