Enough With The Ads Already

by Jon Sinton

Who are the real winners in the current primary season? The winners are, always have been, and always will be local television stations.

Who are the real losers? The viewers.

During the primaries, and again leading up to the general election in November, campaign ads are impossible to avoid. They overwhelm local television like cockroaches on leftovers in a dark kitchen. Mostly, they are misleading attack ads researched to make sure they engage the unengaged with sensational, and often, unreliable, claims. The remainder are institutional ads. Like vanity license plates, some are entertaining, some are dumb, and most go unnoticed.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that $12.7 million was spent on television alone in the weeks before the Georgia gubernatorial primary. The Republicans will have a runoff, so that number is going to rise significantly.

The ads are cynical in nature. They play to our worst instincts by manipulating facts and figures. Mark Twain said, “You can torture statistics until they admit anything,” and political ads are a prime example. He also said, “People, they’re no damned good,” which I guess is a prerequisite for the quip about statistics to be true.

The ads are not intended to grab us by the frontal lobe where critical thinking takes place. They aim exclusively for our reptile “old brain,” the base ganglia where emotion rules. Because it is impossible to impart the nuances of a candidate’s thinking in a thirty-second ad, a sledgehammer is employed. In Georgia, we endured ads by Republican gubernatorial candidates that had them driving ginormous pickups on the lookout for illegal aliens they could personally detain, and another gleefully riding around in a “deportation bus” replete with bars on the windows. All they seek to do is outrage the viewer. Much heat is generated, but very little light.

Fear of loss always beats hope for gain. Insurance advertising taught us this valuable lesson years ago when brightly burning house fires lighted our path to their agents' offices. Political consultants know that fear outsells hope. Thus, every ad is designed to reinforce our fears, not to enlighten us. In their worlds, all is darkness and foreboding.

For years, a proposal has floated around out there. It entails compelling local broadcasters to give up a defined amount of airtime to provide candidates the opportunity to fully outline their platforms free of charge. It would spell the end of the thirty-second ad and promote the good civics of letting office seekers present themselves and their ideas in detail.

There are a number of problems inherent in this idealistic approach. First and foremost is the loss of the biennial avalanche of cash that political advertising represents. Broadcasters will squeal. They’ll say it undermines free enterprise and their right to run their businesses as they see fit. They will not bother to mention the quid pro quo that landed them their broadcast licenses in the first place: that little-mentioned promise of acting in the public interest. They used to run free public service announcements. They used to air a written pledge, provided by the National Association of Broadcasters (back when that was a service organization, not a lobbying group) to uphold community standards and always act in the public interest. The deal was, we’ll award you this scarce license for the exclusive use of our common resource, the electromagnetic spectrum on which broadcast signals ride, in exchange for you behaving in ways that promote the common good. Seems pretty quaint now, huh? Any pretense of acting in a civically-minded way disappeared with the deregulation of ownership caps in 1996. That, however, is a completely separate column.

The other thing they’ll scream is that such a policy puts them at a disadvantage to their cable and internet competitors who don’t use the broadcast spectrum and are therefore not subject to government oversight. Tough toenails, licensees. The license exists for reasons other than your monetary enrichment. You want to use our air? Play by our rules. If you really hate it, hand your license in and let someone with a more communitarian bent enjoy your forty- and fifty-percent gross profit margins.

Another problem is that most candidates are profoundly uninteresting and would likely create unwatchable programming if freed from the thirty-second paradigm. They simply could not compete with Ice Road Truckers, Housewives, or Bachelorettes.

Still, it is worth a shot since it might give us a real look at our would-be electeds, giving us viewers a much-needed win.

Jon Sinton is a former FCC licensee, co-founder of ProgressiveVoices.com and Board Chair of Common Cause Georgia