Today, Knight Foundation is gathering a group of media thought leaders for a discussion about new ways for people to participate in elections through digital tools and content. Follow the conversation via #knightelect.

To kick off Knight’s summit on rethinking election coverage, the head of factcheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Kathleen Hall Jamieson, sounded a warning: “We are Tom Cruise,” she said. Let me explain. In a memorable scene from the Tom Cruise film, Minority Report, everywhere Cruise’s character walks, personalized ads move with him, call out his name, and sell products to him as he makes his way down a mall walkway. That future imagined by movie creators is now a reality in political advertising, Jamieson says. She predicts that by 2016, consultants and technology enhancements will allow campaigns to microtarget so effectively that they can reach specific slices of the electorate, featuring only the types of individuals they want.

“We’ve further fractured our sense that we have any common election we’re engaged in,” Jamieson said. “And suppose I use [microtargeting] to deceive, to send you viral content that’s highly deceptive. That’s the biggest threat.” But because research shows that fact-checking on a linear, print platform isn’t a strong enough counter to the barrage of deceptive non-linear, visual and sound dominated video ads, Jamieson’s taking her fight against dirty ads to the same platform on which they live. Her team will be making commercials of its own, to deconstruct deceptive ads and parody them at the same time. “I don’t object to attack ads. Attack ads are crucial to our democracy,” she said. “We’re going after dirty, deceptive ads.” For actual 2012 candidates who run dirty ads, Jamieson’s team is planning to parody those commercials in real time. The aim is to use meta-communication and humor to reframe what’s left in voters minds and give them an alternative to what a deceptive ad is laying down. “We’re going to do deconstruction: take down the ads, and then reconstruction. Then, comedians riffing on the ads…. If we’re trying to increase the likelihood that you’ll process stuff that your candidate isn’t telling the truth, we think humor is going to hold,” Jamieson said. Deceptive attack ads: You can’t miss ‘em, but you can’t resist ‘em. So Jamieson says the best way to combat them is with some realtime media literacy — using video parody to teach voters the way deception happens, so they’ll better recognize it when they see it. Elise Hu is covering the event as a freelance blogger for KnightBlog. She is the digital editor of StateImpact at NPR.