Recommended background reading materials : "The Uncertain Leviathan" by Jonathan Schell; in Atlantic Monthly magazine
Seminar participants:
Prof. Elzbieta Matynia (EM), Prof. Jeffrey Goldfarb (JG), Adam Michnik, Ina Breuer (IB), Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni (HD), Malgorzata Gajda (MG), Magda Iwanska (MI), Andrew Klepikov (AK), Boris Kostov (BK), Anna Laido (AL), Rumyana Kolarova (RK), Karen Underhill (KU), Michal Vasecka. Visitors: Tim Hamilton (TH), Nancy Naft (NN), Boris Szoraj (BS), Chris Orfolk (CO), Diane Roberts (DR).
Introduction by Elzbieta Matynia: Hello everyone. We have the pleasure today to have with us Jonathan Schell, who joins us from the Media Studies Center in New York City, of which he is currently a Research Fellow. I would like to tell you a few words about Jonathan. As you may already know, he is a writer and political commentator, he has lectured, and is the author of many books. These include: Observing the Nixon Years, published by Pantheon Books in 1989, a collection of notes and commentaries for the New Yorker magazine during the Vietnam-Nixon Years; The Real War, published in 1988 also by Pantheon Books; a collection in one volume of "The Military Half" and "The Village of Ben Suk", together with new essays on the war; History in Sherman Park (1987, Knopf); The Abolition (1984, Knopf); The Faith of the Earth (1982, Knopf); The Time of Illusion (1976); The Military Half (1968); and The Village of Ben Suk (1967), one of the first books written about the Vietnam War.
Jonathan came to us today to help us understand the relationship between media and politics -- and in this case, between media and elections in America. As you know, an article of his entitled "The Uncertain Leviathan" appeared in Atlantic Monthly magazine in August. (Thanks to Editor Adam Michnik, it has already been translated into Polish and will appear in Gazeta Wyborcza, in Poland, this week). This text of this article should serve as background material for us, and for our long-distance study groups.
I will give Jonathan the chance to speak for himself. Professor Schell.
Jonathan Schell [JS]: Thank you. What I want to do today is give a hands-on talk about advertisements. I had 10 of this year's campaign ads sent to me from the Clinton and Dole presidential campaign offices, and I put them on this video cassette, so we'll have a chance to look at the television ads I will be speaking about.
[Note for electronic participants: the ads which were watched in the live session will be described in detail, and text will be provided, to help you follow the analysis.]
Before I start, I would like you to introduce yourselves. I would also like to ask you very quickly if you have been following the election campaign, and what some of your observations or thoughts about it may be. Then I'll proceed to my first prepared remarks, and we'll look at an ad or two on the videotape.
BK: My name is Boris Kostov. I arrived here two months ago, so I can speak only about these two months. I think one should make a very strict division between how the campaign is carried out on TV, as opposed to in printed media. If we are talking about TV, you have basically the ads, these two debates, and some coverage on certain channels. The printed media, in my opinion, is the place where the journalists are actually able to show their attitude towards the different candidates, and the issues; so for me it was much more interesting to see the way the newspapers portrayed the campaign. I was both surprised and not so surprised: I feel that the newspapers simply don't pay attention to the real issues. They pay too much attention to the tactical problems: Where do the candidates go? How do they perform? What are the percentages? Maybe this is the way they deal with campaigns in the USA -- maybe this is the usual stuff. I just expected much more attention to the real issues.
JS: Well, this type of specialized knowledge of politics and campaigning is part of what I want to talk about -- in a sense I'm doing what you criticize. But I think that this is something new -- that until the last 15 or 20 years, there wasn't a specialized technique of campaigning in the way there is now. But I'll talk more about that later.
MI: My name is Magda Iwanska; I am from Poland. I need some more time to express my ideas on this issue.
KU: My name is Karen Underhill, I'm from Chicago. What I find interesting about this election is that there is a national candidate Ralph Nader, who is on the ballot in the majority of states as the presidential candidate of the Green Party -- yet he has decided not to campaign at all -- and is practically non-existent in the media. I would be interested to learn why Ralph Nader has refused to raise campaign funds, or to actively help the Greens to advertise his candidacy -- since the media certainly isn't making an effort to do it for him.
JS: Yes, there isn't much.
IB: My name is Ina Breuer; I'm from Germany originally, but I've been in the States since 1983 so I'm practically American. I think what is interesting about these elections is, first of all I actually think there is more discussion of real issues in this campaign than in the past. I also think this is not a boring election, because there are real issues at stake this time, for me at least: the future of the social welfare system, the deficit, and so on.
NN: My name is Nancy Naft. I grew up in Canada, I've lived here for about two years. I don't have a television set; and I haven't found much substantive discussion of the pressing issues that I perceive as an ordinary citizen.
AK: My name is Andrew Klepikov, I'm from Ukraine. Maybe this election campaign is not as interesting as the last campaign because the Republican candidate, Bob Dole, is not as a strong a candidate as Clinton. On the one hand he is older. Also Republicans are currently losing the classical Republican position -- for example, on international relations. This was traditionally a priority sphere for the Republicans. Now, Clinton's Democrats have priority in this area. And Dole has made false steps: for example, in California he strongly criticized relations to immigrants. Yet California is a state of immigrants! And so on. But I am very interested in the political discourse between Republicans and Democrats, and in the will to power which can be seen in this discourse.
AK: My name is Agnes Kende, and I come from Budapest, Hungary. Unfortunately I have no television, so I could not watch the election campaign. But I really wonder whether or not the outcome of the election actually has an important impact or influence on people's everyday life after the election.
RK: My name is Rumyana Kolarova, I come from Bulgaria. I arrived here two weeks ago, but I must say that my observations of the campaign were more systematic when I was in Bulgaria, though limited, because I watched CNN International. They provide quite a bit of coverage on this.
I have been doing systematic research on the Bulgarian Presidential elections, which are currently being conducted, and on the primaries for the Bulgarian Presidential elections. It is a systematic observation of media coverage. If I can compare media coverage in the two countries: first of all, obviously here the campaign is much more routinized. You have institutionalized mechanisms, and roles which different media play, which members of Congress themselves play. It looks like well- organized theater in which everybody knows his or her role, so for us it really becomes a matter of analyzing the play. Second, I would say that definitely the people [in U.S. campaigns] are much more aggressive. When I say aggressive, this means that reactions are very strong; all the time there is tension, all the time you can feel the pressure, everybody's pushing. If there is a debate it's a real debate, a very intensive debate.
If you compare this to the Bulgarian type of campaigning, first of all there are no institutionalized channels and roles. Even if there is some attempt at institutionalization, everybody pretends that it is improvisation rather than a rehearsed thing. In all cases the pretense is that it's improvisation. And second, this kind of quick reaction and pushy behavior is not accepted in Bulgaria -- though I think this behavior can be quite productive; but in fact it's not accepted yet.
