The Politics Of Distraction

Most of America, and a lot of the world, has been singularly focused on the U.S. presidential election. With so much media attention on this one event, could foreign actors be taking advantage of this moment to do unpopular things?

In a new paper, economist Ruben Durante from the University of Pompeu Fabra argues that politicians strategically time controversial actions with major news events, when the United States is most distracted.

The show is hosted by three professors at the Harris School of Public Policy: William Howell, Anthony Fowler and Wioletta Dziuda.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Transcript

William Howell:

I am Will Howell.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm Wioletta Dziuda.

Anthony Fowler:

I am Anthony Fowler, and this is Not Another Politics Podcast.

William Howell:

We've just been glued to the television watching election returns continue to pour in, obsessing over what the final electoral count is going to be. Is Trump going to concede or not? Just completely saturated with wall-to-wall election coverage. But the rest of the world goes on. Other things happen. I wonder, it isn't just... have we been missing things, important news stories abroad? But is there any reason to believe that in our distraction, other people have taken advantage of this in order to do things that might otherwise elicit a rebuke from the United States, and taken advantage of our distraction to misbehave?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes, I tried to distract myself from the very disturbing news coming from the US media, and I turned on BBC World News. I was shocked to realize that other things are happening. It's not that the only event in the world is the US election. Just to give you a few examples, during the presidential election in the US, Israeli forces razed homes in Palestinian community, Ethiopia started military operations in certain regions which are very surprising and are really stoking fears of a start of a civil war. And Putin, of course, also acted the way we would expect him to act, and he granted immunity to former presidents. So yeah, lots of things happened. And you have to wonder whether they would have happened if we weren't so distracted.

William Howell:

And so the question, I think, before us is whether or not that kind of distraction alters the behavior of other political actors around the globe. And Anthony, you talked to somebody who's written a paper precisely on this topic.

Anthony Fowler:

I did. I talked to Ruben Durante. He and his co-author, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, maybe I'm doing a bad job pronouncing that, but the two of them wrote a really interesting paper about precisely this phenomenon. They're studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and their main finding is that Israeli forces are more likely to initiate some attack that's likely to end up killing people at a time when the world is otherwise distracted. We can all think about this recent election in light of that paper and maybe make sense of some of these events that Wioletta was just talking about.

So, your research seems especially timely right now. We've just gone through a major news cycle here in the US, and I suspect even in Spain where you are, you saw a lot of coverage of our presidential election and maybe even ongoing coverage of the aftermath of that election. And of course, most Americans are so focused on the presidential election, and that's the main thing that they're thinking about right now. But that turns out to have lots of interesting political implications as well. When the world is so focused on one particular news event, your research suggests that there are lots of other things we should be worried about as well, other implications of that that might really matter for us, even if we're not paying close attention to them.

Ruben Durante:

Yeah, absolutely. So, we start to think of this because we work on media and there is a lot of research about how media, by putting the spotlight on policy makers, they make them more disciplined, right, make more accountable. But the other side of the coin is that if you look from the side of the politician, then you can spot good opportunities to do unpopular things when the media is not watching, when public opinion is distracted by something else. So, we started to think about this with my co-author. But it's hard to find, from an empirical perspective, a situation that is suitable to test this.

As I was thinking about conflict and, specifically, we started to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both parties do not want to be perceived as the perpetrators, right, as the bad guys. But basically one idea is that maybe both Israelis and Palestinians, they may have an interest to do this when the world is not watching more generally, or specifically because we have very good US data and because US is clearly, especially from the point of Israel, a very important partner. Then we tried to look at how Israeli and Palestinian attacks related with news cycle in the US.

I think there was an episode in Israel on the day of the US election. I think Israel removed a whole village, if I didn't read it right, everybody was surprised. It was on the exact same day of the election.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, it's really interesting. There's a lot of interesting stuff to get into as far as the details of the paper and how you go about measuring all of this stuff, lots of different data sources and so on. One of the interesting parts of the paper is where you try to measure how much non Israeli-Palestinian conflict news there is in the US on any given day. So you have this variable you call news pressure. Can you tell us a little bit about how you construct that measure?

