NINA: Coming up next, when does a campaign ad cross the line?

Also, tonight, can you spot a real ad from a fake ad?

And Catholic bishops as political props?

The "Ivory Tower" professors are back in a moment.

This program is brought to you by the members of WCNY.

Thank you.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ NINA: Good evening, everybody.

Welcome to "Ivory Tower."

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Nina Moore of Colgate University, The professors around the table tonight: Tara Ross of Onondaga Community College.

Ben Baughman, Gannon University, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, of Syracuse University, and Grant Reeher, also of Syracuse University.

Negative campaign ads are as old as time, but have recent ads reached a new low?

Some believe a commercial for Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, crosses a line.

It suggests food prices are higher in order to set aside money for killing Palestinians.

Then there's the ad from gubernatorial candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, the one in which the mother of his opponent says that she lied about being sexually assaulted by her stepfather at 12 years old.

Grant, do these negative ads go too far?

GRANT: Well, let me just say at the beginning, pick up on the point in your introduction.

These ads are as old as time.

In the presidential election of 1800, the Federalists circulated the idea, or the claim, that Thomas Jefferson, who was running for president at the time, was dead, and therefore could not hold the office.

It got to the point where Jefferson actually had to circulate himself around and say, in sort of a Monty Python vein, "I'm not dead yet."

But we have to distinguish here, I think, between contrast and negative ads, and attack ads.

And often those get conflated.

And I think, actually, my political science colleagues conflate them, because a lot of my colleagues like negative ads, because they have found that they provide more information than the typical positive ad.

And the problem with that is that the experiments that they use to see what people take from them are these one-off kind of things in laboratory settings, and not the drumbeat you get from constant exposure and months on end with attack ads.

So yes, there is a line.

I think ultimately, we, the citizens, have to be the judges and the juries on this.

And everybody can vote the way they want.

It's entirely up to them.

That's the great thing about this country.

But when I vote, one of the things I take into account is not just the positions of the candidates, and not just what they want to do, but how they've conducted themselves during the campaign.

And the ads are part of that.

Now, a lot of these ads come from outside sources, and the candidates, at least on paper, can't control them.

But the influence and the coordination, I think, happens behind the scenes, or even sometimes out on the internet.

So, I think we are, I think we are in a situation where these things have gone over the line.

The two that you used did go over the line.

And I think that voters should hold those candidates accountable for them.

NINA: Yeah, but I wonder about the nuance, Grant, right?

Or Tara, when you are considering that increasingly, campaign ads are about personality traits, about personal lives as opposed to policy, and inevitably, to draw the contrast that you talk about is to go negative.

Tara, how do we get beyond negative if we're still talking about individual people as opposed to policies?

TARA: I don't have a good answer for that, to be perfectly honest.

But I think one of the things that we have to do and Grant refers to it is that we, as the public, have to push back, in a sense, and demand whether it's at the rallies, whether it's, you know, people writing in letters to the editor, you know, or even writing opinions online, basically saying, okay, you've given me this negative attack ad: A, tell me what you stand for, and be real clear about it.

Don't give me these sort of fluff statements that increasingly politicians give.

And, B, you tell me why.

If this is true, why are these points that you're making about your opponent important to me?

NINA: Ben, to Tara's point about discussing or getting folks to talk more about policy, much of the political science research shows that these ads only make a difference at the margins, that they only have a very slight effect, because most folks have made up their minds.

So why is it that campaigns keep running then?

BEN: Because emotions are motivational and strong emotions get people to the polls.

So, unfortunately, I think the polling is correct as far as memorable things, but what it didn't ask is, or look at, is who goes and votes.

And I think that's what, unfortunately, this keeps getting worse each voting cycle, because the people do vote, and the ones that do vote are motivated by emotions, and I think that plays a large part on going to vote.

NINA: Yeah, Ben is right, Jenny, that it is getting worse, that 10 billion have been spent this year in negative ads compared to 8 billion in 2022.