JS: This brings up one question that interests me very much. Here in the United States, and also in Western Europe, of course the political parties were formed in a different era. They were formed in a 'pre-media' era, so to speak. There was no television, of course; but more important even than radio or newspapers were trade unions, civic organizations of all kinds, rallies, demonstrations -- there was a tremendously substantial organization of politics reaching down to the grassroots. And one thing I'm wondering is, how are parties going to be able to take shape and acquire that sort of definition in a media age? I am referring to Eastern Europe and Russia, for example, where you now begin to have functioning democracies. But this is happening in quite a different era from the one in which the political parties took shape in the West. So I'm wondering if that's going to be very easy. I notice that certainly in Russia, the formation of parties seems to be a very difficult thing -- it does not seem to be very well advanced. You have this sort of left-over Communist Party, but Yeltsin doesn't seem to have put much together. I don't know about Bulgaria.
RK: The issue of party formation is an interesting issue in itself. But with regard to media, the problem is that media already exist -- so when the parties emerged, they emerged in a media setting -- though it's a special type of media setting, because you have the almost monopoly of the state media, or the so-called 'public media'. In any case, most of these parties are TV-born parties. They appear first on the TV, and after that they appear as real parties.
JS: It seems to me that those [parties] are likely to be very different animals from what developed in the U.S., for example. As you may know at the beginning of the American republic, there was no provision for political parties in the Constitution. In fact in the world in general there was really no such thing as a 'political party' as we understand it today. And the founders of the Republic were actually very much against political parties. They called them 'factions'. So, the rise of political parties was an improvised phenomenon, and it has always been improvised. It was 'extra-Constitutional', so to speak -- not anti-Constitutional -- and it turned out that the formation of the parties would become an essential part of democracy as it developed in all of the full-fledged democracies.
The democracies that seem to function best, in fact, are the ones in which at least two strong, major parties develop with clear definition, which can actually alternate in power. So it's a terribly important part of democracy. But that kind of party is disintegrating here in the United States, again under the pressure of the media -- and I hope we will discuss this trend. If the media disintegrates the parties here, how much more difficult may it be to actually found parties in that atmosphere? I hope we can return to that subject. But go on --
HD: My name is Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni. I work for the Program (ECEP) and I'm a Ph.D. student here at the New School for Social Research. My one observation about the campaigns: I lived in England for most of my life, and I am fairly cynical about what goes on in American media and in American politics. In the extreme case, it is essentially an argument between two different wings of the same party, over whether you conceive of the next century based upon the Old Testament or based upon the New Testament.
MG: I'm Malgorzata Gajda from Poland. Actually I don't have a TV set either. More than anything else, what I listen to are commentaries on the radio. These will be the questions I have, rather than the observations:
First, I am struck by a contrast. On the one hand there is the statement that "you can make it once you make it in the media"; and that the whole process of going to media people, and through the media is the way -- and it's the only way. On the other hand, the American population is used to all the media tricks. So how is it that the idea of 'making it in the media' is still accepted by the public? Everybody says that "We all watch it but we don't believe it anyway"; so how does this work?
My second question is the idea of the retaliation of constituencies -- that is, the process by which constituencies which traditionally used to be more toward one or the other party, change their allegiance. For example I've heard a few days ago a commentary on the radio about young business women who own small businesses, and who are leaning more and more toward the Republican Party -- for example on the issue on 'family leave'. How does it happen that those traditionally Democratic constituents are moving in a different direction?
And the third question is about negative advertising, and the whole evolution of advertising. On Monday I saw a film which showed a whole compilation of political advertisements from the 1950s up to 1992. This was amazing. For me as an outsider, I needed much more commentary which was not supplied; but when you look at it from Eleanor Roosevelt on, and how enormously campaign advertising changes -- and finally with the introduction of negative advertising. I am not used to it, being from Poland. It is SO shocking.
EM: You are not?
MG: Not in that sense, definitely. So these are the issues that interest me.
BS: My name is [Boris Szoraj], I work as Art Editor with the Polish-American Daily News, but I'm also interested in politics. I haven't been following this campaign very closely, for the simple reason that the outcome seems to be so predictable.
JS: But you have a TV.
BS: Yes I do [laughter]. I have been in New York for two years. It seems to me that there is less negative advertising this year than in the Congressional elections two years ago; but that is perhaps because Clinton never felt really threatened by Dole, from Day 1 of the campaign. But also, as one of the speakers said before, these American campaigns -- those I have witnessed -- are about creating a very superficial image, some aura and climate, and not about confronting the real issues. They are like junk food. And Clinton has all the assets. Dole seems to come from the pre-media age, and he's very awkward with media people.
JS: By the way, that's a very surprising development. It's true that the Democrats have greatly surpassed the Republicans in the skill of their media strategies. But it was very much the reverse in the Reagan era. The Republicans were really the pioneers in political advertising, media techniques, polling techniques, all of that. And there's a very good reason for this, which is that they're the party of business; and these techniques were first developed for business, as you know. So, advertising techniques were just ready-to-hand for them, and they simply switched them over to the political realm, with terrific effect. This was devastating for the Democrats, who didn't know what to do. Now they've learned, and actually they've moved ahead of the Republicans, in my opinion. Clinton, I think, is the greatest master of political public relations that this country has ever seen -- even more so than Reagan. A disgusting thing, perhaps, but I think it's true.
BS: The style of Clinton's public relations and his campaign influence Eastern Europe very much. Kwasniewski, the Polish President -- he is almost a Clinton clone.
JS: I would hesitate to speak, but I do see certain similarities between Clinton and Kwasniewski -- even the wives. [laughter]
BS: It's not a guess. Kwasniewski did send some of his advisors to the States, and they were coached by Clinton PR people.
JS: And by the way, in the information age, obviously one of the big things that you see going on is exactly this very quick contagion of techniques, but also atmospheres, from one country to another. We've seen it very much in the case of England. If you remember, Bush brought over some of the English Torries to advise him on campaigning -- and the Tories tried to help Bush out in other ways too, by getting some dirt on Clinton, regarding his stay in England. And Tony Blair [head of the Labor Party in Britain]: once again, he's a different animal from Clinton, but his whole strategy is very Clinton-esque; and his image is quite Clinton-esque. In fact I know that Blair's team have studied the Clinton experience very carefully.