Ruben Durante:

We look at TV. We look at broadcast TV, we look at the main channels. For each channel, we look at the top three stories. And the idea is that the more time you spend on the top three stories, the less time is going to be available for everything else, including the conflict.

Take an example, there is the Columbine shooting. US news are going to talk about that for a relatively long time. And then really there's going to be very little time left to talk about anything else, including conflict. So that's the idea, to take in top three stories are related, the better day to attack.

It's a story about strategic timing. You use the time of your attacks. By the way, we also find internal documents of the Israeli Army in which these media consideration are explicitly acknowledged and it's clear that, not only they are there, but they also affect the military strategy.

In principle, if you're planning an attack based on these media consideration you can only use news that are able to predict. So the idea there is really that, let's split type of news into groups. On the one hand, you get groups that you can predict and you get news that you cannot predict. The news that you cannot predict, for example, the natural disaster the day of the onset, even the Israeli intelligence doesn't even know that it's going to happen in advance so you cannot really plan ahead. You can have a window of opportunity if it last for a few days, but that's a different story from ours.

When you have an event, like a political event, a big sport event, and so on, that is in a calendar, you can clearly predict. You know when it's going to happen, you know it's going to be big for US public, for example, then those are exactly the events. So we basically split these things and that gives us both identification in the sense that we separate the two things. Both of them increase news pressure based on our measure that I told you before, but only one of them should display an effect. But the other one should display an effect on news, but not on attacks. And that's exactly what we find.

On top of that, when you focus on predictable news, you find that the effect is much bigger. And so we use those type of predictable events, I say sport and political events in the US, and relate it with the Israeli and Palestinians as an instrument for the news pressure that I mentioned before. And that's exactly what we find. An important thing that we find is that when we started we thought that we would find that there was a higher chance of an attack on the same day when big news are occurring. But in fact, it turns out an attack is more likely today if you expect these big news to happen tomorrow. And so we start thinking about that, and this is something that I think it's important and maybe we want to discuss.

Anthony Fowler:

Let's talk about that for a second. But I think your general story makes a lot of sense, that it's predictable events that should especially have an effect here because, presumably, these aren't the kinds of attacks that can be planned in a minute's notice. They're the kinds of attacks that can be planned on a few weeks’ notice or something like that. That seems to be the idea you have in mind. Maybe you have more information about exactly how much planning these kinds of attacks require. But that sounds right.

And it almost sounds like a US presidential election is just about the perfect moment, especially the 2020 US presidential election where it was expected that it wasn't just going to be one busy day of news. It might even be a whole week of news. It's almost a perfect moment for you to plan to do something there. Why do you think that's going on? Why is it the case that you want to schedule your attack the day before the big news item, rather than the day of the big news item?

Ruben Durante:

There are two possible stories. The first one is that US media are just more likely to cover a given attack of Israel, for example, the next day. But that is actually not the case. If you look at the data, there is a lot of coverage the same day, and then there is a lot more in that coverage the following day, but that doesn't seems to be fully explaining our result.

Then we started looking at the coverage the next day and the same day. And you notice the same day you usually get these reporters in their hotel rooms in Jerusalem or in Hamala saying, "Okay, this is the information. Five people died." That's it. But the next day, these numbers, they become personal stories. That's why you typically see these videos of Muhammad, five year old died in these circumstances, this and that. And then they interview the mother, and obviously very touching scene. And so that type of personal stories and more emotional footage can only be collected the next day. That connects the literal to social psychology and media study where personal stories and images are much more effective than just numbers and accounts. So that the difference in quality in the aspect of same day and next day is very substantial.

Anthony Fowler:

So you think if we could somehow cancel the Super Bowl and the Olympics and the World Cup and all of these things, which of course there would be lots of reasons to not do that other than this, but there would be clear benefits in other realms. There would be—

Ruben Durante:

I think the less distraction you have, you make it harder to... or at least conditional on the attack at some point. We have a nice result in the paper, which is that it also depends what type of attacks carried out, right? We find no evidence whatsoever of strategic timing when you look at targeted killings of Palestinian high level terrorists, right? In that case, you can think that the balance between the media consideration and the military consideration clearly is on the side of the military consideration, if this guy is moving from safe house, A, to save house B, and he's a killer, he's a terrorist, I'm not going to have a lot of a hard time defending my actions so I'm going to attack him no matter what. I'm not going to think CNN is watching me versus not.

