Ad Watch 3.0:
Developing Audiovisual Techniques
for Engaging the Audiovisual Content
of Political Advertising

Glenn W. Richardson Jr.
Department of Political Science
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

Prepared for Presentation at the
Foundations of Political Theory
Workshop on Political Myth, Rhetoric
and Symbolism
at the 102nd Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
August 31-September 3, 2006.

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In 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush's campaign advertisements claimed his opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, was responsible for loosing hundreds of first degree murderers on "weekend" passes, whereupon one of the furloughed convicts slashed a Maryland man and raped his fiance. America, the Bush ad charged, could not afford to risk such leadership. The ads and the news coverage they spawned became a central part of the campaign narrative, abetted by Bush's frequent retellings of the tale on the campaign trail. The lasting effect of the ads could be seen in the spike in references in the Congressional Record to "prison furloughs" the following year, and perhaps in Bush's own ascendancy to the White House. The ad's claims, however, were largely fraudulent. As Kathleen Jamieson noted, only one furloughed inmate went on to commit other crimes such as rape, not the 268 suggested by the ad's juxtaposition of graphics and narrative. The prison furlough program had been initiated not by Dukakis, but by a Republican predecessor more than a decade earlier. Indeed, Dukakis eventually abolished the furlough program after extensive reporting of the incident in question. Moreover, the federal government, under the leadership of President Reagan and Vice President Bush, operated exactly the same kind of program. As a Dukakis ad pointed out, under that program, a convict escaped from a federal correctional halfway house and raped and killed a pregnant mother of two. The Massachusetts furloughs were not "weekend" passes but good for only 36 hours; even the name of the Massachusetts convict was twisted by Bush campaign spin: William J. Horton Jr. became "Willie Horton," the man Bush media consultant Lee Atwater promised to make "Michael Dukakis's running mate" (Jamieson 1992). Crime rates tend to ebb and flow, often impervious to public policy, but under Dukakis, Massachusetts had one of the lowest crime rates of any industrialized state in the nation.

The Birth of the Ad Watch

It was the media's complicity in the Bush tactics, however, that prompted perhaps the most significant and sustained critiques ever of press coverage of political campaigns and advertising in particular. Notably, David Broder, one of the deans of the Washington Press corps, called for a greater effort to police the content of political spots (Broder 1990), a position also taken by academics including Jamieson and Darrell West (1992). The result was the growth of "ad watch" journalism (Ad Watch 2.0; see Richardson 2002). The 1992 presidential campaign produced a dramatic up tick in media attention to campaign spots, including many specifically employing the visual grammar developed by Jamieson and her research team to allow reporters to critique an ad without reinforcing it's claims.

The initial results were encouraging. Candidates began to submit documentation to back up the claims made in their ads, and the ads themselves often included onscreen factual citations (West 2005:84). One television reporter argued that ad watch journalism was "the primary reason why no Willie Horton ads or their cousins have appeared in (the 1992) campaign. Our coverage is keeping the bastards honest" (Jamieson and Campbell 2001:332). Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post described the ad watches as "a great step forward for democracy," and a public opinion survey showed that 68 percent of those who responded found ad watches "somewhat helpful" or "very helpful" (West 2005:85).

The Backlash: Let Lying Dogs Sleep

Soon, however, the bloom would fall from the ad watch rose. In 1996, while print ad watches continued, television ad watches almost vanished. Network news producers claimed the Clinton-Dole contest was not close enough to justify the effort (Jamieson and Campbell 2001:332). Perhaps further fueling the turn away from the ad watch were the results of a high profile study by political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Stephen Ansolabehere that found ad watches almost wholly ineffective, even leading viewers to support candidates whose ads were being critiqued (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995; 1996). These findings prompted a reassessment of the ad watch project by prominent journalists, academics, and even some of the original proponents of the the technique.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Max Frankel asked "whether it's worth chasing down the lies and slanders in the candidates' TV commercials," noting that "(o)ur Ad Watch campaigns seem to be giving wide circulation to 30-second mendacities that the campaigns have paid us to air only once or twice." Specifically citing Ansolabehere and Iyengar's work, he continued, "(t)he now-routine policing of TV commercials, it turns out, often compounds the damage that those ads inflict on our democracy. We are being urged to pass up the temptations of testing the ads for truth, to let lying dogs sleep" (Frankel 1996:18). Washington Post columnist David Broder, an early advocate of the ad patrol, stated that the Ansolabehere and Iyengar findings "shatter some of my preconceptions," and that the evidence showed ad watches "appear only to reinforce the negative consequences. They 'clearly backfired''' (Broder 1996).