JENNY: Absolutely.

I think there's a lot of effort right now on negative and really kind of problematic advertisements.

And for me, I think it speaks to this larger question about the norms and values that our political class are exhibiting.

You can't legislate everything.

And because of that, the norms then, the decorum that our political actors abide or fail to abide and sort of push the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable.

Advertising, I think, it keeps being pushed farther and farther, more extreme, more extreme.

And from my perspective, it really speaks to kind of a broken value system we have in the United States.

GRANT: Well, I want to come back to your question about why, if they only work at the margins, we see so many of them.

Couple things.

One is the candidates and the campaigns believe they work.

I mean, this is just an article of faith.

NINA: That's why they're spending so much money.

GRANT: And the second thing is, in an environment like we're in now, where we have so many close elections, and the party control of both chambers is being held by razor thin majorities, and it's on the line, then even marginal difference is going to seem huge to a campaign and a a candidate.

But I want to pick up on Tara's point, too, about we, the citizens holding them accountable.

I've been at public forums after elections where people have said to me, I voted for this candidate, but I also did not like the ads they run.

And what I say to them is, you are the ideal person to contact that person after they win.

Write them, call them, and say, I vote, you won, I voted for you.

But I have a problem with the way that you expressed yourself.

The way that you ran.

They'll listen to that because they care about the votes.

NINA: Yeah, because short of that, and during the campaign ad, the question is, how is the opposing candidate or the candidate that's being targeted to respond?

Michelle Obama, she famously said, When they go low, we go high, but does that work, Ben?

Do you have to fight fire with fire?

BEN: I don't think you have to.

I loved that saying, and I loved that that was a time period where we really tried to do that.

I don't see that that's the case for anybody.

And it's because of more than half Americans are getting their news now through social media.

Social media is influenced significantly by the incentives of people clicking on it and watching it.

And that's what pushes the algorithm, so I think it's more rapid.

It's in your face, and even if it's false when you hear it the first time, you keep hearing and hearing and hearing it, and cognitive fatigue takes place, and you believe it.

JENNY: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point.

The information environment is so fragmented.

We no longer have a set of gatekeepers that are holding politicians accountable, and in that fragmented information environment, these really extreme ads break through.

And sometimes that's enough for a campaign.

NINA: You know, Tara also, what the research shows is that this is more commonly used by Republicans, that is negative ads, than Democrats.

What are your thoughts about that?

TARA: Well, I'm going to answer that by going back to the statement you provided that Michelle Obama made.

I think as a nation, sort of, in our general spirit, we loved that idea.

But if you think about what happened in the election, after that, did it really work?

And once the public once, certainly, once politicians, see that that didn't really work, then that's not what they're going to do.

So there's this sort of high-minded, Yes, that's what happens in America.

NINA: Right.

TARA: Then there's the reality of that didn't seem to help very Much so we have to go negative too.

And so I think, I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought.

NINA: Yeah, well, I'll just jump in here and say that, you know, going back to the Obamas, it's interesting that now President Obama himself is joining in with his Cheesecake Factory joke.

You wanted to say something Grant.

GRANT: Well, so Barack Obama has to be careful because people will notice that they have a second home on Martha's Vineyard.

>> Yeah, but it's not likely decorated in gold.

GRANT: Well, you're kind of making my point.

But, but that was a lighthearted sort of dig, you know, I don't, I don't see that in the same way as an attack ad.

NINA: The president certainly thought.

grant: But unfortunately, the Democrats did not follow Michelle Obama's advice.

I don't remember, and I'm not even sure that Republicans doubled down on attack ads more than the Democrats do.

I think they may engage more in the fake ads, but we'll get into that in a minute.

I will just say that here in central New York, the best example of an attack ad that backfired was one that was done by a Democrat, not by an outside entity, the Democrat's campaign himself.

It was Dan Maffei in 2014.

