PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISING
A NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Attributes shared by political spots
summarized in six propositions
Proposition 1: The central purpose of political spots is to
influence voter's perceptions of candidates.
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A sign of preoccupation with
developing an appropriate image is
increasing reliance on consultants, hired
to fostering or enhancing a certain
image.
Television and the spot format are
extremely flexible in accommodating
the goal of image development.
Spots can "create" an image for an
unknown candidate, act as a reminder
of an established image, or signal the
voters that a candidate has "changed.“
Paid ads allow candidates to choose
their relationship to the political
culture, ranging from the candidate
with experience to an indignant
outsider, suggest an expedient or
principled nature, or endorse a new or
old American myth (e.g., "Log Cabin"
origin or a "Rags-to-Riches" story).
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Ads position a candidate within the field of competitors as the underdog,
the front-runner, or as being distinct, in some way, from the opponent.
Ads routinely portray, implicitly and explicitly, the ideology, concerns,
visions, and values of a candidate.
Because of demonstrated accessibility to voters, spots become the forward
element of the campaign, the public fare, the surrogate for the candidate.
Proposition 2: Televised political spots are
designed to promote positive and negative
images .
•Spot advertising largely consists of embracing or attacking
ideologies and values by associating praise or blame with
candidates.
•Candidates can choose to promote positive images, thereby
encouraging a vote for themselves, or negative images of the
opponent, encouraging a vote against the competitor.
•All political imagery inherently implies an evaluation of the
opponent.
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When candidates utilize positive advertising, they engage in a narrative of selfenhancement.
Campaigns, however, involve a "forced choice" and thus affirmation also contains
an implicit rejection of the opponent. Claims that exalt one candidate's virtue
necessarily bring to mind relative deficiencies in the opponent
• For every hero, there has to be a villain.
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Negative ads are the more direct manner in which
candidates attempt to depreciate the image of an
opponent.
Negative spots typically discredit the opposition by
indicting their public record, assigning them blame
for an imperfect world, or raising doubts about
future performance.
Because campaigns are so deeply tied to candidates
as the central actor, it is not surprising that pitting
two persona against one another promotes the
embodiment of evil in the opponent.
Candidates contextualize the opponent's image as
the "enemy," such that even normal political activity
becomes a sign of an immoral actor.
Negative spots operate to debunk, subvert, and
unmask (Burke, 1959; Fisher,1970), that is, to
expose what has appeared to be desirable as
undesirable.
As with positive messages, negative ads not only
subvert the target, but they also promote the source
by implying an inverse judgment.
• For every scapegoat, there is likely to
be a savior.
Proposition 3: Televised political spots are more concerned
with creating a favorable image for oneself than with
presenting a logically precise argument.
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The standards normally associated with traditional rationality
(formal and informal logics) are absent in most political
advertising.
Spots conform to the reality of TV as entertainment
The relationships between claims, reasoning, and evidence (i.e.
facts, analogies, testimony), while often displaying the form and
appearance of a "logical argument," usually function to bolster
emotional appeals, loose analogies, disassociation and
association, and ad hominem arguments.
The "hype" of "production values," combined with the visual
nature of the medium, promote an intimacy and immediacy with
the audience; asking not for reflection but rather acquiescence
(Postman, 1986).
Television is an emotional medium. Spot ads, with their
truncated exposition and powerful imagery, are more effective in
appealing to the hopes and fears, aspirations and uncertainties,
prejudices and nobility among voters than in constructing a
reasoned treatise.
Not only does brevity tend to disallow formal argument, spots
also combine discursive and nondiscursive elements in their
appeal. Often the pictures in political television have more to do
with the meaning of an ad than the voiceover (e.g., Schram,
1987).
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Jamieson (1988) contends that "television is a visual medium whose natural grammar is associative, a person
adept at visualizing claims in dramatic capsules will be able to use television to short-circuit the audience's
demand that those claims be dignified with evidence."
The pattern of organization is more nearly one of "enthymematic complicity" in which the audience is recruited
to supply the reasons for embracing an ad campaign. The inducement is more one of identification than
deliberation.
Proposition 4: Televised political spots seek images that
resonate in voters lives and are believable.
