Blog 10!

Donald Trump running for President was already a heated argument when he declared. I think the thing that really set people into hating Donald was his proposed plan to “build a wall between The USA and Mexico” to keep illegal aliens from coming into our country. This topic seemed to light the media on fire and everyone was talking about it all at once.

           

            For my “Conservative” website I chose to analyze the story about the wall that Fox News did. They decided to put out a story that was more informative than interesting to me to be honest. They said specified details such as having 50 foot automated gates for vehicles and pedestrians. The fact that the wall would reach 30 feet high, cover 1,000 miles and cost close to $15 billion dollars to make this monolith of a wall our President is calling for. It is almost like Fox purposefully did not take a stance on this topic. They know if they said anything about this idea it would undermine the President and that is not what Fox wants. Fox wants to paint the best possible picture of Donald Trump they can because he is their candidate. My favorite part of this story was that they were not afraid to quote Donald on his very carefully chosen words “Big, beautiful wall”.

 

            On the other hand, I chose the BBC for my “Liberal” news site, their coverage of the wall is much different than Fox. They went into detail about who would be paying for the wall, the effect is would have to the nature. The increase of taxes and tariffs that would need to happen for Mexico to pay and how incredibly massive this project would be to complete. This story gives the reader a very strong feeling of opposition to Trump. Other than blaming humans for single handedly killing animals and ecosystems everywhere, they talk about “not standing with” Trumps pledge for his beautiful wall.

 

            The “Biased” story I chose was done on Eagle Rising and it was titles “Donald Trump is right- We need to build a wall”. If that isn’t biased I’m not entirely sure if we have the same definition of the word. The article does a good job of dialing it back in the end though. It calls Donald a “Showman” admits to many of his faults and even says that he’s gaining popularity despite him being a jerk. This article is different because frankly states that supporting Trump is continuously becoming more popular and it even tells you to vote who you want, and that God is our only hope in the end. It seems like this article was extremely religious and very patriotic while simultaneously explaining to readers than it understands that Donald Trump may not be the best choice for office; but he’s what we have.

 

            The media is the reason for all of these new stories being generated. Not just social media either, all types of media which is a very broad spectrum of communication. We live in a hyper analyzed and over reported world where things that would genuinely matter to people are swept under the rug while we see things that are inherently meaningless. Depending on where you look to for your news you can get a completely different story about the same situation. I would pitch stories about how I can make a difference without spending billions of dollars and reform the system as opposed to the people in the system.

Agenda Setting

Issues:
When I used the way back machine to go back and look at Donald Trump's website looking for issues he wanted to focus on, it was easy to find. There was a massive page dedicated to just what I saw looking for. It was so large actually I needed to take two screen shots of it to fit on this blog. 

Many of you may be surprised to see that Immigration Reform is on the bottom of the list. Among other obvious ones like Healthcare Reform, International Trade, Taxes and taking care of our Veteran's. When I was asked to compare Trump's stance on issues to someone in his party running against him I chose Rand Paul. He is just about as opposite to Donald Trump as you can get other than Jeb Bush, but Bush has too much shadow political motives for my liking due to his last name.

The list of issues that Rand decided to focus was Debt, NSA, taxes and getting all the power out of the hands of The Federal Reserve. I honestly really like Rand's policies and stances more than Donald's. Rand is focusing on the issues that the population of the USA wants to see change as opposed to Trump who is more in line with the changes that Washington wants to see change. Rand is the son of Ron Paul who is notorious for his very opinionated personality and although he is some what radical, his son Rand is much more level headed.

When I did a google News search for Immigration reform and health care reform I saw all "right wing" articles for healthcare and I saw all "left wing" articles for immigration. People seem to be angry that we do not have a replacement for Obama Care yet. They aren't mad that Obama Care was reformed, they're mainly mad that the man who is the reason for it disappearing doesn't have a successful alternative yet.

I personally think the media is setting the agenda. The media seems to be rather "outraged" by Trump getting elected and this is why I think they want to control what people see. When people turn on their TV's and log onto the computer, they are vulnerable to persuasion which us why I believe they are trying to get a little power back.

Pop Culture Trump (Frozen Parody)

When I saw this week we had to use a piece of Satire involving our candidate I did not want to use the typical SNL skits that they've been running recently. It did not take me long to find this amazing parody video on YouTube done by a channel called Derick Watts & The Sunday Blues. Although this channel only has 190,000 subscribers on YouTube, this video has 20 million views... 20 MILLION!

 My artifact was a parody of the song from the Disney movie Frozen, instead of "To build a Snowman" they made a song called "Do You Wanna Build A Wall"? Not only did they change the words of the song but they effectively took clips from every one of Donald's press conferences and speeches and sliced it into an amazing song about our President building the wall between the USA and Mexico. This artifact shows the audience how ridiculous the idea of building this wall would be in reality and how much it would actually cost us. Mexico is a key factor in the song, you get a cameo from the last President of Mexico saying "We will not pay for that f*%!ing wall" and they are included in multiple of the lines in the song.

