Kay McFadden / Times staff columnist
Political ads: pox or vital part of political process?

AP A campaign ad for President Bush, praising him for "moving America forward" amid economic and terrorism challenges.

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Other links Search event listings Search movie listings Sign up for Movies e-mail

It's a crucial election. War still rages, the economy is shaky and the two presidential front-runners are virtually tied in the polls.

But if 2004 proves memorable in the annals of campaign coverage, it may well be as the year when advertising and talk shows effectively displaced TV news as the main conduits of information to voters. Beginning today, this column will take an occasional look at how television is shaping the race for the White House. First up are ads.

In another era, a logical starting point would have been the news.

Yet as study after study reveals, commercials for Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry have emerged as the No. 1 source of data to voters. Increasingly, campaign ads also frame how the news media report stories.

Depending on how you look at it, the result is a civic-affairs tragedy or a realpolitik adjustment to citizens with less time and shorter attention spans.

"We could say ads are the worst possible source, because of the spinning and distortion," said David Domke, communications professor at the University of Washington. "Or we could say they're the modern version of the Greek assembly, where we hear competing arguments and then make up our minds."

The ascendancy of ads is not just quantitative, although media watchdog groups report that network affiliate airtime for commercials now outnumbers campaign news coverage by a 4-to-1 ratio.

Content also is an important factor.

A July study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) and Pew Research Center found that public perception of the chief character themes surrounding the candidates — e.g., decisiveness, credibility — were established by their campaigns.

Although journalists were ranked as a secondary source for these themes, it's not clear to what extent they were responding to the candidates' own agendas.

William Benoit is the author of five books on presidential campaigns, including "Seeing Spots," an analysis of campaign ads from 1952 to 1996.

	AP Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is seen in a campaign commercial released in July and titled "Lifeline."

His research suggests that the growing dominance of advertising over TV news is linked to a rather startling fact. Of the 2004 ad spots he has analyzed through July, 60 percent are devoted to policy issues and 40 percent to character issues.

Conversely, a now-overwhelming percentage of TV news stories are devoted to so-called horse-race coverage: who's ahead, who's raised the most money and what provocative remarks may have been uttered on a given day.

Nor is the difference in approach confined to television news versus campaign spots. Benoit has analyzed 2004 primary reporting by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

In both broadcasting and print, he found an emphasis first on horse-race coverage, then character, then policy — which itself could be a turnoff to viewers and readers and make them more receptive to ads.

"Conflict may be more interesting, but in fact, presidential ad messages talk more about policy than do all of the news media," said Benoit, a professor of communication at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Benoit's findings are reinforced elsewhere. The Center for Media and Public Affairs conducted a February study of TV coverage and found even at the height of the Democratic nomination battle, only 18 percent of network evening news stories about the contest examined the candidates' stances or voting records.

Though it sounds implausible, the upshot is that voters actually may get more usable information from ads than from the news between now and Nov. 2.

Writing about election coverage, Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, commented, "If I had a choice between watching what you typically see in news about campaigns and typical ads, I would watch the typical ad."

For all their reach, though, presidential campaign ads still are regarded poorly. Madison Avenue professionals consider them a crude form of the advertising art and rarely handle them, although that's also to avoid politically charged waters.

As for viewers, they often deny advertising's sway when interviewed, preferring to cite the news first as they did in a follow-up survey from PEJ and Pew.

Nevertheless, a combination of unprecedented commercial bombardment, the usual human susceptibility to persuasion and above all, the declining role of TV news have reshaped the election process.

It might not seem so at first blush.

By the end of July, the campaigns for Bush and Kerry each had spent upward of $80 million on TV ads, according to TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group. (That's not including advocacy ads from so-called "527" committees such as MoveOn.org.)

Was it worth it?

A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll conducted from July 30-Aug. 1 revealed an even split among registered voters for the John Kerry-John Edwards team versus the George Bush-Dick Cheney team. Both got 48 percent.

That's statistically the same as Sept. 19-20, 2003, when the same polling group found a split of 48 percent for Kerry and 47 percent for Bush.

However, those numbers don't tell what would have happened if the two campaigns and their supporting organizations hadn't been engaged in a full-throttle fight to match ad for ad.

"Let me use a football analogy," said Benoit. "If you have two teams with equally strong defenses, you're not going to see a lot of scoring. But that doesn't mean it doesn't affect the game."

That analogy may have special resonance for Democrats. In 1988, candidate Michael Dukakis initially chose to take a high-road approach to Republican attack ads referencing polluted Boston Harbor and paroled convict Willie Horton.

Those spots aired in summer, and by fall, George H.W. Bush had passed Dukakis in the polls. The Democrats responded too late, a mistake not repeated when media consultant Chris Lehane worked for Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.

Beyond strategy, TV ads are seen as playing a critical role in addressing undecided voters.

Evidence indicates that despite conscious resistance to a particular commercial, viewers often succumb to advertising's cumulative effect in a form of internal decision-making that psychologists call "online processing."

In this process, viewers may not engage with a commercial, but it still gets into their heads. Stored over a period of time with other data, the actual ad may be forgotten while the cumulative impression remains.

Unfortunately, that impression also is based on feeling rather than vetted fact. Political ads don't have to be true — just forceful.

Washington's Domke fears the effect.

"In the final analysis, even though I'm not a curmudgeon about ads, this is a bad thing for a democracy," he said. "It allows candidates' claims to go unchecked and untested.

"But the culprit is not the increase in ads — it's the decrease in news coverage."

Monday: Where did all the news go?

Kay McFadden: kmcfadden@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More Entertainment & the Arts headlines...