05.07.08
Negative Campaign Ads - Repeat
With the results in from Indiana and North Carolina, the race for the democratic nomination is starting to see some resolution. Just last week, a noted super-delegate publicly pledge their support for one candidate, stating that part of his decision was made because of the negative campaign ads of the other candidate.
We here at The Oscar Show want to know what you think. The show that follows is a repeat concerning the effects of Negative Campaign ads. After listening to this show, we encourage our listeners to go on-line to WTJU.net and click on the Blogs and Pods link on the left hand side of the page. Follow that link to The Oscar Show site where you will be able to read the copy of the story as well as listen again. We want to hear your comments on this subject or the campaign in general. Enjoy the show and let us hear from you!!!
In today’s show, adapted from an article recently published on the Oscar Web site written by Brevy Cannon, we look at the research of University of Virginia politics professor Paul Freedman which suggests that the ever-growing barrage of political ads actually contributes to citizen education and engagement, and only rarely have negative impacts.
Television viewers may instinctively reach for the remote control when yet another political ad airs during a commercial break, but those who stay tuned may reap some surprising benefits.
A new book, “Campaign Advertising and American Democracy”, suggests that the ever-growing barrage of political ads actually contributes to citizen education and engagement, and only rarely has negative impacts. And according to reviewer Darrell West of Brown University, is “the most comprehensive examination of political advertising that has been attempted to date.”
Written by University of Virginia politics professor Paul Freedman, Michael M. Franz, assistant professor at Bowdoin College; Kenneth M. Goldstein, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Travis N. Ridout, assistant professor at Washington State University in Pullman, the book examines the political advertising of the 2004 election season.
It has been estimated that more than 3 million political ads were televised leading up to the 2004 elections, and in the race for the White House more than $800 million dollars were spent alone. Presidential candidates, along with their parties and interest-group allies, broadcast over a million ads — more than twice the number aired before the 2000 elections.
But according to the authors’ research, being barraged by political ads turns out to be a good thing. Freedman said, he sees political TV ads as “frequently informative, often funny, usually clever, and just a whole lot of fun… Only in the rarest of circumstances do they have negative impacts.”
Political ads, especially negative ads, have a bad reputation. But Freedman and his co-authors found that negative ads, in particular those that draw contrasts between a candidate and his or her opponent’s positions on issues or past record, turn out to have the most measurable positive effects.
Freedman, an election analyst for ABC News in New York since 2000, said, “candidates realize the importance of responding to opponents’ ads that raise questions about their records, character or issue stances, so negative ads help hold candidates accountable.” He went on to say, “we found that the more ads that people are exposed to, the more likely they are to vote.”
Freedman said, “this does not show a direct cause-and-effect relationship, such as X dollars spent on TV advertising buys Y number of votes, but this is a stark example of how polling numbers track and mirror the strategic decisions by campaigns.” He went on to say, “Just as citizens and the polls respond to advertising, candidates respond to the polls. They make strategic decisions based on what the contest looks like at any point in time. The average American has an “impoverished diet of political information, and TV ads can be thought of as informational multi-vitamin, wrapped up in emotional coding, positive or negative, that makes it easier to swallow the substantive information, which is usually accurate and often backed up with footnotes or references to newspaper passages.”
While some pundits consider most political TV ads “nasty, brutish and short” — an annoyance at best, and at worst, corrosive to democratic citizenship and debasing to political discourse, according to their research, just the “sorts of ads most disliked by pundits, are the ones most likely to educate, engage and mobilize voters.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week as we resume regular programming of The Oscar show. And please visit the Oscar Show site by visiting WTJU.net and clicking on the blogs and pods link on the left hand side of the page. We want to hear from you.