CO: My name is Chris Olfolk and I haven't followed the campaign very closely, for one main reason which people have said: after you've seen so many, they all start to look a little more polished and a little more 'spun'. The one thing I noticed this year that I thought was interesting was a new media experiment in North Carolina. There the newspapers are joining together, and saying 'we're not going to do the daily spin routine. We're going to try to do stories on the issues.' I felt that was very interesting, and at the same time a little bit frightening; because if newspapers are in deciding in conjunction on what they're going to report, then what kind of information are you really getting? But it is definitely better than the 'spins' [ed: ].
JS: Yes. What you're describing is a new movement, called "Public Journalism". Are you aware of it at all? There's a movement in journalism in this country, and actually Jay Rosen down at New York University is closely involved with it --
EM: Who will hopefully be coming to join us.
JS: So he will be able to tell you about that -- but the idea of Public Journalism is, in an organized way, to try to get newspapers to more affirmatively address the issues within their communities and in the country at large. But ithis is very controversial, for just the reasons you suggest. Some critics have said, "Yes, it's all very well to concentrate on the issues, but on the other hand newspapers are supposed to observe and comment; they're not supposed to be participants. And they get involved in a conflict of interest as soon as they begin sitting down -- as public journalism people do -- with city leaders, with meetings of citizens, and asking them what their interests are and what they would like to see done, in order to decide what to cover. So it's a very controversial thing, but it is definitely a response to what we're talking about today -- which is the takeover of politics by the media, and the loss of substance that goes along with that.
AL: My name is Anna Laido, I'm from Estonia; and I don't have a TV either. [laughter] Actually this is the first time for me to follow a US Presidential campaign...
JS: Anything surprise you about it?
AL: Actually, Estonia just had Presidential elections a couple weeks ago, so the first thing that comes to my mind is a comparison between Estonia and the United States; but it's a very tricky thing in terms of political culture and the formation of parties. In part I am distracted simply by the exterior structure or organization of the campaign. But the first thing that comes to my mind is similar to what Boris said. I find myself thinking, "What are they talking about?" It's very hard to see the point in their speeches. The emphasis seems to be somewhere else.
MV: My name is Mihal Vasecka, Slovakia. I have a TV, so I have followed the election campaign. But unfortunately I realized very soon that it's extremely boring, so -- [laughter]
JS: That's true. I agree with that, actually. I'll try to make it interesting today, though.
MV: Maybe it is arrogant, but I think only first debate was really good, and brought out some new information. The debate of the former President was sometimes very good.
DR: My name is Diane Roberts. I too am an American citizen. One of the things that struck me is what you were saying about Clinton and his image, and the way that 'scandal' has been handled during the Clinton Administration. It seems as if scandal actually has some entertainment value -- and maybe that explains why he is able to survive through all these events without being tarnished.
JG: [Professor Jeffrey Goldfarb] As with recent campaigns, I think that two things are going on. One is a kind of cynical debate of manipulation and constituency-appeal that is not very substantive. But at the same time, very visible to the viewer, the reader, and the voter, and clearly articulated by the candidates, clear alternative political models are being articulated -- and people can make decisions on the basis of issues.
You can watch the debates and say,"oh, this was all a performance, they have packed lines". You can even analyze every sentence and see where they were trying to appeal to one constituency or another; reveal their strategies. Nevertheless, at the same time watching those debates you can see that there are two different economic programs, two different approaches to questions about what constitutes a good society, what constitutes the future. And what is interesting to me is how commentators often become obsessed by the first part -- the relatively superficial part. It's very sad when you talk to the electorate. They too fall into that kind of pseudo-analysis. Yet, the election does have its rational qualities, and you can actually see people making rational decisions. The only other thing I will mention is that until quite recently, in California, I thought it was quite amazing that this is the first election since 1968, with the possible exception of 1976, where the Republicans didn't use a coded racist message to increase votes -- until very recently.
EM: [Elzbieta Matynia] My observation, or rather my worry, is concerned with the intensity of different messages which people are receiving throughout the campaign, and the effect this may have on voters. I worry that the campaign may become a kind of substitution for elections: if at the end we are either so bored or exhausted by the intesne bombardment of campaign advertising, a lot of people may feel that they already did it: they watched, they participated, they got engaged or upset, and they are not going to do much more. I'm curious about the relationship between the intensity and superficiality of the coverage, and the possible turn-out at the election.
JS: The polls do seem to suggest that the turnout will be low.
Now, I'll give just a little bit of background, and then I want to talk about one or two specific advertisements.
The whole rise of political advertising dates only back to about the late 1950s or the 1960s. As I was saying before, political advertising has come more and more to replace other kinds of politics; and I think that what we're seeing is a very deep reshaping, not so much of what the content of politics is, but what its forms are -- the way that politics happens.
I got an ocular demonstration of that this summer, when I attended both of the political conventions. At each one, there were 15,000 journalists. Fifteen thousand journalists. This is an amazing thing to see. I really haven't quite gotten over it yet; the changes that have occurred. There is a play called "The Front Page" -- which shows the journalist of the 1930s as somebody with a pencil in his hat and a little pad, and he's running out interviewing people. Well, forget all of that; just forget it. This is like the Pentagon. I tried to think of an analogy. The closest thing that I could come up with is the big army bases in the Vietnam War -- which I visited, because I was a reporter in Vietnam.
At these bases they would lower in suburban houses, kitchens, movie theaters -- they were like small pieces of America pulled out of America and just lowered into Vietnam. Very similarly, at these conventions, outside the convention halls or surrounding them, are these Journalism Cities that have been erected. These giant airplane hangars. There's food, bathrooms, everything. Computers -- the wires are snaking everywhere, the trucks are all roaring out in back with the satellites pointing up to the sky. And you get some of the feeling of the power that you got from seeing a military base. It's an awesome thing. And then you reflect on what's going on -- that these antenna are going up to satellites, that this is going all over the world. I don't think that we've yet caught up with what a deep and profound transformation that is in the world of media, simply on the level of size and magnitude.
And it's all the more striking of course, because of the fact that there was no story to cover with either of these conventions.
[laughter]
Really, it was a Convention of Journalists, to which politicians came, in order to try and manipulate the public. There were 4,000 delegates and alternates -- 15,000 journalists. That tells you the story. It was something absolutely surreal to see. I don't know what should be done about that, whether they should cut down the number of journalists, or who should do it. But I couldn't help thinking that if those 15,000 journalists would spread out across the world, or the United States, and write about real things that are happening, what a benefit that would be to mankind!
