Page 117 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

(often deliberately planted by the politicians’ public relations staff),
which are then repeated endlessly. Hart’s analysis of TV coverage of
US presidential speeches shows just how few, on average, of a
speechmaker’s words are reported in the news (1987), and how
much amounts to mere repetition of a few key words and phrases.
In this context, to the extent that television is the major source
of political information for most people, the advertisement is the
format in which a political actor has the greatest opportunity to
impart ‘the issues’ as he or she sees them.
Of course, as in the world of commerce, the advertisement does
not merely inform individuals in society about the choices available
to them as political consumers. They are also designed to persuade.
And in persuasion, as well as information dissemination, the
advertisement has clear advantages for the politician. Most
obviously, editorial control resides with the politician, 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 tele-
vision 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.

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