Ran some really nasty ads against John Katko.

They backfired Katko won by 0 point0 .

NINA: Yeah, that's the question of whether or not they eventually backfire.

Well, now we move from negative ads to fake ads.

Are you confident that you can tell the difference between a real campaign ad and one that's generated by artificial intelligence?

According to Axios, an explosion of AI deepfakes is redefining American elections, throw in the growing number of partisan websites that pretend to be nonpartisan, and it's worth asking.

Is the average American voter able to sort fact from fiction in this election cycle?

Jenny, are they?

JENNY: This topic, it's painful, because I am very worried about the information environment that the public currently lives in, A good democracy, a healthy Democracy, is one when the public can differentiate fact from fiction, can sort out good policy from bad policy, but that requires a high quality information environment, and we increasingly do not have that.

So I did a little experiment with my undergraduates, because I teach a course on AI, and I showed them a bunch of deep fakes, some of which were not, and some of which were.

And it was about a 50/50 split for each image that I showed them.

There's additional research that confirms that the public increasingly cannot differentiate, false information, deepfaked information, with artificial intelligence from true information.

Some of it's because the AI technology in particular has gotten so good that things like, you know, the weird fingers, right, are no longer generated by AI.

So it's hard to tell that there is actually manipulated content.

The other concern I have is because going back to Ben's point, people are snacking in a variety of different media for their information, and that snacking means that they're not paying close attention to the information that's there.

If they're already, what are called, kind of, low information voters, not paying a lot of attention, and they're kind of skimming the information that they're seeing on their social media feeds, they're more susceptible to false, misleading claims.

NINA: Tara, where are you?

TARA: It's both a matter of people not being able to see and differentiate, but it's also a matter of time.

And part of the reason people are doing that snacking is because they don't have the time to really investigate whether or not an ad that they see or something that they've heard is really true or not.

And so I think it's a twofold problem.

The other thing that I think is now a problem is that I did not realize that there was something called website spoofing, where you have these basically websites that are designed to look like major news sources.

And so if you don't have the time or if there isn't something that you can catch, you assume, oh, gee, this is from CNN.

This is from ABC.

These are new sources I trust.

And so it must be accurate.

NINAGRANT: So, Grant, one of the concerns is that this allows foreign countries to have a better shot at interfering in our elections.

What do you think about that worry?

GRANT: First of all, I want to give an early a TO jENNY because the research that she's been doing on this, I mean, you've been digging into this and really trying to suss it out, and it's important work.

And I'll defer to her on what I'm about to say here, but my impression of the research so far, and this is, I guess, the good news, is that the ultimate effects of this disinformation is what you're talking about.

So far, have not been very significant.

I think the consensus is that they did not shape the results Of any elections so far.

And I've got a couple colleagues in my department that have been looking at that.

The other thing I would just point out, going back to our first topic, is the worst ads so far are real.

The two that you mentioned at the beginning in Michigan and Ohio, those aren't fakes.

Those are real ads.

And so that may be where the real problem is.

The other thing is, not to diminish the concern, but some of these deepfake things are clearly meant to be not taken seriously, and they're trying to sort of persuade by being funny.

That doesn't take away our concern about the ones that people are, as you said, Jenny.

really can't distinguish between them.

NINA: So, Jenny, I want to get a little nerdy here, and follow up on what Grant said, because when he mentioned that the research he's aware of has not shown, it has an impact.

My first thought was, what's the methodology for that research?

Like, how would you even be able to tell that except through simulations perhaps?

JENNY: It's experiments, right?

And going back to Grant's point, this is one of the challenges, actually, for the research.

If you really want to measure effects, ideally, you would expose people over a series of weeks and months, a variety of different ads, this complex information environment, but that, of course, is really, really hard to do.

So you do these one-shot experiments, you show them a single ad, you see if it changes our attitudes, and you declare that it has an effect.

So it's a real challenge, the effects question.