A host of other scholarly efforts produced at best mixed results on the efficacy of ad watches, some supporting claims of a "boomerang" or "backlash" effect (where the criticized ad sponsor actually gained support) (Pfau and Louden 1994; O'Sullivan and Geiger 1995; McKinnon and Kaid 1999; Leshner 2001). While West found an increase in ad watches in the New York Times and Washington Post in 2000 (compared to 1996), by 2004 the ad watch had become "an endangered species" (West 2005:88; see also Kaid, Tedesco and McKinnon 1996, Bennett 1997 and Weaver Lariscy and Tinkham 1999 on the decline of the ad watch in the 1990s).

The Ad Watch Endures

Perhaps, though, as with Mr. Twain, the rumors of the demise of the ad watch are greatly exaggerated. Even while on West's endangered species list (grounded in print and broadcast journalism), the ad watch seemingly flourished online and in other corners of the media environment during the 2004 campaign. Prominent ad watch sites included the Ad Watch component of PBS's "Politics 101," the Campaign Ad Watch section of MSNBC's "Decision 2004" web site, and perhaps the mother of all ad watch efforts, Factcheck.org (2004 features remain available in the site's archive). Separately, a group called "Best Practices in Journalism" sponsored over 20 workshops exploring different angles in election coverage including ad watches between 2000 and 2004. Though no longer active, group's web site features video clips of effective ad watch segments and tips for TV stations and reporters considering producing ad watch features. Still more ad watching occurred on independent web sites and blogs (see for example "Wonkette's" weblog on attack ads). All of this activity, moreover, pre-dates the existence of video sharing web sites such as YouTube and the anti-Bush video blog Political Zing.

In short, it is likely that future campaigns will see more, far more "ad watching" behavior by professionals and amateurs alike. The challenge in "building a better ad watch," therefore, no longer lies in finding appropriate venues for the task. Instead, the key challenges are in the task itself, in effectively countering suspect elements of campaign commercials. Jamieson's pioneering efforts produced a "visual grammar" for ad critiques. Yet the grammar itself was a visual way of addressing the verbal and textual claims of ads. Still undeveloped are the tools and techniques that can address the audiovisual elements of ads. The role such elements play in how ads work may be substantial. Research emanating from the University of Iowa has spotlighted the way campaign ads rely upon the audiovisual conventions of popular culture and the recognizable genres from whence they spring to communicate both narrative and emotion (see for example Nelson and Boynton 1997; Richardson 2003). Michigan's Ted Brader found that emotionally uplifting music produced dramatic effects, increasing the likelihood of voting in viewers of his experimental campaign spots (Brader 2006).

The present project is designed to explore the issues confronting the next generation of ad watches. It unfolds in three parts: first, an analysis of the limits and liabilities of extant journalistic approaches to campaign advertising, including the ad watch format. Second, demonstration of a handful of techniques that can aid those seeking to counter the questionable claims, assertions and implicit inferences of dubious political commercials. Finally, some brief ruminations on the future of the ad watch.

Ads as News: Counterargument or Reinforcement?

