Page 139 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

POLITICAL ADVERTISING: THE FUTURE

The role and place of advertising in political communication
continues to generate debate, with each new election campaign
providing material for further controversy, though rarely
resolution of the issues which have occupied political and
communication scientists ever since the first ‘I like Ike’ spots. In
America, criticism of the sheer cost of political advertising remains
at the forefront of debate, though the allegedly negative effects of
‘attack’ ads also worry many (Jamieson, 1992). The third edition
of Diamond and Bates’ classic study of American political
advertising takes a pragmatic tone, pointing out, as was noted
above, that political campaigns have always been negative and
‘dirty’ (1992). Kathleen Jamieson, while complaining of a general
deterioration in the quality of mediated political discourse, to
which political advertising has contributed, accepts that ‘simplistic
dualities’ have always been at the centre of campaigning (1992,
p.44). There is, in America as well as other countries, growing
acceptance that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with negative
campaigning, if the claims made are fair and reasonable. Lies and
deception are not acceptable, of course, but they are hardly unique
to our political culture. Modern media give attack ads more reach
and visibility, but did not invent them, or the principles of political
competition underpinning them. Attack is as much part of the
political process as defence, and if modern advertisers do it with
ever-increasing slickness and sophistication, it seems pointless,
indeed futile, to spend too much intellectual energy on condemning
them. As Diamond and Bates put it, in the history of political
advertising, as in so many other forms of political communication,
‘the political golden age of the past, upon close inspection, turns
out to be made of brass’ (1992, p.384).
In Britain, with its distinctive traditions and conventions, the issues
are rather different. The controversy which Conservative government
advertising for its 1980s privatisation campaigns provoked, fuelled
by legislation (quoted on p. 119) prohibiting local governments from
using public revenues for political advertising purposes, has long
called into question the logic of a system which prevents political
advertising on television and radio, while allowing the government
to spend hundreds of millions of pounds promoting ideologically
based policies. Advocates of reform have argued, reasonably enough,
that since the privatisation campaigns were clearly ‘political’ and
paid for by the tax-payer, other organisations with political objectives,

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