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Are Negative Ads Really Getting Worse Susan Estrich In 1964, a nation was shocked as a young girl counted down to a nuclear explosion, picking the petals off a daisy. It was an ad for Lyndon Johnson, and it was only on for a day before an uproar caused it to be pulled. By the time of the election, however, nearly everyone claimed they'd seen it, which they probably had, on the news. Today, there's a mushroom cloud in a negative being run against Pennsylvania Senate candidate Bob Casey, and the only reason it's on the news is because there is no uproar. In 1988, there were two ads about Willie Horton, the murderer who committed rape while out on furlough - one widely considered to have racial overtones, the other made carefully, with an abundance of white "prisoners" going through a turnstile, so as not to.
Today, when I show both ads to my students, they seem almost innocent compared to the one that has been running against Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, featuring a white Playboy bunny saying she met the African-American candidate at the Playboy mansion. Every year, we say it's getting worse. But is it really getting worse? Story Continues Below
The truth is, politicians have been calling each other terrible names since they've been running against each other. But if the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan so famously said, then the message has definitely changed. Today, they spend more money doing it than ever before, they have more media in which to do it, they are more creative and more unregulated about how to do it, and the limits of taste, truth, decency and decorum don't apply where they used to. There are network ads, cable ads and Internet ads. There are ads that you never expect to show on television, but make for news conferences, ads made to stir controversy, ads that get more airtime on the news than they ever get on paid television, and virtually all of them are negative. Every year, I play dozens of ads for my students, and the ones they remember afterward are the "best" negative ones. Best is toughest. Voters are the same way. They'll tell you how much they hate negative ads, but then you show them a reel, and the spot that changes their mind is the negative one. In the old days, people used to at least make a pretense of putting on as many positive as negative spots. Today, there isn't even any pretense. Negative ads vastly outnumber positive ones. Because they work, we get more of them. But because we see them coming and know we hate them, we pay even less attention than we used to, so we get even more. (Do you really think the consultants would suggest that the answer is to give us fewer?) And the attacks can't help but be sharper: Since we are inured to the attacks from last time, this year's must be even more creative, which usually means more vicious. The ante is continuously being upped. There is no limit to what will be done. The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee initially stood behind the anti-Ford ad. The Chairman of the Republican National Committee said he saw nothing racist about it. It took a good two days before its Congressional Campaign Committee sponsors took it off the air. By then, nearly everyone in the country had seen it, if not as a paid spot, then in the "free media" (aka the news), which, as the Johnson campaign discovered, is the ultimate placement for an advertisement. Whether the controversy helps Ford or the people who placed the ad remains to be seen. But the ad-makers must surely figure that the more times people see the ad, the less likely they are to vote for Ford. Otherwise, why would they have made it?
COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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