And when you do that, we find that the strategic timing is a lot higher when the risk of killing civilians is high in terms of if you're attacking very very densely populated areas, if you're using very heavy weapon. So there seems to be very sophisticated also that type of understanding the balance between military consideration and media consideration, and strike a balance between the two. So that is also evidence of strategic decision there.

Anthony Fowler:

Are there any broader lessons for journalists that should come from this? Are they abdicating their responsibility here? Should they do a better job of not getting so swept up by one major news story and making sure that even when there is one big news story, they still are covering these other important things going on around the world?

Ruben Durante:

The lesson for journalist would probably be, on days when there are some big events, try to take notes for stuff that are happening around the world. You can report this a couple of days after it's better than not reporting them at all. I think it's important. I mean, there's plenty of evidence from spin doctors and other situations when it's clear that the choosing strategically the time of... it can be policy or it can be just pure release of information, right? For spin doctor rule number one is like, "Dump all the bad stuff when the word is not watching." So I think journalist should also be sophisticated in that direction to try to spot this and in some ways, try to react.

Anthony Fowler:

I mean, that's a really good point for a lot of these big things, like a controversial executive order by the president. In some ways maybe the public doesn't even need to know about it that day, but if they find out about it, eventually they find out about it before the next election rolls around maybe that's sufficient for them to make good decisions, but it doesn't seem as if the journalists are always staying on top of those things. Sometimes we might just never learn about it.

Ruben Durante:

Well, the news cycle is very quick, right. Something that is very important today, in two days may be replaced by something else and so on, so forth. So it'd be nice to make sure you have a newspaper where you have a column of stuff you may have missed or stuff you may have got really invisible for awhile but it's still important. But you're right, it doesn't need to be the same day. We have the right to watch the Super Bowl.

Anthony Fowler:

Yes. Are there broader implications here? I mean, this is going beyond your paper a little bit, but this does make me think of a tactic that's used by politicians like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Berlusconi. And so you almost just flood the airwaves with so much junk that it's hard for people to pay close attention, right?

Ruben Durante:

Indeed.

Anthony Fowler:

Is that—

Ruben Durante:

In our paper, the source of distraction that we use it comes from outside. Okay. And Israel I'm using the distraction. We're working currently on a project. You probably watched the movie, Wag the Dog.

Anthony Fowler:

Oh no. I don't know it. Sorry.

Ruben Durante:

It's an old movie with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro where the US president is facing reelection a week from election he's involved in a sexual scandal. And then he basically launched these military campaign against Albania, a totally fictitious campaign that never happened, but they basically hired a Hollywood producer to stage the war just to keep the attention for a week so people don't realize that. So basically the idea that I'm telling you that is that instead of using external events as the distraction, you can create your own destruction in some way.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So Anthony, that was a very interesting interview. Can you just very briefly summarize the main findings for us?

Anthony Fowler:

They've got data on how many big news things are clogging up the US airwaves. They're correlating that with measures of major attacks taken by Israeli forces. And they're also using this clever design where they're using these exogenous events on the calendar to get identification. So the Super Bowl is coming up on a known day, when the Super Bowl happens are you more likely to see an Israeli attack that day or the day before? Say a presidential election is coming up, this is what we might call an instrumental variables design, where we've got some of the exogenous events on the calendar that are likely to clog up the extent to which the US and maybe even people around the world, they're distracted by other big news items and they're not likely to be paying close attention to whatever happens in Israel and Palestine. And that's precisely when Israel decides to initiate these major attacks.

If you do look through the details of the appendix, I will say one thing that might make you a little bit suspicious, and I didn't get a chance to ask Ruben about this is that one of the biggest things that apparently distracts the US news cycle is the World Cup, which makes no sense to me because of course Americans don't care about soccer. That's ridiculous. It's actually other major sporting events, like the Super Bowl and the World Series and so forth, don't actually have nearly the effect of the World Cup. So that was the thing I was the most skeptical about in the entire paper, but otherwise I thought it was a pretty clever design on a very interesting question that I think has brought applications.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. So I think it's interesting because the story is actually quite nuanced. So it's not that Israel cares about the support of, and the attention of the American audience, but it's just like the US government cares about that because the US government is not distracted. The US government will know about all these attacks anyway, but somehow they are responding to the fact that they know those attacked happened during the time when their voters were distracted. So they know they can get away with pursuing their interests that might be more dangerous that the general audience supports.

