practices which inhibit in-depth an

practices which inhibit in-depth analysis of political parties’ policies. The
broadcasters, for example, fasten pack-like onto the day’s soundbites (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. Or was, until
the emergence of Twitter, Facebook and online social networking opened
up another, and in some ways more attractive channel for campaigning
politicians, and those in government, to communicate their messages
‘unmediated’, as it were. We will discuss the new digitised forms of political
communication more fully in the chapter on public relations. Here we note
that the rise of the internet has substantially expanded the range of alternatives to traditional print and TV advertising available to political actors.
Paid advertising remains important, though, given the wide, if declining,
reach of TV and newspapers. Posters and billboards also remain attractive
for political advertisers, particularly in countries such as the UK where
advertising on TV is prohibited by legislation.
1
A striking feature of the digital era of political communication is the
capacity of citizen-voters to subvert official campaign messages with ‘mash
ups’ and other forms of digitally altered image. In the 2010 UK campaign
David Cameron and the Conservatives were extensively satirised in this
manner (as all the parties were). In one image, as reported by the Daily
Telegraph, millionaire Tory leader David Cameron is depicted as Freddie
Mercury with the caption, ‘I’m just a rich boy and nobody loves me. He’s just
a rich boy, from a rich family’.
2
Another ‘mash up’ played on the opposition’s
attempt to define Cameron as an upper class throwback, depicting Gordon
Brown and variations on the caption ‘Step outside, Tory boy’ (see Figure 6.6).
On all paid-for platforms, the viewer is aware of the sender’s control and
may reject the message contained in an advertisement. The political actor
COMMUNICATING POLITICS
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controls the encodingof 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 2004 incumbent George W. Bush and
Democratic challenger John Kerry spent a record $600 million on TV and
radio advertising. In the 2005 British general election campaign, a total of
£42 million was spent by the parties. In 2010, the figure was still higher
though limited by a cap of £18m on each party’s spending. The UK Ministry
of Justice estimated that the 2010 general election cost the parties and their
candidates around £82 million in total. This figure paled in comparison to
the estimated $1 billion spent by US presidential candidates in 2008. In the
US, most of this sum went to paid-for TV spots. By the same token, spending
on the 2010 congressional elections was estimated at around $3.7 billion.
3
Whether advertisements work or not, therefore, no discussion of political
communication would be complete without consideration of them.