ANNOUNCING
Campaign Ethics: Lessons from 2008 for 2012
NCA Preconference Seminar
Wednesday, November 11
1:00 – 5:30 PM
A year ago the presidential campaign was raging forward and there were members of our profession who where deeply concerned about what were unethical campaigning. Worse, such communication seemed to be taken for granted or written off as politics as usual.
In the midst of that, Professor Ed Schiappa wrote to several dozen department chairpersons urging that we get involved to make a point on behalf of ethics. He wanted us, as experts, to take some kind of public stand against lying, exaggeration, and personal attacks. As he put it,
“Making decisions in a democracy requires an informed electorate. The health of our democracy and our ability to make a good decision about who should lead our nation require the very best in communication practices, not the worst.”
In the end, over 150 departmental chairs and other professors signed a document decrying attempts to label Barrack Obama a terrorist. Some others were heard to be concerned about media bias around Sarah Palin. These matters have surfaced off and on in the Communication Ethics division as well as among the rhetoricians and people in the debate community. And of course there is no division in our association in which people do not care about and teach about ethics.
But, for all of that concern, for all of the fact that it is often our alumni who are intimately involved in politics, we have no collective voice to offer any kind of national conscience on the way communication is used to the political process. And, I believe Ed learned that, if we speak out on our own, far too many of us fear reprisals from our institutions and our legislators.
This NCA seminar is in direct response to Ed and also the all of us what care about how politicians position themselves to get elected. The vision for this preconference seminar is to begin a dialogue that could progress through the next two conventions to consider what we might do, if anything, to put us in a position to exercise a collective voice of ethics during the presidential campaign in 2012.
This first seminar will address two questions:
1) What is the state of ethics in presidential campaigning in America? And
2) What, if anything, should this association and/or its members do to advance the cause of ethical campaigning
The seminar will be organized as follows:
1:30
Facilitator: Roy Wood, University of Denver
Keynote: Edward Schiappa, University of Minnesota
Charge: Tammy Swenson Lepper, Winona State University
Charge: David Zarefsky, Northwestern University.
2:30 Discussion
3:15 Sub Group Meetings
4:00 Considering an Action Plan
5:30 Adjourn
We need you! Please join us in Chicago!
Roy Wood
University of Denver
303-596-8947
rvwood@du.edu
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