Summary Of The Tipping Point By Malcolm Gladwell

Sometimes, the methods of propaganda people use are obvious, in other cases, the propaganda can be discreet and propagated through subconscious cues. In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell writes about an experiment that was conducted on the 1984 presidential race between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale to see what makes someone persuasive. The results of this experiment can be analyzed in the context of the spread of propaganda (Gladwell 75). As explained by Gladwell, the experiment was conducted over the eight days before the election in which a group of psychologists videotaped three national evening news broadcasts. The news programs were anchored by Peter Jennings at ABC, Tom Brokaw at NBC

and Dan Rather at CBS. The videotapes were trimmed to be 37 separate clips, each about two seconds long, and the audio from the videos was muted. The videos were then shown to a group of randomly chosen people. The people were asked to rate the "emotional content of the expressions" of the three newscasters on a 21 point scale with 0 being ‘extremely negative’ and 21 being ‘extremely positive’ as the newscasters spoke about both presidential candidates (Gladwell 75).
From the results, it was seen that Dan Rather scored a 10.46, which translates to a neutral expression when talking about Mondale and a 10.37 when talking about Reagan.

Tom Brokaw scored an 11.21 for Mondale and an 11.50 for Reagan. Peter Jennings, on the other hand, scored a 13.38 for Mondale and a 17.44 for Reagan. To account for different variables such as a newscaster simply being more expressive than the other newscasters a control experiment was conducted. The control experiment showed segments of the newscasters speaking of general topics, some being happy while others being sad topics. It was interesting to observe that "...Jennings didn't score any higher on the happy subjects or lower on the sad subjects than his counterparts (Gladwell 75)." According to Gladwell, "... he seemed to be the least expressive of the three(Gladwell 75)." Therefore, according to the study, "...Jennings exhibited a 'significant and noticeable bias in facial expression' toward Reagan(Gladwell 75)." In terms of what happened in the election, it was seen that a majority of those who watched ABC voted for Reagan in greater numbers than those who watched CBS or NBC. It can be said that although newscasters are supposed to provide reliable news information that is not in favor of one political party versus another, this is often time, not the case. Viewers should be aware, that small things such as newscasters smiling or having positive facial expressions when talking about a particular

president can go a long way in determining who the general public will be in favor for in a presidential race.
Another subconscious cue that can contribute to propaganda is the amount of air time a presidential candidate or even just a certain subject receives.

There are several articles suggesting that there is no correlation between the amount of airtime and the number of votes a presidential candidate obtains but simple marketing techniques such as those from The Financial Brand tell us that repetition is a very important technique to use if one is trying to sell an item and that it is effective. The Financial Brand tells us that, “ In simple terms: frequency breeds familiarity, and familiarity breed trust.” because of this, it can be said that the amount of air time a certain topic or presidential candidate gets, can definitely influence an

audience.
From these examples, we can see that broadcasted news definitely generate propaganda whether the propaganda is created intentionally or unintentionally is arbitrary because it is still generated and therefore it still influences public opinions. Another example of how news media generate propaganda is their ability to pick and choose what crimes get broadcasted. As most HAM radio owners know, there exists a radio station that allows the public to listen in on arrests happening in real time. However, the arrests that get announced on televised news are usually very specific and can be due to very specific propaganda motives. From a website called debate.org, a debate asking "Should suspects' names not be revealed to the public until found guilty?" , 67% of the public say yes, suspects' names should not be revealed to the public until found guilty because it makes it impossible to achieve partial jury. On the other hand, 33% say no, suspects names should be revealed to the public because they are still suspects of a crime. Although this debate exists, newscasters still reveal all the information relevant to a domestic crime but which crimes are chosen and for what reason are up to the news broadcasting stations themselves and this generates propaganda if the “news” that are being reported are continuously the same.