Richard M. Perloff is a noted American scholar who specializes in persuasion, psychological perceptions of media effects, and political communication. He has written books on persuasion, political communication, and news, as well as writing many newspaper opinion pieces, letters, and features. He is Distinguished Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Political Science at Cleveland State University.
Recent Articles and Letters
Americans are relieved. The negative ads are off the air, the yard signs are coming down, the animosity has cooled. In Portage County, voters had been counting down the days until the election ended, Portage County commissioner Sabrina Christian-Bennett recently observed. It’s the same across the nation.
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For years, Ohio was the political heart of it all, the state where all electoral roads passed to determine the winner of the presidential election. But that changed when Ohio became a red state. Over the past two elections, and particularly this year, we have been treated with the brazen indignity that Pennsylvania – with reminders of the role played by Pittsburgh, the city with that other AFC North football team – is the state upon which the presidential election depends.
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What will it take to change America? The nation is still reeling from the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, loved and reviled, but still a former president. People were shocked by the sheer madness of the act, and considering the brutish nature of our polarized national politics, unnerved that the verbal aggression that characterizes so much of our political rhetoric metastasized to the level of actual physical violence.
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It seems a little incongruous to joyously celebrate America this July 4, given that a former president has been convicted of a felony, and Americans processed the verdict, not in a unified manner, but through the divided lens of their selective exposure to partisan media outlets.
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They’re baaaack!
We are going to have presidential debates this year. The first debate is set for June 27, the earliest ever. But let’s face it: People aren’t crazy about the prospect, recalling the vituperative, insult-dominated, “dumpster fire” first presidential debate between Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump in 2020.
While Mr. Luntz offers an insightful analysis of how candidate performances will affect voters’ impressions, he does not mention the larger symbolic role the debate plays in American democracy.
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Something needs to be done about President’s Day.
Does anyone take this day seriously or even think about its historical significance? Doubtful. People take the vacation day, while businesses market President’s Day sales. Americans are tired of mythologizing presidents, given all we have learned of their shortcomings. Perhaps it’s time to cancel a holiday that befits another era.
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How should society balance the right to free speech with recognition that the embers of speech ignite psychic wounds? When should offensive speech be tolerated because it opens society’s political pores, and when should it be limited because it rips open wounds that are too painful to bear?
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It is the one episode of “All in the Family” that everybody seems to remember.
The legendary singer, Sammy Davis Jr., had left his briefcase in Archie Bunker’s cab, drops by the Bunker house to retrieve it, and Archie is initially thrilled. “Mr. Davis, there’s my daughter, Gloria, standing over there,” he says, “and her husband, Mike.” Gloria is standing next to Lionel Jefferson, a young Black man and neighbor. Davis shakes Lionel’s hand, mischievously presuming he is Gloria’s husband, shocking Archie, who shouts in the midst of shrieking audience laughter, “No, no.” After a pained pause he explains, “This is only Lionel. He lives next door. My daughter’s married to the white guy over here.”
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It was the flags — the endless sea of blue-and-white Israeli flags sashaying in the wind, clasped and held proudly by thousands of Israelis protesting their government’s sweeping judicial overhaul — that first caught my eye. Watching news of the protests, one sensed that these Israeli citizens were outraged by what they viewed as blatantly anti-democratic actions by their government. Yet they proudly clasped the symbol of the nation that had elected the leaders whose actions they despised.
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Using our very human brains to outthink AI, before it outthinks us:
In the 19th century, partisan newspapers printed scandalous lies about the opposition parties. In the 20th century,
Yeah, it’s over, baby. The Iowa caucuses have been unceremoniously stripped of their first-in-the-nation clout in the Democratic Party presidential nomination sweepstakes.
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Only 34% of Americans believe that the “mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio” — report information fairly and accurately, Gallup reported last October. Pew Research reported around the same time that young adults under 30 were “now almost as likely to trust information from social media sites as they are to trust information from national news outlets.”
It’s my right. I have an absolute right to do this. You’re trampling on my rights. Those are a common cri de coeur in contemporary America.
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The pictures stunned the president.
Standing over President John F. Kennedy’s shoulder, the CIA’s chief photography interpreter showed Kennedy a series of black-and-white photos with captions like “Erector Launcher Equipment.” The evidence was unmistakable. The Soviets had installed surface-to-surface missiles in Cuba.
