Download TV AD WARS: NEGATIVE ADS

TV AD WARS: NEGATIVE ADS
Probably nothing has so revolutionized American politics as the emergence of television as
the principal means of communicating with voters. What used to be the experience of only a few
people!hearing and seeing a candidate at a campaign rally, for example!is now an experience
shared by many millions of Americans. Because television enables political candidates to be
seen and heard in every living room of the country, it is no wonder that politicians devote so
much time and resources to producing television advertisements and other political
programming.
The advent of TV advertising also has led to shorter and shorter campaign spots, in
which candidates in thirty-second or shorter sound and picture bites “bash” their opponents or
attempt to communicate key work messages to the sometimes uninformed, unsuspecting, and
undecided voters. These political advertisements are most often referred to as “negative ads,”
though exactly what constitutes a negative ad is often in dispute.
The thirty-second or less campaign TV spots, particularly those deemed “negative,” are
roundly criticized by “good government” advocates. Critics claim that such ads do not simply
present a negative view of specific candidates for office, but also damage the political system
itself. Such a view is taken by the author of the first selection in this chapter-Fred Wertheimerwho argues that the effect of negative ads is to breed public distrust of the political process.
According to Wertheimer, the damage done by negative ads makes it very difficult to govern in a
world increasingly beset with public cynicism and distrust, that cynicism being fed by negative
campaigning. To remedy this, Wertheimer suggests a number of reforms to make those who
sponsor negative ads more accountable.
[Television,] like the colossus of the ancient world, stands astride our political system,
demanding tribute from every candidate for major public office, incumbent or challenger. Its
appetite is insatiable, and its impact is unique.
!Senator Edward Kennedy, Senate Committee
On Commerce, Hearings, 92nd Congress
Television advertising is the principal means by which candidates publicly
define for the voters their opponents and themselves and the government in which
they serve or hope to serve. Television advertising is characterized in the public’s
mind by one word: negative.
Every two years during the fall, and much earlier in presidential election
years, a focused, intense, negative message goes out to the American people over
the airwaves about how bad the candidates are, how dangerous their ideas are, how
their programs don’t work, how problems cannot be solved. Obviously, discussing
and disagreeing with your opponent’s record and views is a normal and necessary
part of our political process. It is a key part of informing and educating voters on
the choice they have to make. However, our political TV ad campaigns go far
beyond traditional comparative advertising.
Although many candidates have some positive things to say in their TV ads,
these messages are overwhelmed by the negative attack ads that set the tone and
dominate the debate. Because television appeals to our emotions and magnifies
and intensifies what it communicates, the impact of the negative message is much
more powerful and damaging on television than if the same message were being
communicated through print.
Most politicians and their media handlers focus their TV advertising
exclusively on one goal: winning on election day. If winning on election day
means undermining your own credibility or damaging your ability to govern or
breeding public distrust and cynicism or turning large segments of the public away
from voting, so be it. Thus we end up with the perverse result that many
politicians use TV advertising in their campaigns in ways that ultimately do as
much damage to their own credibility as they do to their opponents’.
Regardless of what politicans may believe about negative advertising
“working” in their campaigns, it certainly does not work when it comes to doing
their jobs and serving the American people as effective and credible
representatives. As Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar find in their book,
Going Negative, “Negative advertising demoralizes the electorate . . . eats away at
the individual’s sense of civic duty . . . and contribute[s] to the general antipathy
towards politicians and parties and the high rates of disapproval and distrust of
political institutions”.
Although the candidates bear the principal responsibility for this happening,
we cannot underestimate how important the role played by media consultants is in
bringing about these enormously damaging results. As a result of the perceived
need for consultant expertise to design and produce TV ad campaigns, many
candidates abdicate much of the power to define themselves and their opponents to
their media consultants. The media consultants have only one objective--winning
the election--and this if often equated with negative attack ads. The carnage that is
left after the election is over and it is time to govern is someone else’s problems.
Media consultants, furthermore, normally receive as part of their fee a
percentage of the amount spent to purchase TV advertising time for the campaign,
such as 15 percent. This can involve hundreds of thousands of dollars!sometimes
even millions of dollars!in fees. It also means that media consultants have a
strong personal economic incentive to spend as much money as they can to
conduct the negative TV ad campaigns they devise.
