One Year On!
I've been so busy this past week that I let pass the one-year anniversary of this blog. So to celebrate(?) I'm reprinting my first substantive post, from Nov. 29, 2004.
- Election advertising boondoggle
It looks like we finally know the full cost of the recent election, and it’s a hell of a lot! The Alliance for Better Campaigns points out that more than $1.6 billion was spent in the hundred largest media markets on electioneering by parties, candidates and — most prominently this year — independent groups such as MoveOn.org (the so-called “527s”). This tally, is, unfortunately, at the upper end of a spectrum of pre-election estimates that ran from $1 billion to $1.6 billion. It's also more than double what was spent in 2000. These findings, also covered in TVWeek (registration required) are more or less in line with other investigations into campaign TV advertising, such as those conducted by the Lear Center Local News Archive, as well as Nielsen Monitor Plus, and the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project. The Lear Center points out that almost two million political spots were aired on 615 stations in the top 100 TV markets — equivalent to 677 full days of advertising! So what, you might ask, is this doing to our democracy?
The worst part of all this, of course, is that local TV stations, where most Americans now get their news and where most of this $1.6 billion was spent, have largely abrogated their public service responsibility to provide comprehensive coverage of national, and especially local, elections. The election-related pieces local stations did air tended to be pretty flimsy, to say the least. Strategy and horserace stories outnumbered issues stories by a ratio of 3:2; ad watch stories, meanwhile, made up less than one percent of all campaign stories (according to the Lear Center). I could go on about this — and in time I will — but for now, check out NOW with Bill Moyers’ piece on local elections coverage — or lack thereof.
posted by hdougie at 12/01/2005 10:50:00 AM
3 Comments:
Although, I think that it's unfortunate that the expansion of the media has created huge amounts of electioneering to be made for television, I'll admit that such a growth in campaign TV advertising seems to be inevitable. Even more unfortunate is what is chosen to be aired on television news and ads; hardly any of it pertains to candidates' stances on important issues, such as health care, education, the economy. Instead, it seemed that 9 out of 10 times stories or political ads seemed to focus on personal backgrounds, or appearances. It's unfortunate that so many people rely solely on tv for their information on elections and candidates, however, as we've already seen before, it seems that technology is going to continue changing the face of the media and the information it delivers.
Visual image is now everything for today's candidates. It comes as no surprise that so much money is spent showing the candidates with their families or doing some activity that polishes their image. Advertising for local politicians seems to be even worse. One person running for an office in the Rochester area had a handful of kids no older than 10 in the commercial saying how dissapointed they were in the opponents previous term. To exploit kids like that made me sick to me stomach, but with television dominating elections these days, candidates are free to go farther than ever in order to secure their positive image or bash their opponent to the point where he/she looks like a criminal.
-rich pulvino
Now I don't know any exact statistics. However, I have to believe that most people these days, especially college students hear all their news from television. See all the adds from television. We pretty much know what we know from watching the television. That's why this does no surprise me at all with the amount of money that is being spent on campaigns on the t.v. network. During election periods, you can barely go one half hour of watching television with out seeing some add for an election.
-Casey Balog
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