Attack ads. They’ve become a big force in election campaigns on Long Island, New York, where I live. Several days ago, a little over a week before Election Day this year, I traveled to Maryland for a family event, turned on the TV in the motel room—and there they were, hundreds of miles away: political attack ads one after another.
The names of candidates, other than those running for president and vice president, of course, were unknown to me. But the political TV commercials were thoroughly familiar. Attack ads have clearly become a fixture of politics in the United States.
In my master’s degree thesis in the Media Studies Program at The New School of Social Research in New York, I wrote about how political TV commercials began in the United States. I recounted how Madison Avenue advertising man Rosser Reeves convinced Dwight Eisenhower to use him and TV commercials to run for the presidency in 1952.
Four years earlier Reeves tried to interest the then also Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, in this. But Dewey, former New York governor and Manhattan DA, didn’t go for the idea believing it would be lowering himself to being a political version of a TV toothpaste ad.
Most importantly, Reeves had an early understanding of how television best communicates feeling and emotion, not information. TV, as was related in The New School media program, is a “non-cognitive medium.” A dictionary definition of cognitive is “involving conscious intellectual activity such as thinking, reasoning.” Non-cognitive involves feeling.
Reeves’ ads showed Eisenhower grinning—stressing the likeability of the former five-star general. A slogan was fashioned: “I Like Ike.” That’s what campaign buttons declared, too. I recall them as a kid. And there was even a song written for the theme, lyrics and music by Irving Berlin, no less, titled “I Like Ike.” The chorus began: “You like Ike, I like Ike, everybody likes Ike for president.”
The Democrat candidate, Adlai Stevenson, quite the intellectual, tried to counter the blitz of Eisenhower “I Like Ike” spots by embarking on a series of half-hour TV presentations, giving lectures on issues of the day. That didn’t work on TV.
Then, several years later, added to the political TV commercial came an attack component. What is considered the first TV attack ad arrived in 1964 and was done by Tony Schwartz, also an advertising man from New York, for Democrat Lyndon Johnson for president. In it, a little girl plucks petals from a daisy, counts up to nine, and then a man’s voice counts down from ten to zero—and suddenly the TV screen fills with the super-scary footage of a hydrogen bomb exploding, and Johnson’s voice states: “The stakes are too high…We must either love each other or we must die.” The inference was that a nuclear conflagration was what was faced with GOP candidate Barry Goldwater
It made use of how TV foremost causes people to feel.
That is at the essence of an attack ad. It goes to the negative, often with scowling and otherwise ugly photos and videos and words of a political opponent, demonizing him or her.
And that was what I was seeing in that motel in Maryland: the demonization of candidates. They were just like what we see on Long Island or anywhere in the U.S. these days: now standard, cookie cutter attack ads leaving a bad feeling about a candidate.
Now I know there are plenty of rascals and worse in politics who very much deserve to be criticized. But the now ubiquitous TV attack political ad is far more than that. It’s become a main basis for how one candidate is sold and the other, some of whom surely don’t deserve character assassination, is dealt with.
“Attack Ads” Why They Work—Then and Now” was the heading of an essay by journalist David Corn in the magazine Mother Jones in 2022. “For years, people have asked whether mud-throwing ads work. The answer: basically yes. Perhaps not always. But they can—especially when the targeted candidate is not already well-known to the public.”
Or as Hannah Falcon in September reported on KFVS in Missouri, a TV station that also covers parts of Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee: “When you turn on your television, you’re likely inundated with political ads. Many of these ads take a negative approach, criticizing the campaign’s opponent.” She went on, “These attack ads are widely disliked, but Columbia College [in Missouri] political science professor Terry Smith PhD, said you keep seeing them because they work. Smith said it’s a psychological impact making these appeals very effective, no matter how negative the emotions are.” Smith says in her piece: “Everybody hates negative ads, but the reason that people use them is because they work. They appeal to the gut and people react politically to being appealed to at the gut level.”
Dr. Drew Western, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, wrote an article published in the Los Angeles Times in 2012, that began: “In poll after poll, Americans say they don’t like negative campaigning….So why do candidates rely so heavily on a kind of advertising voters say they abhor?”
Western, author of the book “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” said: “The reason it’s so crucial for politicians to activate both negative and positive emotions is that they are not, as our intuition would suggest, just opposites. Emotions such as anxiety, fear and disgust involve very different neural circuits than, say, happiness or enthusiasm. A candidate’s job is to get all those neural circuits firing, both the ones that draw voters in and the ones that push them away from other candidates. That doesn’t require making things up about your adversaries. You don’t have to bend the truth too far to paint a worrisome picture of any of the candidates” and “with flawed candidates, expect a lot of negative campaign ads between now and November.”
Political ads are now appearing far more than ever.
As Dr. Heather LaMarre, a professor of media and communications at Temple University in Philadelphia, explained this year in an article on “The Conversation,” an online publication: “Political ad spending has monumentally increased over the past several election cycles, and hit the billions after the landmark 2010 Citizens United case. In that ruling the Supreme Court decided that limiting spending from corporations or outside groups violated those groups’ First Amendment right to free speech.”
She said “following the ruling…the influx of corporate and outside money completely changed the campaign finance landscape….Significant portions of this spending come from political action committees that are not bound by traditional campaign contribution limits as long as they do not donate the money directly to a candidate or coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. These groups, known as super PACs, can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from undisclosed donors.”
And, further, the professor cited a Pew Research Center study which, she said, found that: “These days, most political ads are negative.”
“Prior studies have shown that people pay closer attention to negative information than to positive information,” she continued. “And infamous ad effects such as Johnson’s easy win after airing the daisy ad contribute to the commonly held belief that negative ads still win elections.”
What a most dubious major element in democracy today: slick and effective character assassination that makes mudslinging in politics in days of yore seem primitive.
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