The creators of this video did a great job of really emphasizing some of the stupid faces Donald has made throughout the past year or two of him running. They do a great job of using his insane amount of "hand movement" in his speaking and integrate it very flawlessly into the song. I think this does the exact opposite of what Donald has been trying to paint his image as since the beginning of his run. He says he wants to "reunite" the people yet he does things to directly split us apart day by day.

(I made this GIF which is a part of the video where Donald says "Crime Rave" instead of Crime wave) if you watch the original video you will get to see a hilarious compilation of our President dancing and doing other stupid things.

Advertising Strategy

The First ad I decided to use was not necessarily released by the Trump campaign but it is without a doubt some of the best clips I have seen of Hillary Clinton; She is going against what she said in her platform and throughout her run for President and it is involving outsourcing jobs. This is a perfect example of both an issue ad and an attack ad at the same time. The country is in a very difficult time right now where good jobs are hard to come by if any at all. In the video, it is 2005 and Hillary is talking about she couldn't ever imagine "effectively restricting" outsourcing and calls it "inevitable".  She not only received money from India but she also got a $5,000,000 from one of the businessmen in the room that day. Although this video is over 10 years old I personally do not believe people change so I would not be surprised if we did not see a change in the employment rate had she been elected.

This next ad is another perfect example of an attack ad directed towards Hillary's past in politics but it is also an uplifitng candidate-positive message about Donald Trump. The ad blames Hillary's 30 years in politics directly for taxes being raised, terrorism increasing and jobs vanishing from our citizens. Although some of this may be true; Hillary Clinton would only have helped the situation moving foward towards what the ad says. She is not solely responsible for any of those things happening like the video implies. The second half of the ad talks about "Real change" from Trump and how a vote for Hillary is a vote for more of the same we've had in the past. On the other hand a vote for Trump is a vote to "Make America Great Again" and to turn Washington upside-down.

The Pro trump, image ad that the Trump organization released was the most effective in my opinion, only because attack ads seem to be losing their effectiveness to me. I think the Trump campaign went for a different approach with this ad because they had Donald himself narrating the whole time. They show photos of Trump supporters when he is speaking highly of himself; and show politicians such as Obama, Hillary and others in the summit in Paris saying that "They don't have your best interest in mind". He highlights trade being an issue like NAFTA and TPP while showing the people who were in office at the time of these agreeements being signed and who are to blame for our economic issues we face today. Donald does a good job of showing the faces of many American citizens and emphasizes our power as the American people so we can make the changes we need to see.

Online Presence

Donald Trump is all over the place. On top of becoming the new President of the United States, he won this election in one of the most polarizing ways we have ever experienced. Donald Trump went from being a real estate tycoon in New York and TV star in LA to becoming the face of our nation. He won the election. He might have lost the popular vote, but he won the election. To get 304 votes from the Electoral College you have to be well-known. You not only have to be well known, you need lots and lots of money and you need to make yourself a household name. Donald has a fully operational website, he also is on every single social media platform I can find on the internet other than a Tumblr and that place is OVER RUN with Trump content. He uses all the big ones we all instantly think of, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. 

He’s is probably the most viral on Facebook and Twitter, you can see one of his more talked about tweets above. He has countless ads on YouTube with some varying from 100,000 views to some Ads by his campaign with over 1+ million views. Strangely enough, his page on YouTube “The Trump Organization” only has about 85,000 subscribers. I think Donald did a good job at making his online presence what it needed to be for him to win the election. I do not think Trump’s current online presence is very good for the country as a whole or for morale but it sure as hell got him into the White House. I think he should have made his whole platform and online rhetoric much more sensitive to people of other nationalities, races and creeds. The posts Trump would make on Twitter that would target any person or company were the most viewed or controversial. I will post a few of the more popular ones here on this blog. 

He has historically low approval ratings right now and I am not shocked in the slightest because the way he conducted his social media campaign. He was THE protest vote. People who usually voted third-party either were loyal to Clinton from the get go; or got their views swayed away to voting for Trump because he “wasn’t a politician” as all of America would like to use as an excuse. His Twitter does have 26.4 million followers which is impressive, yet his predecessor Barack Obama has 85.7 million. Instagram is probably Donald’s weakest form of social media sitting at a whopping 6.2 million followers, yet it seems Mr.Trump likes to instagram photos of his old tweets! Somewhat odd in my opinion but hey, with Donald Trump’s presidency being so new and Obama’s approval rating being so low at points, I don’t think real Trump supporters need to worry much. Although the majority of the country doesn’t want Donald in office, the way he conducted himself through out his campaign was enough or people to accept him for who he is. The man either knows how to use internet magic and won’t admit it to us, or he has enough money to buy internet magic. Regardless, I doubt we’ll know anytime soon. I know I didn't talk about snapchat or his use of it but I couldn't get myself to bring it up without going off on a tangent about the NSA so pardon me for omitting it.