Going back to a prior conversation, though, you know, it is at the margins.

And if, in these really close races, a manipulated advertisement can shift people's votes, even by a few percentage points, that makes the difference in an election.

NINA: So setting aside whether or not there is an impact, then is the simple question or the fact that we're talking about lying, right?

That, in and of itself, has a corrosive impact on just our political environment, our political discourse, and part of the reason we have the First Amendment is to protect discourse.

And this is about lying.

So, here we are.

BEN: Yeah, well, so we've evolved over many years to believe people.

That's our default.

That's what research shows us.

We're not great at detecting deception per se, we're better at detecting genuine statements.

But the problem with this is the beginning, which is the psychological inoculation stage.

If you can get the facts from the beginning, that's better than if you go into it blind, Whatever you hear first, that it takes so much more information to challenge that if you're not actively challenging.

So there's cognitive biases that we fight with, that's human nature, can be our enemies.

So we've got to act.

Well, we've got to first of all, look at facts to start with when we can.

If you're emotionally triggered, if you are upset about a story, that should be when you're challenging your mindset with other sources.

NINA: Yeah, we're out of time, but I do want to throw in this other thought is the fact that we do not have a federal law that requires the disclosure of AI material.

And so, perhaps until we all get there intellectually, that could be one fix to this.

But now we're going to move to a different front.

Catholic bishops are apologizing.

Video and pictures of them praying with the president, in the Oval Office have been released to the public and appear to be an endorsement of the president by the bishops.

The bishops say they initially met with the president to talk about religious freedom, abortion, and school choice, but ended up being used as political props -- their words.

If they saw the cameras clicking, Tara, shouldn't they have expected pictures?

TARA: They should have expected pictures, and considering we were talking about 12 bishops, we're not talking about new priests.

They should have enough, sort of, PR public relations savvy, that they should have, at the very least, someone should have stopped and said, just so you know, we didn't sign any releases, so you can't use those anywhere.

Someone should have said this.

But I think the bigger issue for, in this case, is what they hope to get out of this meeting, and none of them have admitted this, but I think they don't want to admit that what they hope to get out of this meeting had an influence on their response to the pictures, and what later on became the videos.

And so, I think there was that human hesitancy to simply say, just so we're clear, we didn't agree to anything.

NINA: Ben?

BEN: well, I'm not sure.

I mean, I'm not sure what the question is, because, look, they are witnessing, they are praying for people, every person, every soul.

They were there meeting with the president like we do with every president.

They prayed for the country.

They prayed for the office of the president.

They did not pray specifically for Trump when pictures were being taken.

They didn't pose for the pictures.

They were doing their calling.

They were there on behalf of Jesus Christ.

NINA: Jenny.

JENNY: So, what strikes me is the position of the White House to release the video and the photographs.

The Trump presidency has ridden to power in part on evangelical and Catholic votes.

And right now, actually, his support has eroded both with evangelical and Catholic voters.

And so, from a PR perspective, it makes perfect sense to me that the Trump White House would release this very, you know, noteworthy video showing them praying around him.

And so, yeah, from a PR perspective, I see why the administration did it.

NINA: Grant.

GRANT: Well, let me just say first that I am shocked, shocked, that a political figure would try to use a religious figure for political gain.

NINA: As we all are.

[ Laughter ] GRANT: I mean, literally, literally.

This ship literally sailed hundreds of years ago, was called the Arbella, by the way.

And so since then, we've had Father Coughlin, we've had Billy Graham, we've had Martin Luther King.

I mean, the bishops accepted an invitation from the Heritage Foundation for this.

Let's just let that sink in for a minute, two weeks before, from the Heritage Foundation.

So what were they expecting?

And the other thing I would say, perhaps more provocatively, is, I don't think you can understand their reaction to this, and the language that they are using.

Let me just read you from one of the bishops here" He said, "I also heard from some who felt wounded."

Wounded -- note that word.

