Monday, December 2, 2024
Attack ads: they’ve become a big force in Long Island election campaigns. A little over a week before Election Day, I traveled to Maryland for a family event, turned on the TV in the motel room — and there they were, hundreds of miles from here: political attack ads, one after another.
The names of the candidates, other than those running for president and vice president, of course, were unknown to me. But the commercials were thoroughly familiar. Attack ads have clearly become a staple of politics in the United States.
For my master’s thesis in the Media Studies Program at The New School of Social Research in New York, I wrote about how political commercials began. I recounted how Madison Avenue advertising man Rosser Reeves persuaded Dwight Eisenhower to use TV commercials when he ran for the presidency in 1952.
Four years earlier, Reeves had tried to interest the previous Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, to use commercials. But Dewey, a former New York governor, didn’t go for the idea, believing it would reduce him to a political version of a toothpaste ad.
But Reeves had an early understanding of how television best communicates feeling and emotion, not information. TV, as was related in The New School media program, is a “non-cognitive medium.” A dictionary definition of cognitive is “involving conscious intellectual activity such as thinking, reasoning.” Non-cognitive involves feeling.
Reeves’s ads in 1952 showed Eisenhower grinning — stressing the likability of the former five-star general. A slogan was fashioned: “I Like Ike.” I recall seeing the campaign buttons as a kid. And there was even a song written for the theme — lyrics and music by Irving Berlin, no less — titled “I Like Ike.”
The Democratic candidate, the more intellectual Adlai Stevenson, tried to counter the “I Like Ike” spots with a series of half-hour TV presentations, giving lectures on issues of the day. That didn’t work on TV.
Several years later, an attack component was added to the commercials. The first attack ad was created for Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. In it, a little girl plucked petals from a daisy, counted to nine, and then a man’s voice counted down from 10 to zero — and suddenly the TV screen filled with the super-scary footage of an exploding nuclear bomb, and Johnson intoned: “The stakes are too high … We must either love each other, or we must die.” The inference was that we would face a nuclear conflagration if we elected the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater.
That’s the essence of an attack ad. It goes to the negative, often with scowling and otherwise ugly photos and videos and words of a political opponent, demonizing him or her. And that was what I was seeing in that motel in Maryland: the demonization of candidates. They were just like what we see on Long Island, or anywhere in the U.S., these days. They’re now the standard of political campaigns.
Now, I know there are plenty of rascals, and worse, in politics who very much deserve to be criticized. But the now ubiquitous TV attack ads are far more than that. They have become the main basis for how candidates are sold, while their opponents are the objects of character assassination.
Dr. Heather LaMarre, a professor of media and communications at Temple University, explained this year, in an article on “The Conversation,” that “studies have shown that people pay closer attention to negative information than to positive information. And infamous ad effects such as Johnson’s easy win after airing the daisy ad contribute to the commonly held belief that negative ads still win elections.” LaMarre added, citing a Pew Research Center study: “These days, most political ads are negative.”
And, she said, because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case, “the influx of corporate and outside money completely changed the campaign finance landscape. … Significant portions of this spending come from political action committees that are not bound by traditional campaign contribution limits.”
A most dubious major element in democracy today, slick and effective character assassination in TV ads, makes the political mudslinging in days of yore seem primitive.
Karl Grossman, who began his career in journalism at the Babylon Town Leader in 1962, is now a professor of journalism at SUNY Old Westbury. He is the author of seven books, and for 33 years he has hosted “Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman,” broadcast on nearly 200 cable TV systems in 40 states (www.envirovideo.com).
