Page 111 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

And in persuasion, as well as information dissemination, the
advertisement has clear advantages for the politician. Most
obviously, editorial control resides with the politician, and not the
media. Within legal constraints of truth and taste, which vary from
one country to another, the producers of political advertisements
have the freedom to say what they like; to replace the journalists’
agenda with their own; to play to their clients’ strengths and
highlight the opponents’ weaknesses. The advertisement, in short,
is the only mass media form over the construction of which the
politician has complete control.
At the same time, the viewer is aware of this control and may, as
Chapter 3 suggested, reject the message contained in an
advertisement. The political actor controls the encoding of an
advertisement, but not its decoding. That said, a New York Times/
CBS poll conducted during the 1988 US presidential election found
that 25 per cent of the voters claimed that political ads had influenced
their choice of candidate (Denton and Woodward, 1990, p.56).
Notwithstanding the uncertainty inherent in transmitting
political messages through the format of advertising, it has steadily
grown as a proportion of campaign resources. In 1988, George
Bush and Michael Dukakis spent between them some $85 million
on television advertising (Ibid., p.56). During the 1992 presidential
campaign George Bush’s team spent upwards of $60 million on
television advertising alone. In 1996 the Clinton campaign spent
more than $50 million. In the 1997 British general election
campaign, more than ever before was spent by the three main
parties. Whether advertisements work or not, therefore, no
discussion of political communication would be complete without
consideration of them.

POLITICAL ADVERTISING: A DEFINITION

Bolland defines advertising as the ‘paid placement of organisational
1
messages in the media’ (1989, p.10). Political advertising therefore,
in the strict sense, refers to the purchase and use of advertising space,
paid for at commercial rates, in order to transmit political messages
to a mass audience. The media used for this purpose may include
cinema, billboards, the press, radio, and television.
In the United States, television ads are known as ‘spots’, and
their cost in the world’s richest media market largely accounts for
the extraordinary expense of US political campaigning. In some

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