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Election Titillation
History Study Center
While it's often difficult to reach a consensus on whether a particular ad is "negative," it's usually easy to get people to agree that negative advertising in general is a bad thing and that, as John McCain put it earlier this year, we all "want a respectful campaign."
But do we? Or are the election season's negative ads like titillating stories about celebrities--things we in theory deplore but in practice love watching.
In this new activity from the History Study Center, learn about an experiment that suggests, for all our disapproval, most of us eat negative ads up.
"I'm John McCain, and I approve this message."
"I'm Barak Obama, and I approve this message."
Voters living in swing states will hear those lines repeatedly in the run-up to the presidential elections. It was not always so. Before 2002, when President Bush signed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) into law, candidates could retain a certain distance from ads criticizing their opponents. This distance proved useful in allowing them to keep their hands clean, while others took the low road on their behalf.
The key provision of BCRA is often referred to as "Stand by Your Ad" (SBYA). Modeled on regional initiatives in Minnesota and North Carolina, SBYA requires candidates running for federal office to identify themselves and approve the contents of their campaigns' TV ads. Both the identification and the approval have to be unambiguous, with still or moving pictures of candidates taking up at least 80 percent of the screen and a written disclaimer appearing for at least four seconds.
The sponsors of SBYA had two overriding objectives: to make political candidates take responsibility for the criticisms of their opponents and to decrease the output of negative ads. The two were linked: as John McCain put it in a 2004 speech to the Senate, no serious candidate would "approve a lot of the trash [that goes into] negative attacks."
In the December 2005 edition of Presidential Studies Quarterly, Kristina Gale and several colleagues reported the results of an experiment conducted to measure the SBYA's success in reducing the number and softening the tone of negative ads.
John Kerry greets his swiftboat crewmates,
not the swiftboaters who would later attack
him and his war record
© 2004 Getty Images, Inc.
Their findings would have disappointed the bill's sponsors. The number and tone of the ads in the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004 were "largely identical." And, adding insult to injury, the SBYA sometimes boosted the popularity of the candidate making the attack. Adding the candidate's approval to a negative ad, Gale et al concluded, actually made some respondents "more willing to support the candidate."
Activity
Read through the report by Kristina Gale and colleagues and also "Election 2004: What Happened?"--a reporter's account of what he termed the "most dishonest" presidential campaign he could remember.
Then, using specific examples in both articles to support your points, lay out the basis of a new campaign law that might, in your judgment, cut down on negative advertising.
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