Although the thirty-second negative ad has a preeminent role in U.S. politics
today, it hasn’t always been this way, in terms of either the length or the content of
our political ads. During the first twenty years of presidential ads, for example,
sixty-second spots were the dominant form of TV advertising. In the 1970s, there
were even a series of ads that ran more than four minutes, but starting in the
1980s, the thirty-second spot became dominant in presidential campaigns.
Presidential ads also went through a transition, over time, from positive to
negative.
According to one study, for example from 1960 to 1988, ads in presidential
campaigns were 72 percent positive and 29 percent negative. In 1992, 63 percent
of Bill Clinton’s ads and 56 percent of George Bush’s ads were negative,
representing a high-water mark, as of that time, in negative ad emphasis in a
presidential campaign (Kaid and Holtz-Bacha 1995).
A PROPOSED SOLUTION
A number of proposals have been offered to challenge and break out of the grip of
the thirty-second negative attack ad. The most radical proposal would bar all
political advertising on TV. Other proposals would require candidates
to appear on screen the whole time in their campaign TV ads, that whenever a
negative charge is made in a campaign TV ad that is be made on screen by the
candidate, that all campaign TV ads be five minutes or more in length, and that
candidates take greater personal responsibility for their campaign ads.
The issues and choices involved here are very difficult. On the one hand,
there is great value to our political process and our democracy in moving away
from the political culture embedded in the thirty-second attack ad. On the other
hand, regulating, through mandatory requirements, the style and content of
political ads raises fundamental First Amendment and policy concerns regarding
the ability of citizens to exercise free speech in presenting their candidacies to the
American people.
Although TV ad campaigns are causing deep problems for our political
system today, it is also important to keep in mind how valuable communicating on
TV can be. TV campaign ads allow candidates to communicate their views to
mass audiences and to do so unfiltered by any intermediaries, such as the media.
Ansolabehere and Iyengar point out the real problem: “it’s not the pervasiveness
of broadcast advertising that spawns public cynicism; it is instead the tone of the
advertising campaign. If campaigns were to become more positive, people would
be less embittered about politics as usual and more willing to vote”.
Congress now requires that candidates appear on screen at the end of their
political ads and state they are responsible for the ads. This provides clearer
public accountability for candidates regarding the messages they present to voters
on TV. By having to take personal responsibility for their ads, visually, candidates
may have become less interested in and less likely to run the kinds of negative
attack ads that are so common.
Congress should also require TV stations to provide a designated amount of
free TV time to political parties for use either by their candidates for their
campaigns or by party officials to present party views. The free TV time to the
parties could be conditioned on the candidates and party officials appearing on
screen to present their messages. Broadcasters could be provided financial relief
for this free TV time through tax credits or deductions. (Most democracies provide
free TV time for campaigns, and since most of these countries involve
parliamentary systems, the free tie is given to the political parties.) This would
strengthen the role of political parties, providing them with new clean campaign
resources to use to support their candidates or present their views. It would also
provide the parties with the opportunity to focus new resources on underfinanced
challengers, to the extent the parties are willing to assist them as opposed to their
incumbent candidates.
CONCLUSION
There are ways to reduce the financial and social costs of TV advertising in U.S.
campaigns. The policy changes proposed here would greatly reduce the current
financial costs to federal candidates of communicating through TV. The changes
would also challenge the basic premise that currently drives TV political ad
campaigns. Through a combination of incentives and requirements, they would
help move us away from the thirty-second negative attack ad without intruding on
the candidates’ First Amendment free-speech rights.
Changing the culture of American political campaigns is no easy task,
needless to say. Citizens, however, are rightly fed up with the current system. The
stakes involved here for our politics, our governance, and our country are
enormous. Now is the time to begin changing our TV ways.
Fred Wertheimer Negative Advertising - Does It Need To Be Truthful?
By Jason Stanford
After more than a decade working to dig up and document all manner of malice, I
can tell you from experience what you already know: Contrary to overwhelming
public misconceptions, politicians work overtime to tell the truth when they are
throwing the mud around but get away with half-truths and outright lies when
they're saying something nice.
