Our weekly program, Missouri State Journal, is a collaboration between KSMU Radio and Missouri State University. It's hosted and produced by MSU's Office of Strategic Communication, and it airs each Tuesday morning at 9:45 on KSMU.
There is a long-standing relationship between pop culture and politics. Historically, that relationship has changed overtime. What were once relatively separate spheres, today, have much overlap, and experts don’t regard them as distinct entities.
Dr. Brian Ott is the author of “The Twitter Presidency” and a distinguished professor in the Communication, Media, Journalism and Film Department at Missouri State University. He says the information landscape today is dramatically different than it was even 10 years ago.
“Policy is almost absent from campaigning altogether, and everything today is based on public sentiment,” he said. “It’s based on how people feel about candidates. That’s the cultural coin of the Internet. But a meme is not an argument. It’s an idea with emotion behind it. Going forward I think it’s absolutely the case that we’re going to see even a further continued erosion. Part of the reason I think that there’s so much misinformation and disinformation is because the high quality, hard news is swimming in the same stream as the cat videos.”
Using pop culture to leverage a campaign is nothing new, and Ott notes it’s not partisan, but it used to be something candidates had to seek out.