Anthony Fowler:

Sure. It's not that many steps that we're talking about. I mean, I think it's fair to say the Israeli government cares about US public opinion in so far as US public opinion influences what the US government does. And they might also care a lot about public opinion around the world as well, as Ruben and I discussed in the interview, even though they're using measures of news pressure from the US, these are very often big international events, the Olympics, the Super Bowl, a presidential election, these are the kinds of things that get news coverage all over the world. And so to the extent that Israel cares about public opinion in the UK and the Netherlands and France and so forth, this is also partly being picked up by their empirical strategy.

Wioletta Dziuda:

True. I don't want to cast blame, but when you read this paper and the listen to the interview, you start thinking in terms of blame, why is the Israeli government actually so sinister and tries to hide these attacks and hear it at the end of the day, the blame should be placed with the US government who is very well aware of how the audience would react to all these events had they not been distracted and they selectively respond to those events based on whether the US voter was distracted or not.

Anthony Fowler:

But it's suggesting that the accountability of US foreign policy ultimately resides with easily distracted everyday voters, right? Which is a curious notion. I think we're used to thinking about US foreign policy in particular, being informed by if public opinion, then the most elite public opinion, people who would find out about the attacks anyway, or organize interests domestically, or coalitions within Congress, or much less never mind the geopolitical scene at the international level. But this is a story about the Israeli government worrying about what average Americans think, not because they care per se about what they think, but because what they think has a bearing on the flow of benefits from the US government to Israel. Are you convinced by the findings? Do you think that they're real?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Real, like you mean not made up?

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I think I am. I think I'm convinced, of course you never know. It might be that they just found something by chance, but especially combined with anecdotes, the famous anecdote they start with is Silvio Berlusconi in 1994, issuing a decree that imprisoned corrupt politicians can be released from prison on the same day that Italy qualified for the FIFA World Cup final, which is a huge deal of four Italians or Russian troops entering Georgia in 2008, Adele during the opening day of the summer Olympics. We all know those anecdotes. So the paper just confirms that this is not only the anecdotes and also then combine with these other papers that we know about, especially the paper by York's professor that we discussed on our podcast. There seem to be something there.

I think those effects are real. And the question is, why they are occurring. And I think for me, the bigger question is if we somehow alerted the voters to all those events, would that change any outcomes? Would that change how many attacks Israel is performing and how brutal they are, or would that only change the political outcomes in the US or the reaction of the US government? So that's still a big question in my mind, how real the effects are.

Anthony Fowler:

I'd like to make a picture that they might be even more expansive than they're presented in the paper. There's reason to believe anything that would alter the behavior of the Israeli military is going to in turn alter the behavior of the Palestinians, both in terms of not just when they wage attacks, but also how they defend or how they allocate resources, what kind of PR campaign that they offer in the wake of an attack that is receiving more or less attention by the US. And of course they don't have data on those things, and we shouldn't expect them to have data on all things, but there's reason to believe that the effects that they do offer have even further downstream effects and that this might be an even broader phenomenon than they've characterized.

William Howell:

I agree. I agree. And obviously why did they focus on the Israel-Palestinian conflict? Of course, the conflict is itself important. And also there are features that are useful for researchers, but presumably this mechanism would apply much more broadly beyond this one context. There are lots of political actors who would like to take certain actions, but would prefer that those actions not be super, publicly visible.

Anthony Fowler:

And might some of those effects be domestic in orientation as well? It's not just about shift of US attention affecting the behavior of other States, but shift of US attention affecting what goes on within our country. I mean, that's your York's paper with regard to... right?

William Howell:

Right. Oh yeah, absolutely.

Anthony Fowler:

We could think—

William Howell:

And then Ruben mentioned he has another where he's looking at US presidential executive orders with the same general finding that these more controversial executive orders, you try to sneak them in at a time when the public is distracted by something else.

