TV REVIEW : Chronicling the TV ‘War’ on Voters

A huckster will always find a sucker.

Presidential candidates have discovered television talk shows as a way to advertise themselves to the electorate at length without having to answer tough questions from reporters or spend a penny. In addition, they continue to get free exposure via photo opportunities and catchy sound bites.

On a still grander scale, there was this week’s unpaid jumbo political infomercial in Houston’s Astrodome, where Republicans shrilly propagandized the nation on network TV, just as the Democrats did last month from their stump inside New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Yet paid TV political ads--with candidates on the attack or warmly pictured strolling through a forest flanked by family--continue to resonate loudly across campaigns, as noted in a new documentary detailing how advertising helps shape voter perceptions.

Arriving on cue, just as the Bush/Clinton hostilities are building, “The Living Room War” airs at 10 tonight on cable’s Arts & Entertainment network.

Anyone taking political ads at face value “is a fool,” University of Virginia media observer Larry Sabato says tonight.

Although the fool factor surely looms large in many campaign strategies, some major newspapers are now helping voters cut through candidates’ often-deceptive rhetoric by printing critiques of political spots--pointing out false claims while separating the truth from the fibs.

The political spots that many in the press find so superficial and misleading, however, are merely microcosms of the way campaigns are covered, according to famed Republican media strategist Roger Ailes: “The news media is really interested in pictures, mistakes, attacks and polls. If you give the news media anything but those four things, you’re never going to get covered.” Thus, he adds, candidates exploit the fact that viewers have been primed by the media to “look for one of those four things” in political commercials as well.

“The Living Room War” travels a vast landscape, from the 1952 candidacy of Dwight Eisenhower to George Bush’s take-no-prisoners campaign that helped annihilate Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. Or was it Dukakis who in part self-destructed, among other things getting himself televised riding atop a tank, footage that Ailes used so devastatingly in one of Bush’s TV spots?

The hour is especially fascinating when noting the mind games played by political ads, whether in the notorious 1964 anti-Goldwater spot that showed a tiny flower child dissolving to a nuclear blast, or in media guru Tony Schwartz’s ad for the Democrats greeting the prospect of a Spiro Agnew vice presidency with gales of laughter. Both spots sought to tap latent fears and other feelings without articulating a conventional political message--Goldwater was not even named in the first one.

While candidates may routinely lie on the stump, a typical deceptive political ad may not be flat-out untruthful but instead will seek to draw false inferences from the viewer, says Kathleen Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications.

The warning about political ads that viewers may take away from this program--Beware!--is anything but false.