If you ask most voters, all egghead political scientists, and not a few consultants,
they will tell you that politics would be better if we could just get away from
negative campaigning and concentrate on the issues. A 2000 study by the
Institute for Global Ethics found that an eye-popping 90 percent of Ohio voters
agreed that “negative attack campaigning is unethical,” and 88 percent believed
that “negative campaigning undermines democracy.” But in a country where 76
percent of the citizens thought Saddam Hussein helped Osama bin Laden carry off
the 9/11 attacks, majority public opinion can fall a little short of the mark.
What voters – and most pundits and political scientists – fail to understand is that
consultants worship at the twin altars of truth and accuracy when making
negative attacks.
Consider the lengths that Neil Kammerman, a consultant with the political media
firm Murphy Putnam Shorr, goes to in order to demonstrate that a negative
attack is both factually accurate and broadly truthful: He cites the documents at
the bottom of the screen, shows an image of the document as well as a logo or
masthead, and highlights in large type the relevant text from the document. “You
want to provide the footnotes, so to speak, the backup, so a station has no
question as to where the information came from,” says Kammerman.
It's standard practice to do this in a negative commercial, not only to overcome
the voters' bias against negative ads but to protect the attack against questions
the opposition will use to get the ad pulled off the air, a tactic Kammerman has
used to defend his clients against false attacks.
“If we feel the attack is misleading or in any way inaccurate, we'll go to war. We
will do everything in our power to have that ad pulled off the air. We will
respond,” says Kammerman. “You're able to hold your opponent to a higher
standard on negatives.”
Campaign consultants tell our clients–and ourselves–that we only get one bite at
the credibility apple and that once you lose your integrity with the voters, you
can't get it back. And when it comes to saying something untoward, we believe it,
but how many of us apply the same standards when we making the positive case
for our candidates? But when a campaign shades the truth in a positive ad, Hell
and damnation take the day off.
One reason that campaigns are held to a lower standard of honesty on the
positive side is that positive politics relies more on general platitudes than
specifics, what longtime Democratic campaign manager John Lapp calls “dare to
love your mother and apple pie kinds of things.”
One consultant brings up the common example of claiming that so-and-so has
“been a leader” or “fought” on some issue, which isn't necessarily lying, but
“more of a general kind of slightly enhancing someone's accomplishments or
credentials that you can't say is inaccurate.”
“Who defines what a leader is? Anyone can be a leader on anything in Congress,”
says this media consultant, who understandably wanted to keep his name out of
this. “You can get away playing with language in a positive ad that you can't in a
negative ad.”
Some pundits would love to blame consultants for squishy rhetoric, but this is a
uniquely American tradition that historian Daniel Boorstin identified as
boosterism by settlers who wanted their new towns to thrive. Citing the example
of Pittsburgh, which was touted as an industrial Mecca years before they built the
first factory there, Boorstin notes that civic leaders began using the present tense
to describe future goals to create reality out of intention and imagination. It's the
only way to explain how George W. Bush could call his looting of the federal
treasury a jobs program.
Fuzzy language begets spongy standards of accuracy begets lazy accountability,
making it harder to apply standards of accuracy to positive ads. In fact, the only
recourse for making campaigns tell the truth in positive commercials is to engage
in negative politics.
“Your only recourse is to find some factual evidence [to rebut their positive
claims],” says Kammerman.
Jim Moore, the best-selling author of “Bush's Brain” and “Bush's War” as well as a
former Texas political reporter, says that contrary to popular misconception,
negative attacks have accuracy in positive rhetoric.
“I actually think negative ads have improved credibility for issue and image
advertising for candidates,” says Moore. “Before negative ads began undergoing
scrutiny, candidates were able to embellish their resumes and make spurious
claims about their accomplishments and backgrounds because reporters were
operating on the erroneous assumption that no one would be so silly as to pump
up their CV while running for office. After journalists started doing truth tests on
attack ads, they went back to start analyzing bio advertising and some issues
spots. — The process got better as a result of negative advertising by campaigns.”
Voters and the eggheads they listen to abhor a campaign that engages in negative
attacks and counterattacks, but they fail to understand that the more negative
campaigns get, the more we take care to adhere to strict standards of accuracy
and truth.
Jason Stanford is the founder and president of Stanford Everhar an opposition
research