Anthony Fowler:

And so he's leveraging for identification in his paper, these events that are locked into the calendar, but to the extent that this is true, political elites who want to misbehave, or to take actions that would be controversial, have incentives to generate those events, no, create those distractions themselves. Why isn't that the story of the Trump presidency?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Here we go, 20 minutes into our podcast and we have Trump. Yes, no, I think this is exactly what's been going on with Trump's presidency. And in my opinion, this is what Trump actually excels at, he excels at creating distractions. Sometimes when you read his tweets, you are just terrified like, "How could anyone tweet something like this." But it becomes a little bit easier to understand if you realize that everyone then talks about this tweets, and that gives the administration a room to enact policies that they are constituency wants, or that their lobbyists want that are actually not super popular with the general voters.

So for example, a lot of the regulation of environmental issues happened during Trump administration. And some of them I would venture to say would be very unpopular, like dismantling of water quality regulation, that cannot be a popular idea. And this all happened when we were all distracted with tweets and yet another controversy that's not really a long-lasting controversy.

William Howell:

And we don't know if this is brilliance on Trump's part or if he just happened into this because he can't help himself from sending out 30 crazy tweets a day. But yes, and this isn't new for world leaders. It does feel pretty new for US Presidents, creating a bunch of junk to distract people is an old trick by many world leaders who are doing all kinds of unpopular things. And Vladimir Putin is very good at it and has been very good at it for longer than Trump has been doing it. And I think the media is of a fallen prey to it as well.

Anthony Fowler:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's a slight variant on a story that we hear a lot in the media right now about why do Republicans abide this president? Well, the story is that this is how they got tax cuts or how they get conservative judges to the judiciary. An alternative is variant on it but I think that comes from this paper is to say, well, no, no, Trump doesn't have a deep bench of executive orders that he's waiting to issue himself, but his advisors do. I mean, people in his midst do, and he's performing a service for them by continuing to stir the pot and attracting all this media attention. It isn't just something that they're willing to put up with in the service of getting their tax cut it's that he's cast a spell on the media, right? And that are enthralled with the craziness of the latest tweet, which then gives them meaning as advisors or people within the administrative state space and cover to go and do things that aren't broadly popular.

William Howell:

Yeah, so maybe if Biden uses this tactic, it'll be for a completely different set of things, but certainly a liberal leader could use these tactics as well to do things that are unpopular on the liberal side. If Biden decides that he, after all does want to pursue defunding the police of the Green New Deal, even though he said he did it, but if he does maybe he will want to distract the public when he does that or if he wants to implement cultural sensitivity training for all government employees or something, he's going to want to also send out some crazy tweets that same day so that we're not talking about that.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm looking forward to that day when Joe Biden sends a crazy tweets.

William Howell:

Anthony, you were starting to point your finger at the media. And I think we should spend a little time talking about what our understanding is of the media that generates these effects, and then maybe things that might change what alterations to the behavior of the media, which would unwind them. So what's the model of the media that allows for these effects to occur?

Anthony Fowler:

Sure. Yeah, my reading of this paper is that it really is a media paper in the sense that if the media didn't behave the way that they were expected to behave, then Israel wouldn't be doing this. They wouldn't be taken advantage of this. So the media is going to cover these big stories. That's going to mean there's less time to cover other important things that are going on. And there's probably some corollary that a week later when that big story, when the presidential election is over, the media isn't going to come back and recover those important things that happened at the same time as the election, they're going to move on to whatever new things have popped up. And maybe that's because they believe that most media consumers have short attention spans and just want to know about what happened yesterday, or maybe that's just the way the media typically operates is you sit around the newsroom and you say, "Okay, what big things happened yesterday and this morning? That's what we're going to talk about."

And so, as we think about potential reforms or changes that could maybe improve public information and democratic accountability and mitigate some of these bad behaviors, we'd want to think about how we could change the behavior of media in such a way that the public does ultimately become informed about these things. One part of it is we don't have 24/7 coverage of the presidential election. Everyone cares about the presidential election. We all want to know what's going on, but we don't all have to be glued to CNN and John King touching these counties on the map. John King can take a pause every once in a while and say, "And also there's this important thing that just happened in Russia. And this other important thing just happened in Israel. And we'll update you in 20 minutes about what's going on in the latest county in Georgia." So that's one potential solution to this problem.