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If practitioners are unanimous about anything, it is that ads must,
above all else, be credible.
It is less clear, however, what message components make an ad
campaign credible.
Campaigns cannot manufacture an image for a candidate "out of
whole cloth." Roger Ailes, advises, "You can present all the issues
you want on the air, and if at the end the audience doesn't like the
guy, they're not going to vote for him."
Certainly there is latitude between the "private" person and his or her
"public" image, yet the candidate as a public actor, before and during
the campaign, places real boundaries on messages voters find
credible.
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One key may be to seize the candidate attributes held
in the public mind and defend an interpretive context
in which those qualities are desirable.
Typically candidates attempt to capitalize on attitudes,
beliefs, and values already held by voters, seeking
actional and attitudinal homophily with their
contingency.
Rarely do campaigns seek ideological conversion.
Most often the image portrayed in spots reflects the
latest polling data.
For many campaigns, establishing credibility with
voters simply means following the "lead" of the
electorate; consequently the "issue of the day" or
public fears inform advertising.
Resonating with voters requires more than simply the
candidate acting as an echo chamber.
At a more fundamental level, campaigners' messages
must ring true with the experience of voters.
Voters may "want" to hear certain panaceas but still
may reject them as untruthful. (see next principle).
Proposition 5: Televised political spots are
prescriptions for action.
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Political spots are fundamentally a
configuration of symbols which propose to
define or redefine the past, present, and
future.
Spots provide various symbols (e.g., patriotic
themes) embracing hierarchies of values and
order.
At their core, ads are prescriptive. Messages
provide explicit and implicit prescriptions
and resolutions for life's problems, in effect
instructing the electorate for sizing up their
situations and providing strategies for dealing
with them.
Spots place the world within a context which
helps voters make sense of their environment
and provide, as Brummett (1985) describes
the symbolic process of mass media,
"equipment for living."
In an attempt to define the context or scene,
spot campaigns offer voters competing
conceptions of the past, present, and future.
These potential realities are seldom neutral,
but rather imply varying degrees of hope and
despair. (e.g., "the good old days" or "the
promise of the future", “Morning in
America”)
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Janette Muir's (1987) study of a large
cross section of political spots,
characterizes the core message of spots
as "stories about how America is and
what it can eventually become."
The most common form of political
advertising is some variation of a
problem/solution, in which an injustice is
revealed and the candidate is presented
as the solution.
The "candidate as fixer" becomes the
symbolic representative of hope-laden
claims.
Spot " are "stories," complete with a
storyteller, actors, plot, and dramatic
conflict.
Spots function as self-contained
lessons on the conditions in one's
life, definitions of self-identity, and
the revelation of salvation with
the candidate as savior.
Proposition 6: Story lines developed
in spot campaigns are opposed by
competing stories.
• Campaign rhetoric is seldom isolated, more often it stands in direct conflict with a
competing message.
• An election campaign is by its very nature a dramatic story of competing forces,
each with its own story to sell.
• Charles Guggenheim observes, "No one in his right mind, in a senatorial or
gubernatorial or presidential election, cannot use television--if for no other reason
than self-defense to neutralize what will undoubtedly be coming from the other
side."
• Few candidates have the luxury of not producing spots, regardless of their efficacy.
Patrick Delvin relates an old adage in campaigns which states that, "half of all
advertising money is wasted. Since nobody in a campaign knows which half, all
advertising continues."
• Spots are not entertained in a vacuum, there
is a rival depiction of the political landscape.
• Hence, the meaning of one candidate's spots
is defined, in large measure, by the
opposition's commercials.
• Through the practices of simply ignoring or
offering direct confrontation, imitation or
contrast, rebuttal or initiation, the spots from
campaigns imbue each other with meaning.
• Spots engage in an unfolding dialogue.
• Ads, unlike many aspects of a campaign, are
adaptable. Spots can be repeated, revised,
substituted with new generations of
messages, and directed to influence selected
segments of the electorate.
• Rothenberg notes that new technologies
allow "candidates to respond overnight to
their opponents, rather than simply repeat
bland, non-combative `issues' spots shot at
the campaign's start."
The End