The scholarly research that began to cast doubt on the effectiveness of ad watch journalism highlighted the difficulty news producers have in attempting to counter the questionable claims and inferences in ads without unintentionally reinforcing the very charges they seek to rebut. Unfortunately, reporters, producers, and even researchers may have drawn the wrong conclusions from that scholarly evidence. For all the findings of the failure of ad watches, few have paused to consider the alternatives. The academic work was typically designed to measure whether ad watches worked in supplanting the claims of ads with the factual judgments of reporters. What they did not do was to contrast a world (more than just a broadcast) without ad watches to one with them. While one study that did contrast exposure to ad watches and exposure to the ads themselves found ad watches magnify the ad's messages, that work, like much of the research on ad watches, did not feature and ad watch pointing to major flaws in the ad (McKinnon and Kaid 1999), or fundamentally address the ad's audiovisual elements. In short, in testing the efficacy of ad watches, researchers, relying largely on extant ad watches, have used poor exemplars of the breed. They have focused narrowly, perhaps overlooking the broader implications of the ad watch movement.

While there can be little doubt that it is extremely difficult for journalists to counter the claims of campaign ads, academic efforts to assess the efficacy of the ad watch also have several drawbacks that have largely escaped scrutiny, even as the studies' conclusions may have influenced how journalists approach ads. None of the prominent analyses questioning the effectiveness of ad watch journalism involved random samples of Americans, or even of a the residents of a given state. Several involved samples of undergraduates in communications-related courses. Many sought evidence that viewers would be repelled from a sponsor of an ad being analyzed when the actual ad analysis was not particularly critical (the closing line to the Brooks Jackson ad watch in the Iyengar and Ansolabehere study began, "Nothing really false here ...") (Jamieson and Cappella 1997; see also Richardson 2003:99-100). In their detailed response to the Ansolabehere and Iyengar work, Jamieson and Cappella conclude, "Ansolabehere and Iyengar's descriptions of the tested ad watches are themselves misleading . . . No boomerang. No backlash" (Jamieson and Cappella 1997:19). All had to struggle with vexing issues of internal and external validity. Despite elaborate research designs aimed at simulating actual news in an on-going campaign environment, none truly comes close to replicating political behavior "in the field." Of course this is a standard critique of virtually all experimental research, and should not be taken as an indictment of the method, but rather as a note of caution.

More broadly, ad watch research has implicitly adopted a primitive model of voting wherein all survey respondents are created equal. Marketers and political consultants now know that some respondents are more influential than others and have an outsized role in shaping the behavior of their peers. That is, the role of the reporter is to get information before the public. Individual members of the public naturally differ in their ability to parse information and to impart information to others. Moreover, the use of "online processing," (Hastie and Park 1986) where evaluations are made but the details supporting those judgments are discarded, may explain why less educated respondents may pick up the tone of an ad watch but do not retrieve specific information about it when probed by investigators, producing confounding effects for researchers (Jamieson and Cappella 1997:20).

In sum, it may be quite enough for journalists to make critical information available, whether or not experiments suggest most respondents process that information properly. Once the information is available, an entire infrastructure of political communication comes into play, including parties and activists. The more important point is that scholars, journalists and other observers must act, even in the absence of scientifically compelling research findings. Scholars may have their reasons for their inquiries, but in the larger public sphere, the calling is deeper and the criteria for judgment more evasive. Journalists need not necessarily subject their quest for a truer campaign discourse to the survey respondent and the social scientist's t-test.

Audiovisuals and the Ad Watch

In building a better ad watch, perhaps the principal shortcoming is the lack of attention to the audiovisual claims made by ads (McKinnon et al 1996; Richardson 1998). This applies to ad watches and even more so to the use of ads in "regular" reporting. Consider the concluding story of the CBS Evening News on November 6, 2000. The story focused on "negative" ads, though no attempt was made to assess the validity of the claims made in the ad clips shown; though we are told such ads work to raise doubts, we are not told how.

