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Negative ads everywhere, nowhere

Public rarely sees the harsher ones

By Stephen Dinan (Contact) | Tuesday, September 30, 2008

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A lot of the nastiest, harshest ads are released to the press but aren't airing that much on regular television.

From dirty campaign connections to dirty energy, Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama daily announce new, harsh, usually negative ads and Web videos, which dutifully get airtime on cable news networks and grab ink in newspapers. However, regular voters - those outside the few million political junkies - are getting a completely different diet of ads.

"That stuff is getting very little airtime," said Evan Tracey, founder of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political ad spending. Mr. Tracey said many of the ads that are getting attention on cable news amount to little more than "video press releases" designed to keep their candidates in the news cycle.

"A lot of these things are clearly being fed in to have the candidates' unfiltered take on the news of the day so they can be churned through these content machines," he said.

Meanwhile, most of the ads the campaigns are buying are far less acerbic and focus on two or three basic messages. For instance, Mr. Tracey said, Mr. McCain's most prominent single ad in the early part of September was a positive spot touting himself and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, as mavericks, while Mr. Obama's most prominent ad linked Mr. McCain to President Bush.

What it signifies is that campaigns have learned how to play the system. They know the more outrageous a claim, the more likely it is to earn free airtime on newscasts and coverage in newspapers. Or, as Mr. Tracey puts it, "There's this food-fight media out there, and the ads are the tomatoes."

During the Democratic National Convention, the McCain campaign announced a new ad every morning, and though it didn't put much advertising muscle behind them, the ads got plenty of airtime because of saturation coverage of the conventions.

The deceptive campaign claims aren't limited to ads, though the commercials are among the most egregious.

Take immigration, an issue on which Mr. McCain, of Arizona, led the push for an overhaul, and which Mr. Obama, of Illinois, clearly supported. In Spanish-language ads, the candidates accuse each other of having struck nefarious alliances with opponents to try to attack immigrants or scuttle the bill for which both voted.

In their English ads, the campaigns are just as loose with the facts - so much so that four of Mr. McCain's ads in the past three months have earned a "pants-on-fire" rating from PolitiFact.com, as has one of Mr. Obama's. Another three McCain ads have earned the slightly less damning "false," and seven were labeled "barely true," compared to two of Mr. Obama's earning "barely true."