 http://fortune.com/2016/03/21/donald-trump-controversial-tweets/

https://www.youtube.com/user/trump

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

https://twitter.com/BarackObama

Polling

This election was unbelievable. We had two candidate’s that seemed like choosing between a rock and a hard place. Obviously we are all entitled to our opinions in this country and we have the freedom to share them as such. When I had to do some research about the polls this election, I immediately went to Pew Research, the BBC and used FiveThirtyEight.


PEW

Pew reported some very interesting points about polling that I would have never even thought to have notice if it wasn’t for this article. The first was the massive amount of variety for people to use polling. Older ways such as telephone calls are now being paired with other modes of response. With everyone using social media and smart phones, it seems like the problem isn’t the availability of people sharing their opinion on a poll, it’s the way they’re asking for the response. On the other side, lots of people chalk up the Clinton winning the popular vote but still losing to a polling error that lead her camp astray. State polls are  much more inaccurate than national polls, historically at least. When Clinton’s campaign were reporting 70%-99% that she had the victory in the bag, they had to have made more than a few mistakes when gathering data.

FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Overestimating or underestimating how a candidate will perform on polls make a huge difference. All polls have a winning side unless it is a dead even tie which is unlikely a lot of the time. When pollster’s say that their candidate will perform one way, and are incorrect there are countless other polls that have different estimations that cancel each other out. A big thing pollster’s missed was the amount of support Donald Trump had behind him and how fed up with politician’s the population is.

BBC Poll on Election --------------->
 (Clearly showing Hillary winning)






What I would change?

If I were conducting a poll about how an election would turn out things would be a little different. I would try to minimize push polling and ask questions about important hot topic’s and then after they responded I would lay out both sides of that topic and each sides views on it. Polls are important because they give you a glimpse of what voters minds are made up about. If candidate A said something on television about candidate B, or if candidate A takes a particularly strong stance on a topic lots of voters will not wait until the end. Early voting was a big thing this year along with absentee voting.

 Analyzing Polls

 I think polls limitation’s are exactly what we saw happen in this election. You can have a strong “trend” and think you have the election won (See .Gif below). Does this mean our votes don’t matter? Obviously not, everyone who can vote can make a difference. Polls are polls for a reason, they’re estimations and should not be taken as the truth. That may be the biggest problem for people. Everyone wants to think that if the poll says it, it must be true.  But are the powers that be that put Trump in office really the late “shy trump” voters, or was there more at play here. We will never know, all we can know is we have a former television star as our President and things are pretty much ass backwards right now.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/

http://www.people-press.org/2016/11/21/low-marks-for-major-players-in-2016-election-including-the-winner/

http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37450661

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-election-polls-missed-their-mark/

Debate

      The debate I chose to analyze for this blog was the second Presidential debate between Trump and Clinton on October 9th, 2016. I chose to pick the 27:35-35:00 minute section during this debate because this time in the video is when you get to truly see Donald's debate style. Donald does a great job of telling us that Obamacare is terrible "We know it, he knows it" and says that he will be repealing and replacing it with something much less expensive. Some things Donald did poorly was explaining the plan that he plans to replace Obamacare with; another thing was failing to actually answer the question of how he plans on "De-funding Obamacare while making coverage available to all". Those two things are such are so contradictory that it almost makes my head spin hearing that sentence. Another thing Donald did that hurt him in my opinion was talk so nonchalantly about how "bad Islamic people are at reporting when they see something going on". Talking about a whole culture being on watch for their own culture to be committing crimes makes people feel like they are criminals themselves for sharing that religion. People hold religion up to the highest standards and I feel like Trump made himself look very close minded and weak by bashing a group of peoples religion so blatantly.

      If I had any say in this debate I would tell Donald to maybe have a plan when talking about a healthcare plan you want to implement... not just say that it exists while not saying it's name or saying a single detail about the healthcare plan. I would also tell Donald to pick his battles carefully so he doesn't seem like such a panderer or flip flopper. Another thing that couldn't hurt Donald to talk about would maybe be his Education plan and how he plans to keep educating our youth while not bankrupting the country. Maybe also talk about his plan on what to do with international relations without talking to China or Russia. I'm not sure if it is possible for Donald to leave China out of anything so I doubt they'll be left behind. This debate I will admit was one of the more childish debates we watched in this election cycle. It was chalk full of the candidates cutting each other off, going over time, dodging questions and making subtle comments about the other candidate. In honor of this debate being so childish I am going to post photos of my favorite new internet meme, Tiny Trump.