Tag Archives: Negative Campaign Ads

Don’t be negative

A guest op-ed in the Washington Post (by Vanderbilt Political Science Professor John G. Geer) makes the obvious point that "negative" ads are not ipso facto bad (a similar point was made more effectively I think by Jamison Foser at Media Matters, discussed by me here).  They are more likely, the author correctly argues, to provide information to the voter than "positive" ads.  This need not necessarily be the case, but it seems in fact to be the case (the author has empirical research to support this claim). 

My problem with this op-ed, however, is another.  In all of the discussion of "negative" ads, the author fails to distinguish between "attack" ads and "critical" ads.  One might make finer-grained distinctions, as I am sure someone has, but these will suffice for the moment.  Let's say a "critical" ad makes an argument against an opponent's position on some or other issue.  An "attack" ad consists argument free character style attacks.  Those, as anyone can see I think, are clearly different.

A defense of the one kind of negative ad, need not be a defense of the other.  I would argue in fact that defending critical ads entails rejecting "attack" ads as "politically informative."  So this, for instance, strikes me as a false equivalence:

And Obama's not innocent, either. While McCain's running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, blasted the Democratic nominee for his rather thin ties to a seemingly unrepentant member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground, Obama responded with an ad reminding voters of McCain's role in the "Keating Five" savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s. Recent data from Nielsen suggest that the campaigns have aired roughly the same number of negative ads. Even Karl Rove, who knows a thing or two about attack ads, has declared that both sides have gone too negative.

The thin links between Obama and Ayers made by the McCain campaign and Fox News are dishonest and misleading.  Obama's linking McCain to the Keathing Five is another matter.  McCain was a member of the Keating Five (otherwise it would have been four), he intervened on Keating's behalf, had a tight relationship to Keating and helped, in a legislative way, Keating commit fraud.  He was in fact officially reprimanded by the Senate for that.  The Ayers and Keating allegations are not, in other words, in the same logical category.  It would be very helpful, I think, to keep them distinct.

Theory of negativity

Jamison Foser at Media Matters notices some very stunning idiocy and responds accordingly.  He writes:

The Wisconsin Advertising Project looked at a single week's worth of ads in determining that 56 percent of McCain ads and 77 percent of Obama ads were "negative." Aside from the dangers in drawing conclusions from such a small sample of campaign ads, the findings are of limited value given that the project made no effort to assess the veracity or fairness of the ads in question. In fact, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the study counted any ad that so much as mentioned the opponent's name as "negative."

I suppose it might be mildly interesting to know that 56 percent of John McCain's ads mention Barack Obama, or that 77 percent of Obama's ads mention McCain. But it doesn't really tell us anything useful. How did they mention each other? Did the ads criticize policy positions or personality? Were they honest? The answers to those questions are essential to any meaningful assessment of the candidates' campaign tactics. (If you do find the project's findings compelling, you should keep in mind that in July, based on a much larger sample, the project found that more of McCain's ads were negative.)

Despite the study's failure to even attempt to assess the validity of the ads it declared "negative," several news organizations hyped the findings. Worse, some suggested the finding that more of Obama's ads have been negative undermines the recent conclusions of many impartial observers that the McCain campaign ads have been more dishonest than those of the Obama campaign.

The New York Post, for example, reported that the results of the study "clash with recent media coverage accusing McCain of distorting Obama's record in ads." Nonsense. That's like saying that the fact that this is September clashes with the fact that it is Friday.

Foser is right.  This is what one would call a "category mistake."  Also, I think I speak from experience that many people wrongly call anything critical an "attack" and assume that anything "negative" is wrong.  Foser's whole piece is well worth reading, as always.