Correspondent Bob McNamara begins the "Eye on America" feature by describing negative ads as "the bad breath of American politics." Next, MIT political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere is shown in a soundbite, saying "the negative advertisements are very effective in raising doubts."
This is immediately followed by a clip from a Bush campaign ad (titled "Really?") showing Al Gore on a small kitchen-counter TV (canted to appear much like the ad images in ad watches), saying "I took the initiative in creating the internet." The ad clip qua news continues with a female voice over intoning "yeah, and I invented the remote control too."
The image of Gore on the little TV gives way to noisy static (conveying Gore's inauthenticity), first full screen, then within the countertop TV again (right), all straight from the Bush ad. Then, as correspondent McNamara says "as long as campaigns have come into the kitchen . . . "
The Bush ad continues to play full screen, including the superimposed URL for the Bush web site"gorewillsayanything.com" which appears (barely visible as a black line across the center of the image, at right) adjacent to the small TV with Gore on it, now shown from a distance, clearly revealing its countertop location.
McNamara pauses slightly, and a clip from a 1988 Dukakis ad now plays. In this clip, visibly titled in the ad as "the packaging of Dan Quayle," actors playing Bush campaign consultants are seen huddled around a table with what appears to be computer and video equipment. The ad's soundtrack fills the void left by McNamara's pause: "that debate was a disaster," says one consultant. "Suddenly the words President Quayle even make me nervous," replies the other. Now McNamara's voice returns: "there have been negative ads."
Next we see the distinguished communications scholar Lynda Lee Kaid stating "the all time high offender of negative ads, many people don't realize, I think, is Bill Clinton." Next, a clip from a 1992 Clinton ad showing in black lettering on a white screen the words "he asked you to believe him."
The ad's narration repeats the phrase, and then the ad's audio and video changes to Vice President Bush delivering perhaps his most infamous statement, "read my lips." The ad then shows the text "now he's asking you to believe his attacks against Bill Clinton." As the ad goes back to the audiovisual of Bush saying "read my lips," Professor Kaid's voice plays over the audio and video of the ad, still being shown. She says, "in his '92 campaign against George Bush," and then as she continues, the video returns from the ad to her speaking, "about 69 percent of all of his ads were negative."
The report continues with McNamara noting that George H. Bush himself had benefited from negative attacks, along with self-described images of the "greatest hits (and misses)" of broadcast politics, including the 1988 Bush campaign's"Revolving Door"and 1964 Johnson "Daisy Girl" spots. The clip from "Revolving Door" includes the point at which that ad's narration and imagery combine to falsely suggest that 268 "first degree murderers not eligible for parole ... escaped" and went on to commit crimes such as rape and assault (only one such escapee committed such crimes, the infamous Mr. Horton) (Jamieson 1992).
McNamara then notes (while more ads play in the background) that "women, sometimes the targets of the most unscrupulous attack ads, have turned the tables." Kaid, in voice-over, states, "women actually use negative ads more than men."
The segment concludes with a clip from an anti-Bush ad asking "is he ready to lead America?," then McNamara noting "going negative . . . "
... as the video switches to Gore, in the Bush ad featured earlier in the segment, now framed by a white background with a cut-out in the shape of a TV screen, saying "there's never been a time when I've said something untrue," followed by the ad's punch line, stated by the ad's narrator and shown in black text on a white full screen: "Really?"
McNamara continues the narration as a new image from an anti-Bush ad appears "has often been the difference between winning and losing say the ad experts."
The video switches quickly from an anti-Bush to an anti-Gore ad ...
... before turning to an ad featuring chimps in shirts and ties poring over a budget, then doing backflips, as McNamara signs off: "and history is on their side . . ." Anchor Dan Rather chuckles and reminds viewers not to forget "to vote tomorrow."

The CBS feature managed to weave in three separate audiovisual clips from the Bush ad "Really?" that was then running heavily in selected media markets in the Midwest, East, and Pacific Northwest the night before the election. In fact, that ad would appear just 30 seconds after the close of the CBS Evening News on KYW channel 3 in Philadelphia, the fourth largest media market in the country. A slightly distracted viewer might look up at the TV one minute, see the CBS Evening News, see the Bush ad on the news and then look up again and see the Bush ad as an ad, albeit an ad itself designed to look like news. Moreover, Jamieson (1992) has noted how upon repeated viewings, merely showing part of an ad can induce recall of the whole of the ad.

