Switching gears from my previous reading, the Nightly News Nightmare focuses on modern presidential elections from 1988-2004. Initially, it seems as if it is not going to be as helpful as I had hoped. The authors thus far have presented information about public option surveys. It is interesting that what people say they want the news media to cover and what the news media feels is important to cover are often different. For instance, public opinion polls consistently say that American’s want coverage of the issues, while the media constantly covers the candidates as people and their correspondent’s take on this. Even though American’s claim to not be getting the information they want from the news, they still continue to watch it.
I spent a lot of time this week on a cool website, livingroomcanidate.org. This website has an archive of most presidential campaign commercials from 1952-2008. I spent a lot of time watching commercials from both Democrats and Republicans. One striking theme emerges; campaigning in the last decade of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first centuries has taken a decidedly negative turn. I do not mean to suggest that negative campaigning is a new phenomenon. It seems as if older campaign commercials did more attacking of issues and less attacking of the candidate’s character.
Tying in what I learned from Nightly News Nightmare, this seems strange. If American’s are supposedly more concerned with issues that affect them (ie. healthcare, defense, social welfare programs), then why have advertisements turned away from the issues? The theme for modern political ads seems to be attacking one another’s character. Obama does not have enough experience. McCain is too old to be president. Sarah Palin is a sexy librarian with no brain.
There can only be one reason that campaigns chose to run these ads; they must work. Which shows the indecisiveness of the American electorate. We supposedly care less about candidates’ extra-marital dealings and war records then about their positions. However, we are not swayed by political platforms, we are swayed by the candidate’s personal shortcomings.
I am interested to see how Farnsworth and Lichter account for this apparent hypocrisy. Do American’s really not know what we think is important in selecting our leader? Or are these public opinion polls so far off base that they are projecting falsehoods about the electorate?
I plan to continue to read Nightly News Nightmare, as well as look around for other sites that log political advertisements. As Ben Wright suggested, I would like to look at how campaign posters and buttons have changed. Hopefully I can find a sampling of this online. If anyone knows of where I could find this, please speak up. Comments are always welcome…
Good start.
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Hey! So, about this whole "ads becoming more personal and less about the issues" theme... I wonder if it has to do not only with the American Public's preferences but also with candidate's positions. Perhaps, candidates realize that while they run as "democrat" or "republican" they actually need to stay fairly middle of the road in order to secure enough votes to be elected. I think that since we've forced our candidates to water down their political stances there's less to attack when it comes to the issues, and at that point we have nothing left but to worry about Palin's wardrobe or Obama's bowling skill. It might be interesting to look at nominees involved in particularly nasty personal campaigns and see if their policies are mostly similar or are very different. I have an inkling that there's something there.
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