Negative political advertising

[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

Comments

[aimeric.livejournal.com]

Interesting point, but I think this is too cursory an analysis. I'd agree that negative ads generally focus on issues ("candidate X voted against Y!" vs "candidate X cares for your community"), but I'd argue that what they usually do is distort them. Even having a true fact will lead someone to a wrong conclusion if other, more relevant facts are omitted or taken out of context. Or, one can use documented facts in combinations with incorrect logic to produce an erroneous conclusion. (After all, you can have true premises and still have a non-valid argument, e.g. "All A are B; All C are B" could be true but "All A are C" is not).

Moreoever, I'd argue that self-correction by the system does not solve the problem. a) people might not see the correction (e.g. front page news correction buried on pg 20), b) a pulled ad isn't equal to a countered ad (wasn't the Daisy ad aired only once?), c) a good portion of the population doesn't research whether what they've been presented is actually true - especially if this line is parroted by an authority figure they agree with - and d) the initial accusation will be believed by a portion of the population regardless of what facts are presented later to the contrary.

More precisely, the prof's statement: "[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" doesn't hold water to me:

- Does he show that the rebound effect happens with significant frequency?
- If not, because the threshold is so high that no one wants to risk the rebound effect, then how can he prove his statement?
- What constitutes a fact? If candidate A says X and B disputes it, and A *repeats* X, and B refines Not X, etc, etc, etc, then at what point do we determine that sufficient documentation has been provided?
- Re: "Looking like a fool". People will swallow lies if they're repeated often and loudly enough. Well-known tactic (I swear, I'm not going to invoke Godwin's Law...).

So, in general, I'd buy that negative ads focus more on specific issues and content, but that's about it.