Page 106 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 85

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PARTY POLITICAL
COMMUNICATION I

Advertising

This chapter presents:

• An outline of how advertisements work
• A brief history of the development of political advertising from
print to the internet
• An account of the various approaches adopted in both the US and
Britain since the Second World War, up to and including the 2010
general election.

Robert Denton argues that in America, thanks to the growth in the role of
television in political campaigning, the pre-eminent form of political oratory
has become the advertisement. The political ad, he wrote more than two
decades ago, is ‘now the major means by which candidates for the presi-
dency communicate their messages to voters’ (1988, p. 5). Nimmo and
Felsberg suggested that ‘paid political advertising via television now con-
stitutes the mainstream of modern electoral politics’ (1986, p. 248). In
Britain and other comparable countries too, although regulatory and stylistic
conventions differ from those of the US, political advertising is central to
political communication. Today, of course, television has been joined by the
internet as a platform for advertising of all kinds, including political.

THE POWER OF ADVERTISING

Advertising’s power – if power it has (by no means an uncontentious
assertion, as Chapter 3 suggested) – is exercised on two levels. First, the
political advertisement disseminates information about the candidate’s or
party’s programme to a degree of detail which journalists can rarely match.
As Chapter 4 argued, news has developed generic conventions and narrative

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