So, what I'm saying is there to me in a visible form, was this immense establishment (again, similar to the Pentagon) -- ritualized, highly-paid. And we don't know yet what the influence of that is going to be, although we can see already that it is absolutely decisive in politics. And I think what we're getting is a re-shaping. On the one hand you have a class of people -- and the 15,000 journalists are the visual representation of this -- who are a type of 'specialist' in politics. They're like ...dentists; who are interested in Dentistry; and they go to the Dentists Convention, they get the dentists journals; and they just can't get enough of it, they're junkies as we say. And then on the other side you have the public at large, which seems to be dropping out more and more. As you know, the turnout at Presidential elections is about 50% -- it was a little higher in the last election, we'll see what happens this time. 50%, that's a very low percentage -- especially when you consider the importance an election is supposed to hold in a democratic society; and when you consider other countries as well.
So on the one side you have this tremendous professional class, and on the other a rather bored and also a rather disgusted Public. From my observations while traveling this year with candidates, and spending time with voters, I believe that just below the surface is a terrific disgust with this entire political establishment. Journalists and politicians included. And I think that the sudden rise of Colin Powell [candidate for President in 1992] that you saw; the rise in 1992 of Ross Perot, these sudden enthusiasms are signs of a will to reject this establishment. But they haven't found the way to do it yet.
I'm of course part of this professional class -- I'm one of the dentists. But it occurred to me in 1984, that I was only talking to all my professional friends about politics. I thought "well I'll just quit all that, and I'll go out somewhere in America and I'll just talk to -- my original idea was one voter; and see on the ground everything that went into that one vote; what composed it and made it up. As it turned out I found two voters. They were husband and wife, one was a Democrat and one was a Republican. To put it very briefly, it was absolutely revelatory for me. The dimness of politics down at the local level, as compared to the vividness at the professional level, was just so very striking. For these voters politics was like watching something happening a thousand miles away, a few dim images and ads. Also, I couldn't help noting that people's views, as far as I could tell, were very lightly held. They were very malleable, very changeable. People talk about de-alignment and re-alignment in political affiliation; I think it's more like de-politicization.
Also, the stereotypes. Very often I would talk to a voter who would have a strange (at least from the point of view of the professional class) combination of religious, right and leftist views -- very surprising, when you got it down to the level of the individual voter. The sharp stereotypes of voters, that are really formed by the media and encouraged by them, don't actually exist.
So I think a very very deep reshaping of political life is taking place, and unfortunately I think it includes a lot of withering of what used to constitute politics -- which was more of a grassroots phenomenon. Above all, a withering of the activities of the parties themselves, which were traditionally much more on-the-ground operations, and of unions. Now this year we see the unions re-entering politics; but in what form are they re-entering? They're re-entering with a 30 million dollar ad campaign. I'm sure that they're doing more traditional organizing as well, but it's barely visible. What really gets the attention and what seems to count is the ad campaign.
That's just a little bit of background about what I see happening to the shape and form of American politics. What I want to do now is discuss, in some detail, two specific political ads.
Some of you commented earlier one of the big questions that has been agitating the commenting class: that is, whether Dole would "go negative" or not. And of course he did go negative. And as you all know, "going negative" is a jargon phrase standing for over-all bad manners and nastiness in your campaign. And by the way, that's just one of the new jargon terms -- the idea of "positive" and "negative". This almost childishly simplistic idea that the world can be divided into positive and negative, and that things should be identified that way. It is part of a huge, specialized political jargon that has evolved, and which didn't exist before. Previously, ordinary English words were quite adequate for political purposes. But now you have "wedge issue"; you have "going positive", "going negative". You have "the candidate's positives", "the candidates negative"; your "on message", your "off message". There's a whole new battery of technical terms, which to me is symbolic again of the 'professionalization' of the activity -- as if political campaigns are now the business of a certain class of people, rather than all of us, the way it's supposed to be.
In any case, Dole did go negative. But he did it within certain limits; and in fact as somebody commented, we are not seeing quite as many of the so-called 'negative ads' as we did in the 1994 campaign, or for that matter in the 1988 campaign. Actually, I think there's a very good reason for that. There are certain rules and regulations that have come to define and circumscribe political advertisements in this country. For instance, they should not be flatly false or inaccurate. If you say something that is simply factually false, there is a whole battery of professional journalists who are now writing things called "Ad Watch" and so on -- it's a minor industry that's grown up, a sub-specialization of the field -- and they will point our that, "No, it is not a 275 billion tax cut, it was a 270 billion --", if you make that kind of mistake. In fact every now and then someone gets slapped down by his opponent or by the press for doing this. One example, for instance, is the recent negative ad run by the Republican candidate from New Jersey, Bob Zimmer.
He showed an ad that simulated a newscast. It showed a news announcer-ish looking woman, but it wasn't a real newscast. The woman was announcing so-called "news", that the opponent of Bob Zimmer had accepted money from this, and done that, and now this just in... , and so forth. He was criticized for that because he actually faked a newscast.
JG: It's still on the air.
JS: Oh, so he hasn't been forced to pull this ad. One that definitely was pulled from the air, and that caused a bigger fuss, occurred in Virginia -- where there are two gentleman running against each other, both called Warner. Mark Warner the Democrat, and John Warner. The Republican ran an advertisement in which he wanted to show his opponent shaking hands with a very unpopular politician. But, that had never happened, or he had no footage of it. So what the advertising firm did was to take some footage of someone else shaking hands with that unpopular politician -- the former Governor of Virginia -- and take his head off, and put on the head of Mark Warner.
[laughter]
EM: This is like a story from Kundera.
JS: And of course this is very easy now. You can imagine what could happen if this sort of thing becomes permitted; because now of course photography is absolutely at sea in a world of computer manipulation. You can make anything happen in a photograph now. You can do it yourself on an Apple computer; you can manipulate images. And you don't need to do what they did in the Kremlin before -- to get out your airbrush and black somebody out from the top of the Kremlin wall. You can go to your Apple computer and have anybody shaking hands, and so on.
Well this is an example of negative advertising which was factually false, and it crossed the line. So Warner was criticized and he did in fact withdraw that advertisement from the air, and he got in trouble for it. But, the question I want to concentrate on here is -- What IS in these ads? Of what stuff are they made? Is it positive or negative? And what I propose to do is look at two of these ads. But I'm going to do it first in print, because and amazing amount goes on in these ads. It took me a very long time of going back and forth with the tape, to catch each element; and I hope you'll be as surprised as I was to discover how much they can pack in in 30 seconds. So I'll just read this description of one of the ads, because I think we would miss it if we just watched it without the description -- I know I did.
[Campaign Ad 1 -- for the Clinton campaign]:
A voice speaks. We know this voice. It is the deep, "warm", roughened male voice, at once intimate and intimidating, that in regular commercials tells us that we really deserve the more expensive brand of whiskey, or to repose our trust in this or that brokerage firm. Soothing, nondescript music, somewhere between classical and folk, is heard. But now the voice, dwelling lovingly on each syllable, announces, "American Values". And the words appear in print on the screen at the same time: "American Values". We see a youngish couple with a child, dressed in L.L. Bean-ish clothes.