"Some who felt wounded because of the ways they, or their family, had been harmed by the president's policies."

I don't think you can understand this without recalling, first of all, the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal and Donald Trump's association with Jeffrey Epstein.

I think that's in the background here.

NINA: From a historical standpoint, one of the distinctions between this and Dr.

King and Johnson is that Johnson didn't co-opt Dr.

King.

The same for Reagan and Graham.

Is the co-optation here the problem, as opposed to simply praying.

TARA: That is part of the problem, is that this -- It was not made clear that this was going to be used in any manner other than maybe, okay, here's a picture of you with the President, so to speak.

And so that's where the co-optation comes in.

And then for the White House to sort of make light of the concerns of the bishops, is the additional co-optation.

NINA: Yeah, insult added to their sense of injury.

Well, now it's time for our grade books, and we're going to start with F's.

Tara, why don't you kick us off?

TARA: I'm giving an F to the increasing number of local and state law enforcement officers who have joined in ICE enforcement under the 287(g) program.

Under the guise of simple traffic stops, the combined local and federal actions have quietly and steadily resulted in an increasing number of ICE arrests.

NINA: And now we're going to turn to Ben.

BEN: An A -- or sorry, an F, to California's levee maintenance.

The state auditor found that flood defenses may not be ready for any floods.

That's not a warning, it's a forecast.

So 14 of 48 critical repair locations remained unrepaired in August of 2026, and they've been like that, well, a lot of them since 2023.

So this is a systematic F for the government.

NINA: Jenny, JENNY: MY F goes to President Trump and the Senate for leaving the federal election commission without a quorum since May of 2025.

JENNY: With only two of six commissioners seated, the agency can't investigate, fine anyone, or write new rules.

And its backlog of unresolved cases has doubled to more than 300.

Federal campaign finance laws are still on the books, as weak as they are now, but with just a few days remaining, ultimately, the voters lose.

NINA: Grant.

GRANT: My F goes to the newspapers, including the Post-Standard, that lack transparency regarding their political endorsements.

The fact that they do the endorsements is fine, and it can be helpful, but much more helpful would be an account of how those decisions are made.

Does the publisher have the final say?

Is there a vote?

And if so, what was it?

Many newspapers do provide that kind of information, and more, and all of them should.

NINA: And now we're going to leave you with some good news, and we'll start again with Tara.

TARA: My A goes to the U.S.

National Park Service and the Arizona Congressional Delegation for finally having the area around Chiricahua National Monument designated as the latest National Park.

Chiricahua National Park is in the southwestern section of the Arizona, and it's been designated as a national park because it protects towering rhyolite rock spires, and balanced rock formations.

NINA: Ben.

BEN: A is going to a Pittsburgh NICU, or NICU, nurse, who made Halloween costumes for all 80 babies in her unit.

Riley Samowski, a nurse at the UPMC hospital there, she spent months crafting these outfits for those babies.

NINA: Jenny.

JENNY: So I'm delighted Governor Hochul signed a law barring AI chatbots from pretending to be humans with kids.

Chatbots can no longer claim to have feelings, claim a romantic relationship, or flatter young users to keep them hooked.

Companies must now verify the ages and the AG can fine them up to $25,000 a violation.

It passed the Assembly unanimously.

So New York gets an A, but now it has to be actually enforced.

NINA: Grant.

GRANT: Well, first, Patrick Patrick Stewart.

Rest in peace, my Captain.

My bipartisan A goes to Blake Carter -- hes a former student of mine -- and Ken Bush, Jr.

the two candidates for the 13th District in the Onondaga County.

Legislature.

In part, for personal reasons, they agreed not to personally attack each other and have demonstrated open principled disagreements.

Good on both of them.

NINA: Very good.

That's a wrap for us here in the studio.

We want to know what you think.

please write to the address on your screen.

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I'm Nina Moore for all of us here at Ivory Tower.

Have a great night, and don't forget to vote.

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