The Justice Department really needs to explain to the American people why the F.B.I. searched former President Donald Trump’s home, given the precedent-shattering nature of what happened. It should do so for three reasons.
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Attorney General Merrick B. Garland rose to the occasion, leveling with the American people about the reasons the Justice Department took the unprecedented step of searching a former president’s home.
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A June 18, 1972 story written by legendary Washington Post reporter Alfred E. Lewis reported that one of the five men arrested in an attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters was a former employee of the CIA.
I welcome Emma Camp’s plea for free speech, but it is important to remember that pressures to censor come from the political right as well as from the left. With Florida’s lawmakers passing a bill that forbids teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade, teachers and even young children will find they must suppress expression of any comments that offend conservative orthodoxy.
He wanted to make a difference. He really did. And he thought, as the son of a white mother and Nigerian dad, he could bring a special empathy to his work as a Black police officer in a police department long plagued by racial prejudice.
Adam Fox couldn’t catch a break. He struggled to find a direction after graduating from high school, did contract work for a vacuum repair store in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but that didn’t work out. He blamed Democratic leaders for his plight. It was March 2020, and COVID-19 was getting worse.
I collected musical comedy albums – “Oklahoma,” “My Fair Lady,” “West Side Story” — as a boy, and accumulated so many show tunes that I once wrote Miles Kreuger, who wrote the synopses describing those vinyl albums, asking him how I could do what he did when I grew up.
There has been a rush to judgment without empirical facts. It is true, as the whistle-blower Frances Haugen charged, that there was a plethora of misinformation on Facebook concerning the 2020 election. However, her testimony does not empirically show that there is a causal relationship between exposure to falsehoods on Facebook and participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
He sits ponderously, reflectively, somberly staring into the distance, his hands clutching a newspaper. Thomas Jefferson is perched high on a chair, in a gray-green statue on the steps of the old Cuyahoga County Courthouse. Does his sober expression betray a fear that the county will remove his statue, just as New York City recently announced it would do to register its revulsion at Jefferson’s enslavement of African Americans?
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Sometimes, after a period of cataclysmic national events, it is helpful to take stock.
Back in August, the nation experienced the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, the loss of 13 valorous American lives and the painful reminder that we had been vanquished in a valiant 20-year effort.
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Patriotism used to be easy. It conjured July 4, fireworks, red, white, and blue, and a beatific belief that the United States epitomized all that was good and right and noble in the pantheon of nations.
Teaching children about Tulsa is important, but the history lessons must be placed in the context of the more than 3,000 lynchings that raged across the country during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The press was complicit as it reported on mob violence against Black people, such as graphically occurred in Tulsa, in abjectly biased, inflammatory ways. As journalism historians have chronicled, the press covered lynchings in a matter-of-fact manner that elided their horror, typically presuming Black people were guilty when they were not, while portraying white lynch mobs sympathetically.
They are hypocrites and selfish. Their minds are barricaded closed to our ideas. We don’t want to hang out with them at all. This is what staunch Democrats say about Republicans and strong Republicans claim about Democrats, illustrating the persistent ways affective polarization is splitting Americans of different partisan stripes.
Fifty years ago, the liberal-bias canard was coined.
In 1971, Edith Efron wrote “The News Twisters,” a blockbuster book that argued television news displayed a strident liberal bias in the 1968 presidential election, favoring Democrat Hubert Humphrey over the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. The Nixon White House, sensing a public relations bonanza that would further its burgeoning war against the media, purchased copy after copy until the book made it to the New York Times bestseller list.
Alan Canfora wouldn’t like a teary obituary. He didn’t like mawkishness, particularly sentimental descriptions of his decades long dedication to righting the wrongs of what he called the National Guard’s “intentional massacre” of four Kent State University students on May 4, 1970.
When books are written about the coronavirus pandemic, one question will loom above the rest: Why? It’s not why or how the pandemic emerged, because an answer to this can ultimately be pieced together by fine-tuned scientific analyses. Instead, the question revolves around what it is about human nature that allowed so many of us to place ourselves in the path of existential danger when we could have done otherwise.