-- I'll have to describe this to our foreign guests. L.L. Bean. You know the phrase "Yuppy" I'm sure. Basically, it means a prosperous young person who's climbing up some corporate or other ladder. Anyway, L.L. Bean is a clothes order catalog that sells casual clothes to this class of yuppies. It has a very distinct -- rather prosperous but a little bit rural at the same time...
EM: Low-key but well made.
JS: So. Enough on L.L.Bean. But believe me, the PR firm had a three-hour conversation deciding what those people would wear.
The couple is walking in the countryside. A child is with them. And the man passes the child to the woman as they walk along. Now the voice says, "Duty to our parents"; and while we hear that, we see the young woman -- and it's a new cut -- handing the child to a grandmother-like woman, who appears to be in the hospital. As you hear "Duty to our parents", the word "DUTY" appears on the screen.
Now the voice says, "President Clinton protects Medicare," while we see, but do not hear, President Clinton giving a speech. In the background of his podium we see a row of Marines. (This is a very calculated touch, and I won't go into it. You have to know Clinton's whole story of avoiding the draft, and so forth. But they're very careful to put a row of soldiers in the background of that picture).
That short phrase just hangs in the air, without context. And we may wonder, "How does he protect Medicare? Is he doing it right now? Is he doing it in the muted speech that we're watching? Is it his nature to do it?" It sounds sort of like, "Dogs bark." "President Clinton protects Medicare". As if it's just part of the man's nature to do that. But ...there's no explanation.
Everything that has happened so far is a mini-saga of life, birth and death in America: we've seen the couple, we've seen the child, we've seen the woman in the hospital, and all of that has been associated with the President. And all of this has happened in a space of five seconds.
Now, suddenly, all the color is drained out of the world, and everything is black-and-white. We seem to be in a sort of Underworld, a Hades.
TH: Kansas? [laughter]
JS: Well, no, it's just the world of black-and-white photographs. And the music, if you want to call this music still, has changed. Now, it's a deep and discordant, groaning roar. It sounds like bombers coming over the horizon in World War II. We're in the land of The Republicans.
This is where Republicans are. Now we see, in black-and white, House Speaker Newt Gingrich; and he's moving with a slow, jerky, drunken-seeming motion -- somewhat the way monsters used to do in old horror movies from the 1950's. And now the voice, which is no longer warm, it's full of menace, refers to "Dole-Gingrich". Newt Gingrich is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and is very unpopular in the United States now. So the advertisers have created in effect a kind of composite human being; a monster living in this Hades. Gingrich's eyes are lidded, and he's laughing; and now the voice says, "The Dole-Gingrich budget tried to cut Medicare by 270 billion." Once again, the words are printed on the screen. I think this technique, which you will see throughout the ads, is worth commenting on; because it suggests that the voters are too dull (they feel) to take in any message through their ears alone. We have to get it typed at the same time, so it's hammered in in two ways. And in fact these words are typed across Gingrich's face. Graffitied over, as if they've written graffiti over his face. Of course when you saw Clinton there was nothing typed over his face. So Gingrich been literally "de-faced" in this ad.
Now once again -- this is all in the course of a 30-second ad -- everything changes. Color returns to the world, the music is harmonious, soothing, uplifting, and the male voice is warm and reassuring again. "The Oval Office", it says simply; and now the camera just pans slowly, showing the Oval Office. [The Oval Office is the President's Office at the White House]. We've left that black-and-white Republican hell behind; it's just a dim memory. But we aren't permitted that luxury for long, because just a moment later a huge, sick-looking, washed-out, once again black-and-white face of Bob Dole, much bigger than the screen, is superimposed on the pleasant view of the Oval Office; and his lips are puckered or pursed, as if he's trying to hold in false teeth. Next he's replaced by a newspaper headline, which however we can't really read. We only read the word "patients" in it. Then, in the background, we see a dim image of an old lady limping along with a walker in front of her bed. And all these images are swimming along in front of the picture of the Oval Office, producing a kind of visual sea-sickness. Each time the image changes, you now hear a violent ripping sound, halfway between a noise and a crash, and the voice says, "If it were Bob Dole here, he would have already cut Medicare 270 billion dollars."
All of that is packed into 30 seconds of advertising.
I'll give you one more description, and then we'll watch them for real.
[Campaign ad 2: from the Dole Campaign]:
This is from the Dole campaign, and we immediately recognize the surroundings, because we're back in that black-and-white hell, inhabited by the clumsy, sick monsters -- but now in Hades we find, of course, President Clinton. Our friend the seductive but bullying male voice is there too -- and the very composer who produced the groaning roar for the Clinton ads has offered his talents to the Republicans as well.
The voice begins in its menacing, ominous mode, and it says, "THE TRUTH." The screen is black -- once again they feel we're too stupid just to hear the word aloud. "The Truth" appears , as if at the beginning of a philosophy course, all by itself against a black background,. But the voice pronounces the word with an angry snarl, as if to say, "Your lying days are over." It goes on: "484 new spending proposals, costing us $432 billion in bigger government; a massive health care bureaucracy."
As the voice speaks, illustrations of each thing it describes appear on the right side of the screen. "Big spending" is a phrase that they find it hard to illustrate, obviously. (If you think about it, how do you illustrate it?) They weakly resort to just showing a lot of people at their desks. [laughter] That's big spending. You can just hear them at the meeting -- "Oh, the hell with it. Let's just put a lot of people at their desks." And here I think you see some of the weakness of the Dole ads as compared with the Clinton ads, which are much more successful.
Before each of the phrases is spoken, you see the word "FACT" fly, letter after letter onto the screen, like a flock of birds landing on the screen rather dramatically. And once again, the print rendering of the phrases. Now in this case these words are worth watching, because for the brief second that each phrase appears on the screen, accompanied by a figure, you see the printed figure actually grow. For one second it expands, because they are trying to illustrate "increased spending" . You could miss that altogether, but we'll watch for it, so you can see it.
Now, the ad goes on: "$2.5 million for Alpine slides for Puerto Rico. $76 million dollars for midnight basketball." Then the voice comes back and says, "But Clinton says..." and now we see Clinton -- he's been on the left side of the screen all along, while these pictures were on the right -- saying, "Yet I don't think that qualifies me as a closet liberal." Clinton's voice in this picture is a sort of oral counterpart of these grainy, blurry black-and-white pictures, because it's very hoarse and tinny. It sounds as if it's coming over the telephone, or from the back of a cave. And then, finally, comes the conclusion, which is both spoken and written. It says, as usual, "The Real Bill Clinton? A real spend-and-tax liberal".