William Howell:

Or as you gesture towards is that you wait for a week, right? That is okay, I can't take my eyes off of John King because wow, that man, what a performance, right? But damn it, a week later... But a week later we could have a look back, right? I mean, if there was an appetite... so that's where it's not clear. I mean, it's the critique of the media or it's the critique of the public, right? I mean, it may be that the public is simply unwilling to look back. The media, if the public was interested in finding out what happened in the previous week when we were fixated on the election would gladly offer that review, but there's simply no appetite for it.

Anthony Fowler:

One related solution is to have more of these long form journalism projects that are out there. The New Yorker, for example, will, instead of just doing a snippet on what happened yesterday, or this morning, the New Yorker might do a very in-depth piece on some very important thing that happened that you missed that was three weeks ago, or even a John Oliver's show, which is a comedy show. Reels will devote sometimes a 20 to 25 minutes of the show to some very important topic that is not a salient news topic that you're not going to learn about on CNN. You're not going to learn about in ABC news, even if you don't agree with everything, John Oliver says, he's an entertainer. Those kinds of outlets, I think are very important for information and accountability, perhaps more important than the CNN breaking news coverage that we're so used to.

William Howell:

I totally agree. I mean, if we move away from media market where it's just a running tally, this is what happened now, what happened now, what happened now, to a world in which you have shows that look back and synthesize information, it could have a, well... I mean, if we believe the paper, then some of those attacks might not have happened, or at least they would have happened at a different time.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I think you're absolving the viewer, the listener, the voter a little bit too much, because Anthony, you mentioned we have all those outlets. We do have in-depth coverage. We even have some in-depth coverage on CNN on Sunday morning. I mean, it probably helps to a large extent, but it doesn't seem to eliminate this considerations. Either we have to admit that we are all searching for entertainment. We turn on CNN because we are going to have this flashing images while we are cooking or doing something else. And we turn on every day because we hope there'll be something entertaining, interesting that we're going to learn. And if we turn on CNN and we learn three days ago, there was an attack in Israel. Let's say 10 days ago, there was an attack in Israel, and we learned that this is what CNN provides to us, or they are just going to talk about events from few days ago, that might not be what we want. We will know what we are going to hear today about and so why would we turn on the CNN?

So I don't know, I'm a little bit skeptical that this can be solved simply by supplying better quality news. Of course, if there was some hustled collusion among all the news providers and they decided to raise the quality of the news that they provide, we would probably help the problem go away, but this is not going to happen. This is a competition. And I think it's a demand problem. We are just demanding to be entertained. And it's much more entertaining to read about Donald Trump's tweets than about an attack in Israel.

William Howell:

No, no, that's different, isn't it? I was looking into that last little bit. What we demand is to know what's happening right now. We want to hear about the burning building that's happening right now, not the burning building from a couple of days ago, because if the problem here is that we're more interested in Donald Trump's tweets than we are in what's happening in Israel, then it's not much of a problem for the Israeli military. They just could say, "Look, the American public isn't interested in us. Right? So we could just carry on."

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, you're right. You're right. In my story, there's something about the recency of the news that fulfills this desire to be entertained and to be desired for our attention to be captured. And somehow when we hear about the news that happened a few days ago, that's much less entertaining.

Anthony Fowler:

You might be right about this and maybe it is the fault of the media consumers, but I guess I'm not willing to conclude that.

William Howell:

Leave your voter. We need the ding. We need the ding.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, jingle.

Anthony Fowler:

You remember the ding. I'm not willing to jump to that conclusion without seeing more compelling evidence, I'm not sure how much media outlets are even trying to do what we're recommending that they do. Of course there are exceptions, but I think media outlets are doing the easy thing. Right? It's very easy to sit down in the newsroom and say, "Okay, what's the most salient thing that happened today. Let's cover that." But if I think about myself as a news consumer, I don't have time to watch CNN every day and then decide what was the most important thing that... what I really want to do is I want to be able to go online and open up the front page of the Washington Post and the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune or whatever, and then have them tell me as curators, as the expert curators that they are or should be, have them tell me what are the most important things I should know from what happened in the last week or two weeks or three weeks or four weeks.