All in all, a curious send off to the electorate the night before the vote from a newscast ostensibly serving the public interest. Of course the antipathy shown toward politicians in the feature may be more appealing to an audience way past cynical. It was, though, a microcosm of the campaign coverage up to that point. Gore was a serial exaggerator.

Yet, even when reporters explicitly don their ad watch cloth, they generally fail to address the implicit audiovisual arguments. A Lexis-Nexis search of transcripts from the CBS Evening News suggests they never specifically discussed the Bush ad "Really?" which began airing in the final days of the campaign. Both the Washington Post and New York Times did include brief ad watch features on "Really?"

The ad is based on a story line that began on August 28, 2000, when Vice President Gore made a campaign stop at Florida State University in Tallahassee to push his health care agenda. After hearing several retirees describing the difficult choices they faced in trying to determine which medicines to buy, Gore called on the drug companies to lower prices. He offered as an example his mother-in-law, Margaret Ann Atchieson, who he said paid $108 a month for the prescription arthritis medication Lodine, and his 14-year old labrador retriever Shiloh, whose prescription cost $39 a month for the same drug. "It's pretty bad when you have got to pretend to be a dog or a cat to get a price break," Gore remarked. (see Robinson 2000a, 2000b; Wasson 2000).

Gore's appearance generated front-page coverage in Florida, but did not receive such prominent play nationwide. Then, on September 18, Boston Globe reporter Walter Robinson wrote a story arguing that Gore had "mangled the facts." Robinson reported Gore's aides could not say whether his mother-in-law took brand name Lodine or the generic equivalent; that the figures cited by Gore came not from family bills but from a House Democratic study; that the price comparisons erroneously assumed the same dosage; and that the prices were wholesale, not retail. Yet, Robinson noted, "(t)hose facts aside, Gore's overall message was accurate - that many brand-name drugs that have both human and animal applications are much more expensive for people than for pets." Indeed Robinson would note that the cost of prescription (brand name) Lodine "typically ranges from $140 to $174 a month . . . according to a Globe review of prices offered by walk-in and online pharmacies" and that the dog version (Etogesic), "costs at least $70 a month for comparable doses" (Robinson 2000a). Indeed, "(a) check by The New York Times of several pharmacies and veterinary clinics in Washington found a price disparity between Lodine and Etogesic capsules roughly similar to that given by Mr. Gore" though the capsules were of different sizes (Seelye 2000).

Yet, the press would soon be whipped up into a feeding frenzy, baited by a full-court press on the issue from the Bush-Cheney campaign, which produced an 11-paragraph statement on the subject (Kelly 2000) reinforced by public statements painting Gore as someone who "makes up" facts to support his case, linked to GOP claims that Gore routinely makes things up, like when had said he "invented" the internet. Bush Communications Director Karen Hughes claimed "that the vice president is willing to say anything to get elected" (Balz 2000). Vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney said Gore "simply makes some things up out of whole cloth and repeats them over and over and over again until he's called on it" (Cooper 2000). Governor Bush told one interviewer that Gore had a tendency "to make up facts to make his case," and that the episode "confirms what I have said in the past, that he'll say anything to be the president" (Seelye 2000). Bush stated in another interview, "a leader doesn't try to exaggerate in order to win" and that "America better beware of a candidate who is willing to stretch reality in order to win points" (Johnson 2000).

In the media, the Bush-Cheney campaign would find a willing accomplice. The bitter antipathy in the press toward Vice President Gore was longstanding and well known, dating back at least to Gore's response to queries about campaign finance during the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection effort. Republican operatives seized upon the animosity already there and painstakingly fueled the notion of Gore as exaggerator through deliberate misrepresentations of Gore's statements (Parry 2000). By the fall campaign, the disdain was palpable, and it can be gleaned from USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro's take on Gore's prescription drug claims. He wrote, "(c)ampaigns do mete out a certain rough justice. If a candidate insists on being cloistered from both the press and the public, then he runs the risk that a minor snafu like the Shiloh affair may end up biting him in the leg" (Shapiro 2000). By the end of the week during which the story "broke," editorialists from coast to coast were piling on Gore for yet another exaggeration that cast doubt on his fitness to serve.

