Negative political advertising
Oct. 31st, 2006 07:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madbaker"The difference between a positive ad and a negative ad is that the negative ad has a fact in it."
Historically I have basically bought into the conventional wisdom: that attack ads or negative ads are bad. A fact of life - and effective, which is why they are used - but bad.
John Geer, a poli-sci prof at Vanderbilt, did a survey in a book published earlier this year ("In Defense of Negativity") where he looked at nearly every presidential campaign TV ad since 1964. He rated them; "better" ads discussed relevant political issues of the day, had specific substance, and (perhaps most importantly) had documentation.
Negative ads scored better on all those.
Geer's comment: "[With attack ads] the threshold is higher. You need documentation and support. If a candidate just attacks, without documentation to back it up, it rebounds against the attacker and he looks like a fool."
It doesn't mean I want to watch them, of course. (Or the positive, content-free ones either.)
What I'm reading: Jack Campbell, Dauntless
Historically I have basically bought into the conventional wisdom: that attack ads or negative ads are bad. A fact of life - and effective, which is why they are used - but bad.
John Geer, a poli-sci prof at Vanderbilt, did a survey in a book published earlier this year ("In Defense of Negativity") where he looked at nearly every presidential campaign TV ad since 1964. He rated them; "better" ads discussed relevant political issues of the day, had specific substance, and (perhaps most importantly) had documentation.
Negative ads scored better on all those.
Geer's comment: "[With attack ads] the threshold is higher. You need documentation and support. If a candidate just attacks, without documentation to back it up, it rebounds against the attacker and he looks like a fool."
It doesn't mean I want to watch them, of course. (Or the positive, content-free ones either.)
What I'm reading: Jack Campbell, Dauntless
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-31 08:40 pm (UTC)That doesn't excuse the others. Kerry and the Gunboat stuff during the last Presidential campaign; the senator (or representative, don't know which, don't care) in Tenessee who's getting slammed by another Republican ad because gasp, he went to a Playboy Mansion party, and apparently they're lying about what went on, and so on. They make shit up. These are NOT facts. Yes, this guy went to the party, so what? What they claim happened at the party didn't ...
This may be asking a lot
Date: 2006-10-31 09:06 pm (UTC)Better? Okay. Now re-read the original post. Note that no mention is made of political party. (Both parties do negative ads, after all.)
The article I cited surprised me because it flew in the face of common wisdom (and my own general feeling) that negative ads have no redeeming value.
One of the points he was making is that they do. Which of these statements has more useful content (and is more likely to be backed up by documentable evidence):