So I think there probably would be demand out there for such a service if it was really reliable, but I think they're not providing it because it's harder to do that. It's much easier to just say, "Oh, look, there was a burning building today." It's much harder to say, "You know what? There's been some really important stuff that's happened over the last three weeks and we're going to really research it and we're going to condense it. And we're going to tell you what you need to know about it."

William Howell:

This is working on two levels. One has to do with synthesizing and assigning meaning to, and analyzing events that clearly is harder. It's less clear that it is harder to say, "Hey, we're going to report about an Israeli attack two days later." In some ways, that's easier than reporting it Live. You simply write and they don't do that.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So I have an idea that the news providers should actually have the segment of like, "Here are the news that happen when you were watching the Super Bowl." And have a big banner and, "Here's what you've missed." And big drums and some—

Anthony Fowler:

I like it. I like it.

William Howell:

Yes.

Anthony Fowler:

And there's an extra shaming that happens too, right?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Exactly, like, "Can you believe what the Israelis did during the Super Bowl? So perhaps you're right, that there is a way to bring those news to the US audience, but I think you have to be very conscious about the demand side of this entire story.

William Howell:

And there are instances of news outlets trying to do the right thing, right? They're going to provide more substantive news because, damn it, that's what their purpose is, that's what they want to do and they're going to build their audience. A fair number of these efforts have failed entirely. So yeah, I think I'm with Wioletta on this one. Journalists go into journalism because they would love to talk about many of them. Deeper, more meaningful stuff to do this kind of work, but it's costlier and there doesn't appear to be an audience that's willing to step up and support it.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. Well, let's find out. I'd love to see it, I’d love to see the journalists try and just see what happens and see ...

William Howell:

And what's behind our entire discussion, which is worth making explicit it's the idea that there's a budget constraint or a space constraint or a time constraint that is having paid more attention to one thing, it displaces other things. You can imagine in a world in which there are a thousand different media outlets and a division of labor wherein everything can get covered all the time. You can have ESPN doing the Super Bowl ad nauseum. So those who want to go and watch it there, but still have another outlet that's focused entirely on what's happening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the extent that we had cameras trained on both all the time. When did that, as a design, allow us to distinguish these effects, that is? What happens then is all the public simply turned their attention away from one to the other. Then this is a story, not of supply. It's really a story of what the public cares about and what they're willing to actually pay attention to.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. So what you said just made me think about how much the news media market has changed in the last few years. In the past, there was a really strict constraint on how many pieces of news you could relay to the audience. So you really had to focus on the most important events, the most important attacks. And this had a differential impact. Governments, actors knew that their worst behavior will be actually covered, but perhaps this other behavior is also bad and we will also want to know about, is going to fly under the radar. So perhaps we had fewer examples of outrageous behavior and more of this everyday misconduct. Now what we is I think we have more time to cover, we have news 24 hours a day and we have online newspapers that don't have actually a space constraint, but we are all distracted. We are getting more entertaining news, or we are just choosing news at random, which news to follow. So that allows the biggest events, the biggest misconduct go less noticed. I wonder whether there's this financial effect of the changes in how we consume media these days.

Anthony Fowler:

I'm sure it matters a lot. And there are people who study this extensively. And I think one of the claims you get from this era of proliferated news is that if you want to be hyper informed on some issue, if you want to be an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, now is a better time than ever before, because there are probably news websites entirely devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But if you were just a regular news consumer, it's so easy to just tune into your favorite sport and your favorite hobby, et cetera, and get no news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And so on average, your median voter is less informed about all these important things, even if some people are hyper informed.

William Howell:

And again, that's what I find most perplexing about the story that's being told in this paper, the fate of US foreign policy resides with that median voter, not with the people who are hyper attentive or with organized interest or with in some way, the willingness of the US government to continue to provide substantial aid to Israel hinges upon the people who are easily distracted by the Super Bowl. And that they'll subsequently learn about the attack because it didn't show up on CNN that day.

Anthony Fowler:

That is the story of any interest group, right? Is that maybe there's a small group that cares a lot about something that if the median voter were more informed, they maybe wouldn't be happy with it, but you rely on your small set of supporters being very active and vigilant and the median voter not paying very close attention.

