Long before this year's elections, politicians' spot ads on radio and TV had earned a bad reputation for negativism, sheer nastiness and sidestepping the truth.
Some of the media, including major newspapers, began analyzing them in 1990, after the 1988 presidential race hit a low in credibility - remember Willie Horton? The Salt Lake TV stations wrung the ads through "truth tests" in 1992, a landmark year in which they said they were out to improve the political discourse.This year, spot ads saturated the air waves more than ever, and the huge sums spent on them became a local and national disgrace. (More than a billion dollars was spent nationwide, according to Advertising Age, including a stupendous $40 million by the two California multimillionaires running for the Senate.) Although even the experts disagree on how effective political spots are, the ads are widely presumed to have been a major factor in at least 10 key states this year. Questions also persist on whether the ads really have any informational value. Never mind that Enid Waldholtz, the most free-spending of the lot in Utah, insisted that she won because hers clearly conveyed her position on the issues.
- YET NO UTAH TV STATION addressed these questions and only one tried to test the accuracy of the ads on any systematic and regular basis. How come?
News executives at the four commercial news stations say that despite all the complaints about campaign ads, most of them on Utah TV were rather mundane. The ads got more negative and harsher and strayed further from demonstrable truth in the few days before the election. By then, however, scarce time on the newscasts was being given over to what the stations felt was more compelling election news.
Perhaps newspeople have a high tolerance for campaign overstatement anyway, because their natural skepticism sets up some defenses. "I look at politics as kind of a full-bodied contact sport," says Tim Ryan, news director at Fox Ch. 13. Ryan, who came to Salt Lake City recently from Dallas, says that in other markets voters expect some hitting below the belt, while in Utah it doesn't seem to play well.
Ch. 5 was one of the most zealous of the news outlets in doing the truth tests in 1992. Lee Roderick, then the news director, said early in that year that KSL would monitor ads in the major races, with the consent of the candidates themselves, and his experiment turned out to be intriguing and useful, a colossal success.
- THIS YEAR, says managing editor Bruce Lindsay, KSL again got releases to use the candidates' ads in news shows early in the campaign with the intention of repeating the 1992 performance. But then it discovered that the ads at that juncture didn't have the same blatant misstatements that were so prevalent two years ago. Most complaints about the ads centered on characterization or opinion rather than on facts; Lindsay says he's learned not to try to rebut an opinion with an opinion.
Still, some value might have come of analyzing the ads not just for factual truth but also for their nuanced card stacking and shading of fact. Some value might have come out of simply analyzing the effectiveness of the ads. I would have liked to have known if the newspeople agreed with my view, for instance, that the Merrill Cook take-back-America ads were meaningless and punchless.
Some of the media have wisely and conscientiously defined "truth" as including not only the accuracy of the script but also the image on the screen and the tone and the oblique suggestions.
- CONSIDER CH. 2'S APPROACH. Ch. 2 had no regular news feature analyzing the ads, but political reporters Rod Decker and Brian Mullahy did deal with four or five ads each in short segments on the news shows. (Mullahy, then at Ch. 5, did a lot of the truth tests in 1992). Many dealt less with "truth" than with comparisons or subjective appraisals.
For instance, in one of these critiques Decker saw an irony in the man-of-the-people pitch by Senate candidate Pat Shea. Shea, who has a Stanford-Harvard-Oxford pedigree, seemed to suggest in his first TV ad that he was, as Decker puts it, "a camper sort of guy."
Most of Ch. 2's analyses, however, were done early, rather than in the thick of the campaign.
After the 1992 election a Freedom Forum study on reforming campaign practices concluded:
"In the future, as campaigns shift increasingly to the television screen, broadcasters may have to pay keen attention to how the ratio of political advertising and news coverage changes in the weeks before election night. At this late stage in the campaign, the advertisements compete both in time and in effect with news coverage proper. . . . Broadcasters must ensure that viewers never confuse the objectivity of the news with the biased claims of the ever-more sophisticated political commercials."
NATIONALLY, CRITICS have been a great deal less charitable toward the political ad as a genre than have Utah broadcasters.
A full-page ad last Wednesday headlined, "Don't call it advertising," was placed in the New York Times the day after the election by the 1,200 employees of Ketchum Communications, a national advertising agency. It cited some especially disgusting ads of the current year and called them "filth." One of these was an ad about "a distraught woman
whoT is persuaded to appear in a commercial where she accuses the governor of New York of being responsible for the murder of her son."
"If a reputable corporation produced advertising with the same exaggerated claims and promises for their products and then failed to deliver on these claims, their executives would be fined or led off to jail in handcuffs. And, standing on the sidelines, shouting, `How dare they not deliver on what they promised!' would be those politicians who have condoned this year's group of political lies and exaggerations."
- IT URGED PEOPLE to "vote for a change in the nature and tone of political advertising" by writing to Ketchum Advertising, 527 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022.
A New York Times advertising columnist, Stuart Elliot, wondered whether "the sour, surly mood of the electorate has been fully reflected in the smarmy, annoying, inaccurate and sometimes irresponsible political messages" or whether "the electorate has become embittered and fractious as a result of being bombarded with so many negative, vicious ads."
In a column on the Deseret News editorial page last week Anthony Lewis opined that "the 30-second television spot advertisement, basic weapon of the modern American political campaign, is incompatible with the republican form of government. . . ."
- LEWIS IS A LIBERAL on free speech, but he was so incensed with the "dark image" of the typical spot ad that he said, "American campaigns would be far less degrading if we imposed
a banT by rule of law." He even argued, much at variance with his usual philosophy, that such a ban would not necessarily run afoul of the First Amendment.
I'm not so sure. Nongovernmental monitoring and self-regulation are much to be preferred, in the hope and belief that "the cleansing light of publicity" will bring reform without the dangers of censorship.
New York Times TV columnist Walter Goodman joined reformists who over the years have offered specific suggestions for judging political give-and-take. One of his key suggestions: Any ad that attacks a candidate's record should be followed with all deliberate speed by a news department account of its accuracy and method of delivery."
LET'S HOPE THE STATIONS don't let the truth test idea lie fallow too long. I wrote in 1992 that scrutinizing the ads was an idea whose time had come. I said the project calls for a lot of research that could strain the resources of small papers and small stations. But I concluded that it's worthwhile to make a solid try at holding down the wild rhetoric to which campaigns can degenerate.