So it was that when the Bush-Cheney campaign released the ad "Really?," the ground had already been softened for the character assault that would follow.

In his ad watch, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz noted this was "perhaps (the) harshest" Bush attack during the campaign, that "Gore did not 'make up' the drug story but clearly misstated the facts," that "(t)he only 'press' cited as calling Gore's Social Security attacks nonsense is the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page," that the video of Gore was taken from a January debate, and even that "many newspapers have echoed Gore's criticism that Bush's Social Security plan threatens the budget surplus" (Kurtz 2000). In his single paragraph ad watch, Kurtz does an admirable job of identifying crucial flaws in the Bush ad's logic, though he notably does not address the interaction of narrative and video, failing to mention, for example, that the ad makes it appear that Gore is denying ever having said anything untrue during the campaign in the recent days after the fall presidential debates, and after the latest feeding frenzy over his "pattern of embellishment." He does note that the "sarcastic tag line softens the attack," but never explicitly explains that the joke itself is based on a fraudulent audiovisual juxtaposition, and how much the joke is central to the emotional impact of the ad. While he noted that Gore didn't "make up" the dog drug story, he didn't mention that those are the very words the Bush-Cheney ticket had been relentlessly (and by Kurtz's own analysis, erroneously) tarring Gore with since the publication of the Boston Globe story.

Peter Marks (2000) ad watch in the New York Times does show sensitivity to the ad's emotional core, though it does far less to clarify the flaws in the Bush claims while amplifying its effects. He wrote, "(t)he spot is funny, devastating" and that "it cleverly changes the subject by suggesting that Mr. Gore's attacks are merely further evidence of a propensity for stretching the truth." (The ad was a response to Gore ads featuring Nobel Prize winning economists claiming Bush's Social Security plans would lead to huge budget deficits.) Marks concludes, "(t)he spot's payoff is the mocking clip in which Mr. Gore asserts that 'there has never been a time' when he uttered an untruth, and the announcer's cynical comeback. The commercial deftly shifts the focus from whatever doubts voters may have about Mr. Bush's proposal to questions about Mr. Gore's character."  Marks seems unaware of the implication of Gore's remark being taken chronologically out of context; he adopts the Republican frame of Gore as serial exaggerator unquestioningly; fails to challenge the Bush language that Gore's misattribution of the source of the drug price quotes means he "made up" the story; chooses not to distinguish between "the press" and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal; and apparently finds no fault in shifting debate from the trillions of dollars at issue in the Bush Social Security plan to the few dollars worth of exaggeration in the Gore drug price remarks on the basis of "funny . . . clever . . .mocking . . . cynical" advertising that "deftly" weaves distortion and falsehood.

It has hard not to conclude that "Gore as exaggerator" became a greater exaggeration than Gore's original exaggerations. What are we to think, moreover, of a campaign operation so ruthlessly and relentlessly dedicated to misrepresentation? Indeed, in hindsight, one can make the claim that the nation would have been better served if the press had zeroed in on the Bush-Cheney campaign's manipulation of facts and events and what it said about how they would govern.

Yet the task facing the prospective ad watcher is still daunting. What more could be done? At least one possibility is suggested by political scientist Edward Tufte, a renowned expert on visual representation of data. He wrote:

One way to enforce some standard of truth-telling is to insist that the innocent, unprocessed natural image be shown along with the manipulated image, and, further, that the manipulators and their methods be identified. If images are to be credible, their source and history must be documented. And, if an image is to serve as serious evidence, a more rigorous accounting should reveal the overall pool of images from which the displayed image was selected. (1997:25)

In this case, a variation on this theme might be to reproduce the Bush ad so that the audiovisual distortion of the chronology of events is removed. That is, one could edit the ad so that Gore's remarks, the Bush ad claims and so on were presented in the order in which they actually occurred, rather in the misleading order presented in the ad. Figure shows what such a "re-mixed" ad might look like.