William Howell:

Yes. There's just a big literature that suggests that the American public has much less information, knows much less about foreign policy, which then gives presidents generally more discretion to do what they want in foreign policy. And therefore, I think the literature suggests is the American public opinion is less important as a consequence relative to the influence that the public decidedly wields, when it comes to high salient issues. This is suggesting that's not quite right. This paper is suggesting that that's not quite right, it's suggesting, "No, the public opinion still matters," or at least generals who are working in the Israeli army think that it matters.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, but maybe it's also that we find that voters don't care so much about the foreign policy in a sense that they are not rewarding or punishing the executive for the foreign policies as much as they do for domestic issues. But that might be also because they are not informed so much about the foreign issues and for various reasons, demand, supply and what the Israeli army in this paper is doing is just trying to keep it this way. It's trying to keep them not informed because even if you don't care about Israeli-Palestinian conflict, per se, you would never go and seek information. If you get those images from a bomb being, and you see children are dying or injured or houses burned down, you have to care and they talk about this in the paper also know that, that somehow you have this emotional reaction to those images. If you're Israel, you want to avoid this kind of effect. So you just want to keep the audience uninterested and uninformed.

William Howell:

That sounds right. That's right. That sounds right.

Anthony Fowler:

Wioletta, what's your bottom line?

Wioletta Dziuda:

I don't know. I like the paper. I think it's a nice compliment to the other paper that we've discussed a while ago. I think it solidifies if that politicians and governments are timing their behavior, perhaps they're also shaping voters' attention. I'm still not sure how concerned we should be about this, whether this is just a matter of temporary changes in people's beliefs about a particular government and a particular action, or is this something that has long-term consequences and lowers accountability of the governments? That's still an opened question to me and hopefully we'll discuss a paper one day that answers this question.

William Howell:

Yeah. Just on this one point, like the counterfactual is clear that they have in mind, is it that an attack that happens on the day of the Super Bowl would not have otherwise happened at all, or is it that it would have just happened a week later or a week before? And that has real implications for our assessments of how important this finding is, obviously.

Wioletta Dziuda:

And if it happened a week before or a week after, would it have different consequences for the reelection of the Israeli government or the American government for the actions of the American government and so on?

William Howell:

Right.

Wioletta Dziuda:

And yeah, they don't know. They don't know, and I asked Ruben about this and they discuss it to some extent in the paper and they talk about under what assumptions can we conclude that we were actually increasing the total amount of violence as opposed to just displacing it. And I think their argument is that there are certain kinds of attacks that if you don't do them now, you're probably never going to do them. And there are other kinds of attacks where you can time them. And so it's probably a little bit of both if they had to guess.

And certainly, I mean, if you think about York's paper on members of Congress voting for special interests, that bill was going to be voted on at that time regardless. And so this is not just a displacement kind of thing. I don't know. This is a hard question. I agree.

William Howell:

It is. I'll say it's a hard problem generally trying to identify the fact that they are identifying. And I just had the experience reading the paper each time I had a thought, but you should be worrying about this then in reasonably short order, they attended to it, repeatedly. Both in their measurement strategy, in terms of their modeling strategy. It was just transparent and clear and thoughtful. I really liked the paper. And it also fits into, as you guys have pointed out, into this larger phenomenon about the politics of attention which I hadn't thought much about. It raises lots of questions about the role of the media and notions of accountability and how the average citizens learned about information and the relevance of that information for their subsequent behavior. As another data point in a broad phenomenon, I was really glad to read the paper.

Anthony Fowler:

I agree with everything you guys said, and I'm going to add it to my bottom line, that we at Not Another Politics Podcast will make a promise, despite all of the urgings of our producer, who sometimes wants us to go the other way, we will promise to try to cover the most important and interesting and high quality research papers, not just the most newsworthy or recent research papers. What do you guys think about that?

William Howell:

I like it. I think this is a classic case of it. I mean, we were concerned. We have this background concern about how, "Oh my God, what are we missing? Right? What are we missing amidst the selection of this stuff that was happening?" And what motivated the question was not an interest in exploring the details of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it's by going there that we could do the best job of getting some clarity about the phenomenon, about this as a tactic that political elites rely upon. And we were right to go there.

William Howell:

Thanks for listening to Not Another Politics Podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and it's produced by Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.