statistic: [mediacare] Obama: I'm Not a Muslim! Forward This to Everyone You Know

Jumat, 25 Januari 2008

[mediacare] Obama: I'm Not a Muslim! Forward This to Everyone You Know

***Bye bye to Obama.

***Memangnya Muslim tidak boleh dicalonkan di AS yang selalu bangga
dengan pemisahan agama dari politik ?

***"The principle is that a very strong denial makes some people
think: 'Uh huh, we knew it. If he's taken the trouble to make such a
strong denial, there must be some truth to it,'" says Bill Ellis, a
professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies contemporary
folklore and popular cultural responses to societal events like the
9/11 attacks.

Obama: I'm Not a Muslim! Forward This to Everyone You Know

By Sarah Lai Stirland 01.24.08 | 12:00 AM

The campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-
Illinois) is asking supporters to help debunk myths being propagated
about him. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama launched
an online viral counteroffensive Tuesday against persistent e-mail
chain letters that lie about his religious and political background.
But history suggests that the effort might backfire, according to
experts in urban myths and folklore.

"The principle is that a very strong denial makes some people
think: 'Uh huh, we knew it. If he's taken the trouble to make such a
strong denial, there must be some truth to it,'" says Bill Ellis, a
professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies contemporary
folklore and popular cultural responses to societal events like the
9/11 attacks.

There are various versions of the e-mails, but they generally
insinuate that Obama is secretly a Muslim who attended a radical
Islamic school in Indonesia. One of the e-mails charges that he's a
radical Muslim who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Another e-mail claims that he was sworn into the Senate using a copy
of the Quran. All of the allegations are false.

According to a list on the urban-legends tracking-and-debunking page
Snopes.com, the falsehoods about Obama are the "hottest" urban
legends on the internet right now.

Obama's campaign launched a sophisticated counterattack late Tuesday
with a webpage called a "Fact Check Action Center," with three
paragraphs and a YouTube video testimonial about Obama's background.

The page allows supporters to enter 10 e-mail addresses at a time --
or import their Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOLMail contact lists --
into a web form on the site, and with a single click send out
talking points that counter the lies in the anti-Obama e-mails.

The page says the campaign won't "hold on to any of the e-mail
addresses you share."

The Obama campaign announced the debunking effort with an e-mail
barrage from John Kerry of Massachusetts, in which the former
presidential candidate urges supporters to "e-mail the truth" to
everyone on their address books, to print out the facts about
Obama's background and post them at work, and to call local radio
stations and talk to neighbors.

"If lies can be spread virally, let's prove to the cynics that the
truth can be every bit as persuasive as it is powerful," Kerry wrote
in the note.

Kerry's note was titled "Swiftboating" -- a reference to Kerry's own
presidential campaign in 2004, which was famously sunk by falsities
spread by the lobbying group Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth. Many
politicos believe that Kerry's decision not to "dignify" the rumors
and fight them aggressively contributed to his campaign's defeat in
the general election.

But Gary Alan Fine, a professor of social psychology at Northwestern
University, who's studied the subject of politics and reputation,
suggests that Obama's blanket approach may not be the wisest.

"It underlines the attack," Fine says. "Sometimes defenses against
rumors work; sometimes they backfire."

Penn State's Ellis cites an incident from the 1980s that illustrates
the problem. The French government was forced to officially denounce
a pervasive rumor that lick-and-stick tattoos contained LSD, and
that the government wasn't doing anything to protect children
against these dangerous products.

When researchers conducted a survey of people and their views of the
credibility of the government's claim, they found that those who had
already heard the rumors found the government's denial plausible.
But those who first heard about the tattoo-LSD rumor through the
government denial itself were more suspicious. They thought the
strong denials masked an underlying truth.

Fine's advice is for Obama's supporters to be more strategic, and
try to feel out friends, colleagues and relatives before sending
them the debunking chain letter.

"What you want to do, when you deny the rumor, you only want to deny
it to the people who originally heard it," Fine says.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2008/01/obama_mail