I would like to point out that neither of these ads crosses the line of what is considered to be unacceptable. In fact these two ads, as we'll see in a minute, are entirely typical of the whole genre; and it's for just that reason that I find them interesting. Also, they seem to be made from absolutely the same cloth. For instance, both of them use a simultaneous 'hard-sell' and 'soft-sell'. A "good cop/bad cop" routine. All of them employ this redundant technique with the voice, the print words on the screen, and a picture, to launch what becomes a brief and concentrated frontal assault on the conscious mind. It is really just an attempt to batter the viewer into remembering certain crude and simple slogans -- such as "A real tax-and-spend liberal". If you have watched any of these ads you will have heard phrases like this a hundred thousand times. But on the other hand, it is also a profusion of either uplifting or frightening images, which are being sent in below the radar screen into the unconscious or semi-conscious mind -- such as the happy grandmother receiving the child, and so forth.
Now if you look at these ads, of course they're made by two parties. In style and technique, though, they might as well be made by one party. Even though the overt messages are opposed, there's an underlying message that I consider to be the same in all of them. In this sense, it feels as if we're in a political world that's really dominated by a single party. There are several planks to that party's platform: one of them seems to be that the American public is of sub-normal intelligence. It can't grasp even the simplest phrases unless they're repeated endlessly, and spoken and written at the same time, with the words growing bigger; the highlighting; the brilliant red. Another plank of this party is that the voters are susceptible only to seduction or to bludgeoning -- to the carrot or the stick -- and never to reasoned or balanced information. And a final message seems to be that the voters are moral children, who divide the world into realms of dark or light, similar to those in the world of cartoons.
My conclusion is that with these ads there's no need to divide them into positive and negative. Even the positive ones insult their viewers, and in that sense they're all negative.
Let's look at one of the two that I just described, and you can get a taste, and then we'll look at others.
[Here the ads will be played on the video machine. The text of the ads watched in class is provided below]
[Text of the Republican ad about Clinton, Campaign ad 2 described above.]
"THE TRUTH.
484 new spending proposals, costing us 432 billion in bigger government.
A massive health care bureaucracy.
Thousands of wasteful projects like 2.5 million dollars for alpine slides in Puerto Rico,
76 million for programs like midnight basketball.
The largest tax increase in history.
Yet Clinton says:
"I don't think that that qualifies me as a closet liberal."
That's not what the facts say, Mr. Clinton.
The REAL Bill Clinton?
A REAL Spend and Tax Liberal."
EM: And, because the speech was not very clear, they also displayed it as text.
BK: Yes, and they could have made much better sound, if they wanted to.
JS: I don't know how it strikes you, but I'd like to get your reaction. I think this business of putting the opponent in black-and-white is new.
JG: Though as Tim pointed out, the "Wizard of Oz" pioneered that. It's an old technique.
JS: Though, I think I also remember from the Dukakis campaign. One of his opponents ads was that Dukakis was going to let all the prisoners out, and it portrayed it as a revolving door. I think that was in black and white.
JS: The famous Willy Horton ad. Yes, that was in black-and-white. I don't know how they arrived at this, but my reaction is to feel that my intelligence is incredibly insulted by this. The idea that right out in the open, they should use the crudest techniques. It seems to me like something out of Communist Chinese propaganda.
EM: Yes, there is the tone of a loudspeaker from the May 1st parade -- a sense of an outside power being imposed on you, trying to make you as little as it can.
JS: I'm interested: you come from countries that had lots of state propaganda and probably still do. But how do you react seeing this in this country? Let's watch one or two more, and then we'll discuss it.
[Text of ad for the Clinton campaign]:
"Bob Dole attacking the President.
But under President Clinton, 10 million new jobs.
Taxes cut for 15 million working families.
Proposes tax credits for college tuition.
Dole voted to raise payroll taxes, social security taxes, income tax increase: 900 billion in higher taxes.
And look closely at his risky tax scheme. He'd actually raise taxes on 9 million working families.
Bob Dole. 35 years in Washington. 35 years of higher taxes."
I want to make a little commentary on the message of this ad, because I find it particularly offensive. As you know, I think, one of the big issues of this campaign is that Dole is proposing a 15% tax decrease, and Clinton is not. He offers only a few, almost symbolic tax decreases. As Jeff said, this is a very important, substantive difference between the candidates. And the tax issue in this country is one that goes back forever; but in this particular form, it really goes back to about 1980, when Ronald Reagan first proposed 1) cutting taxes, 2) raising military spending, and 3) doing some cutting of social spending.
It was very clear to a lot of people that those figures did not add up -- that if the government did that, it would have to have a lot of deficit spending. And indeed it turned out that way. Over a period of 10 years the Reagan government ran up 4 trillion dollars of debt -- which is absolutely unparalleled in the history of this country.
So then, Bush was campaigning as Reagan's successor. He said: "Read my lips: No New Taxes." Again, that promise was completely unrealistic, if at the same time you wanted to cut the budget deficit at all, and take care of the tremendous fiscal crisis that had grown up. It was very obvious that if he did cut taxes, the budget deficit would go up even further, and probably he wouldn't be able to fulfill that promise. And in fact he did break the promise. And this was one of the reasons that he lost in the election of 1992: because he was found to have not kept his word.
Of course, actually his raising taxes was an act of responsibility -- because although he broke his promise, it would have been terribly irresponsible fiscally to have increased the deficit still more. In fact, at that time, Dole was the Senate Majority Leader. And the Republican Party position was that taxes must not be raised. Dole was really a rather pragmatic and sensible Senator in many ways; and he saw that in fact it was going to be a big mess if they did not in fact raise taxes. So he led the fight in the Senate, against the demagoguery of his own party. This was one of his most responsible actions as Senator; to cooperate with Bush and a lot of Democrats in the Senate to raise taxes -- which is very politically unpopular, but very good for the financial health of the country. And it was something that he won respect for.
Now. Along comes Clinton. Clinton, like Reagan, like Bush, promises a cut in taxes -- completely irresponsible. A middle-class tax cut. Once he gets in office, he of course discovers what anybody can see, which is that it is ridiculous and impossible, and he drops it. And he does very much what Bush did -- he breaks his promise.
JG: Though his promise wasn't quite as firm -- I mean Bush's promise was so strong.
JS: That's true. But you'll see, the Republicans have him nailed in these ads. He'll say, "if we never do anything else, we should have a tax cut for the middle class."
JG: Yeah, but there was a simplicity to Bush's line, "Read my lips; no new taxes", which was repeated and repeated.
JS: He absolutely made it the foundation of his campaign, you're right. It was his main promise. In any case, once Clinton got in, he did very much what Dole did. He did the responsible thing, and actually raised taxes. The result now is that the budget deficit has been cut as they brag, and rightly so in this case, by 60%. It's down to ... whatever trillion.
I have gone through this rather complicated explanation because it all has a bearing on this ad. What are they saying? Number 1, they're saying that Dole is someone who raises taxes. But Dole is proposing the 15% tax decrease. So the claim is completely counter to what the current facts are, and it's terribly confusing. Now, it's true that Dole raised taxes in the past. However, at the time that Dole did raise taxes, the Democrats were all for it! And supported it. And it was a very responsible act. So insofar as the ad is true, it accuses Dole of doing something that the Democrats did even more, and that Dole deserves great credit for.
This ad is just like a handful of sand thrown in the eyes of the voter. It's absolutely confusing. It is a complete obfuscation in about four different ways. And you can tell what the discussion was in the Clinton campaign: they saw that for the last three Presidential elections, including Clinton's -- all of those successful Presidents promised either not to raise taxes, or to cut them. That is, Reagan, Bush and Clinton. They saw that that promise was like a piece of political magic that got you elected. Never mind that it was completely irresponsible, never mind that the promises couldn't be kept; never mind that it ran the national debt up 4 trillion dollars. That was a piece of political magic. Give the voters a tax break and they'll vote for you. So, the Clinton people are saying to themselves, "That might work again. We'd better do something about it." So what do they do? They don't say (in this ad at least), "Dole's tax decrease is irresponsible, and we are responsible in not having a tax decrease." They don't do that, even though that would be the right thing to say.
EM: Because they think that would not work.
JS: They have the sneaking suspicion. So obviously someone comes up with something else and says, "Look, let's not do this noble, responsible thing and point out the factual inaccuracy and the error in that... Let's call Dole a tax increaser." Which is factually true, because he did favor raising taxes, at a time when Clinton did too, and everybody thought it was a good idea. Anyway, enough of analysis of that ad; but you see how deeply deceptive it is, even though it has a kernel of factual truth in it.
Let's go on to some others.
[Videotape plays again. Text of ad for the Clinton campaign]:
"10 million new jobs. Family income up $1,600.
President Clinton cut the deficit 60%; signed welfare reform, requiring work, time limits.
Taxes cut for 15 million families. Balancing the budget.
America's moving forward with an economic plan that works.
Bob Dole. Republicans call him 'tax collector for the welfare state'.
His risky tax scheme will raise taxes on 9 million families.
Bob Dole. Wrong in the past. Wrong for our future."
[end of ad]
JS: Now, just imagine the levels of deception that are going on here. The ad says that Republicans call Bob Dole the "tax collector for the welfare state." Do you know who it was that called him this? Gingrich. It was Gingrich. You can scarcely fathom the different levels of deception that are going on here. This history behind this statement is that when Dole actually did favor a tax increase, there was a split in the Republican Party. Dole and the Democrats proposed the increase, and Gingrich, who is far to the right, called Dole "the tax collector for the welfare state". Now of course that's the kind of charge that Republicans like to bring against Democrats. But here the Democrats, without acknowledging it, are muddying the waters by quoting Gingrich's criticism of Dole -- as if at that time that Dole raised taxes, they would have favored the Gingrich plan. It is of course the last thing in the world the Democrats would have done. So this is the most blatant and crude manipulation.
JG: You know it's something else, it seems to me. When there was a Communist threat -- and by that I mean during the whole Cold War period, the Republican Party was made up of a very disparate groups of "Conservatives". It had these Moral Majoritarians, these fundamentalist Christians; and old-fashioned Midwestern Republicans who were concerned with sound economic policy -- that's Dole. His whole career has been dedicated to balanced budget, careful spending, frugality. It also had these kind of Reagan crazies -- supply-side economic theorists who essentially have a false theory of cutting spending to raise government income, which is actually an attack on government itself, on the State. The whole idea is to bankrupt the federal government's capacity to raise revenue, and force the government to shrink. That's what's behind it. They're vulnerable because of this.
Now, without the Communist threat all these contradictions in the Republican Party have come out in the open; and the way Dole has dealt with it is to go over to the other side. He was a truly conservative man, as far as fiscal policy goes. But now he's adopted essentially his partisan opponent's position. He lays himself open to that criticism precisely because he's shifted his political position without acknowledging it. Which is not to say that the ads are responsible, but that Dole is vulnerable to them for that reason.
JS: Yes, which adds just another level. This has a bearing on what happens to politics in a media age. Put yourself in the position of a voter, who is trying to pick between two parties. On the one hand, you begin with a candidate Dole, who was against any tax increases for his entire career. But he read some poll results which said that his best chance of being elected was to reverse himself. So you start the campaign, as Jeff says, with a candidate who has reversed his own position on this issue. Then you have the Democrats, who on the one hand are pointing out that this tax decrease contradicts his earlier record, and would create, as they say, a 'bigger hole in the deficit'. But then, at the same time, they are accusing Dole of being someone who increases taxes, as in this ad.
The point for us is that there is anything but clarity here for the voters. There's just complete confusion from both sides. I would argue a bit with what you said at the beginning, and hold that there is a blurring of clear positions here -- both in the positions that are taken by the candidates, and in the ads' representation of them. This would argue against the claim that coherent platforms are being formed.
Let's see a couple more.
[Videotape plays again]
[Text of ad from the Clinton campaign}:
"Let's go back in time. The sixties. Bob Dole's in Congress.
Dole's against creating Medicare. Against creating student loans. Against the Department of Education. Against a higher minimum wage.
Still there. Against creating a Drug Czar."
EM: He's getting older --
JS: Yes, good, that's it.
[text for the ad continues]:
"Against the Brady Bill. Against Family and medical leave. Against Medicare, again.
Dole-Gingrich tried to cut $270 billion.
Dole. Wrong in the past. Wrong for our future."
JS: Elzbieta points out what the real point of that ad is -- that Dole is old.
NN: I think also it's interesting looking at the footage of Dole in that image in front of the White House. They clearly manipulated the footage, to make Dole look like Richard Nixon. For somebody who grew up in North America, that's a very strong emotional association; a visceral reaction.
JG: Of course he deserves that. He was Nixon's real apologist to the very end.
[Text of the next ad, for the Dole campaign}:
[Woman's voice]: "Bill Clinton never took the drug crisis seriously.
[an audience member asking Clinton a question]: "If you had it to do over again, would you inhale?"
[note: this is a reference to the fact brought out in the 92 campaign, that Clinton had tried marijuana. His response to the claim was that he did try it, but he did not inhale].
[Clinton]: "Sure, if I could. I tried, before."
[Woman's voice again]: "Under Clinton's liberal policies teen drug use has doubled. But now Clinton admits he was wrong."
[Clinton]: "I wish I'd never done any of that -- although I did such a little bit; but it was wrong."
[Woman's voice]: For the thousands of young Americans who became hooked on drugs under Clinton, his apology is too little, too late. America deserves better."
[Clinton speaking:] "I will not raise taxes on the middle class"
We heard this a lot.
"We've got to give middle class tax relief, no matter what else we do."
Six months later, he gave us our largest tax increase in history. Higher income taxes. Increased taxes on social security benefits. More payroll taxes. Under Clinton, the typical American family now pays over $1,500 more in federal taxes. A big price to pay for his broken promise. Tell President Clinton you can't afford higher taxes for more wasteful spending."
JG: Of course there's a double deception there. The typical American family doesn't pay that much more in taxes, because the new taxes were really on the very wealthiest people in the society.
JS: That's right. In fact most people saw no tax increase.
TH: That picture they used of Clinton makes him look like a cheap gigolo.
HD: The interesting difference for me between the Dole ads and the Clinton ads is that Clinton portrays minorities. I don't think I've ever seen a Dole ad that has a minority.
JS: You're going to see one in a minute -- but it will only confirm your point.
Now you will see plenty of people of color. Here they come.
[Videotape plays. Text of next campaign ad, for the Dole campaign]:
[The ad begins with grainy, choppy black-and-white aerial footage showing people of color running across a field -- obviously Mexicans fleeing for the American border]
[Woman's voice]: "Did you know, there are over 5 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.? And that you spend five and a half billion dollars a year to support them? With welfare, food stamps, and other services.
[Cut to new black-and-white footage showing Black refugees in boats coming toward the shore -- most likely Haitians].
[Woman's voice continues]: "Under President Clinton, spending on illegals has gone UP -- while wages for the typical American worker have gone down. And when efforts were made to stop giving benefits to illegal immigrants, Bill Clinton opposed them.
Tell President Clinton to stop giving benefits to illegals; and END wasteful Washington spending."
[end]
HD: It was a woman's voice, too, which is very interesting.
JS: Oh, absolutely. That's trying to erase the gender gap.
JG: I don't think we see that ad here in New York. I suspect that it's targeted at California.
JS: I got these directly from the campaign offices, so I don't know where they show them.
EM: I wonder whether that kind of ad would be effective; because people are running. Obviously they are running from some kind of danger. I'm WITH them, you know. And the voice seemed to be kind of, the teacher that you don't like, telling you something that's obviously not true.
JS: That's one of the most unpleasant ads, and it really tries to make people look like cockroaches or something. It's very unpleasant.
[...]
JS: Well, I think we've seen enough. Just to wind up on a slightly more cheerful note, I personally find these political ads to be as crude as propaganda coming from any authoritarian government. And that startles me. That surprises me very much. If you look at commercial advertising, it's crude too; but it's not that crude. I would have expected greater subtlety. And I would think that these ads would insult anybody's intelligence.
Now, the conventional wisdom on negative advertisements has been that people hate them, and people have always disliked them -- if you ask people do you like them, they say No -- but, that they listen to them, and are influenced by them. And in fact, there are many elections that seem to prove that point. However, this year for the first time, it turns out that the public's distaste for the so-called 'negative ads' is actually having a political effect.
For instance, there is a race in Minnesota where a Democrat, Paul Wellstone, is running against a Republican named Rudy Boshwitz. The Republican has gone in for a tremendous amount of really harsh negative advertising, and the latest poll results and interviews are showing that the public out there is reacting against the ads, and they have actually become politically costly for Boshwitz, and Wellstone has moved ahead.
Likewise, Dole's decision to 'go negative' has very clearly backfired against him. At the end of that televised debate [in which Dole 'went negative'], the poll results showed that the public preferred Clinton's performance by two to one. And Clinton's popularity went up in the polls in the days following the debate, and stayed higher. So it absolutely backfired, and the Dole campaign has pretty much acknowledged this by dropping it. This is a rather hopeful and positive sign I think. And, after all, this entire phenomenon is rather new: it's been going on for a quarter of a century. But it could be possible that the public is beginning to become educated about it, and to become somewhat immunized against it.
It would be a very very good thing, I think, at least for the American political system, if it were said in the future -- and it looks already as if it will be -- that Dole's decision to go negative backfired on him. Because lots of politicians will take that very seriously. And if they find that it causes them to lose, they won't do it in the next election. So, that's a little positive development.
EM: I have a last question. Do you think that one may consider, at least in this country, the possibility of trying to introduce a campaign against political ads whatsoever? I mean, is there a conversation about it, is anyone talking about it, and what would be your opinion about such a move?
JS: Well, the thing that's being done which I think is a good idea -- in my opinion it doesn't really get to the root of the problem, but I think it's serious and important -- is that a move to get free air time for the candidates, an abundance of it. If there were sufficient air time, the candidates wouldn't feel this pressure to raise all this money, to put their message in these 30-second ads. They wouldn't feel the same pressure if they got 10 minutes every night on all the networks in the last two weeks of the campaign, for instance. I don't think it deeply solves the problem, but it's the only thing I can think of that's being done, that even begins to address it at all.
JG: The real solution to the problem seems to me to be impossible in the American constitutional tradition -- and that is, actually to control it. The polity could decide that this is manipulative speech, and that it doesn't facilitate rational political decision, and therefore it is not allowed. Every other advanced industrial democratic society has such controls. But in our tradition of interpreting the First Amendment, that is viewed as constraint of free speech.
JS: And I even agree with that. I personally wouldn't want it to be controlled by the government. I think that cure would be worse than the disease. I'm an American Constitutionalist in that sense. But to me the real challenge is to find the avenues for a positive politics -- and within the media, because that is where politics is taking place right now. But above all I'd like to see a renewal of politics outside the news media: that would be the real revolution.
KU: Since, as Jeff is saying, it's not in our political tradition to limit people's right to advertise themselves, it seems like the role of the newsmedia in response to the ads becomes really important; and I'm curious as to whether you think they exacerbate the problem. What we have been watching are advertisements and not, as in Communist countries, the government political line being given to us on the news. As viewers we know that they're advertisements. But, what the newsmedia says can have a big influence on how people would react to those ads. Do they play a positive role by being critical of the ads, or do they exacerbate the problem by being excited about the ads and watching how well or how poorly they're working?
JS: As I say there's this minor industry of criticizing the factuality and the accuracy of the ads.
KU: Is that in the major newsmedia as well?
JS: Oh yes, absolutely, it's everywhere. But, as I'm saying these ads that we've watched are not the type of thing they would criticize. I picked these because they are mainstream, typical ads. And to my mind, the stuff that these are made of is so disturbing, that the media criticism doesn't touch it. It's rather surprised me.
EM: We'll have to finish here. Thank you very much. Thank you.