Dealing with the audiovisual elements of ads is clearly the biggest challenge facing the ad watcher, assuming one can find a way through the conflicting claims of partisans who can disagree vehemently over the correct time of day. One aspect of that challenge involves determining the proper frame of reference from which to assess audiovisual claims. In televised political advertising, the key audiovisual referents may well be those of popular culture (Nelson and Boynton 1997; Richardson 1998). This can be illustrated by considering the Bush-Cheney advertising in 2004.

The 2004 Bush-Cheney Ad Campaign

In their bid to win a second term, at a broad level the Bush-Cheney campaign followed along two interrelated tracks. The first would seek to reinforce the president's definition of himself as a "war president." The second was aimed at discrediting opponent John Kerry as the unreliable opposite to Bush's steadfast leadership, particularly on the key issue of security. To accomplish these objectives, Bush cultivated fear about the future and fear about Senator Kerry. The Bush camp ran several ads extensively on these issues, including "Peace and Security," "Searching," and "Risk." (Other ads also touched on these themes, including "Wolves," which echoed the Reagan-Bush ad featuring "a bear in the woods."). Taken together, they presented voters a world ripped from the world of Jack Bauer, the fictional superhero of the FOX action-thriller "24."

The ads "Peace and Security" and "Risk" juxtapose scenes of domestic tranquility (often personified in the faces of children) with ominous warnings about the terrorist threat and accusations that Senator Kerry and "liberals in Congress" voted to slash intelligence funds "after the first Trade Center attack," and opposed weapons vital to the war on terror. "Risk" also claims Kerry opposed "Reagan as he won the Cold War," and notes Kerry's opposition to the first Gulf War. "Peace and Security" says Kerry "refused to support our troops in combat with the latest weapons and body armor." Factcheck.org found the ads' claims false or distorted in virtually all of the particulars. They noted that the ads make it sound like Kerry voted to "slash" intelligence after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, when the "first attack on the Trade Center" occurred in 1993. Kerry's proposals to cut roughly 1 percent from the intelligence budget came

five days after the Washington Post had reported that one intelligence agency, the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office, had quietly hoarded between $1 billion and $1.7 billion in unspent funds without informing the Central Intelligence Agency or the Pentagon. The CIA was in the midst of an inquiry into the NRO's funding because of complaints that the agency had spent $300 million on unspent funds from its classified budget to build a new headquarters building in Virginia a year earlier. ... Also, the very same day Kerry proposed his $1.5 billion cut, the Senate passed by voice vote an amendment proposed by Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to eliminate $1 billion in intelligence funds for fiscal year 1996. Specter made clear he was attempting to recoup $1 billion in unused intelligence funds from the NRO .... (http://www.factcheck.org/article153.html)

Bush-Cheney charges that Kerry voted against weapons vital to the war on terror, Factcheck noted, were equally distorted. Kerry did oppose certain strategic weapons (such as the MX missile and B-2 Stealth bomber) but both were also abandoned by George H.W. Bush in his 1992 State of the Union Address in which he also announced plans for a 30 percent reduction in military spending. The Bush campaign identified the AH-64 Apache helicopter as another vital weapon opposed by Kerry even while Dick Cheney proposed canceling the same weapon five years after Kerry had. Other weapons "opposed" by Kerry were part of larger spending bills; Kerry never voted against the specific weapons he is charged with opposing in the Bush ads. Kerry was also correct in claiming to have "voted for some of the largest defense and intelligence budgets in our history.” In fact, Kerry voted for every regular defense authorization bill since 1997, and did so in 16 of the 19 years he had served in the Senate. (http://www.factcheck.org/article147.html; http://www.factcheck.org/article177.html).

In some ways, the claim that Kerry opposed body armor for the troops is the most vicious of all. Kerry never voted specifically against body armor. His vote against the $87 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq that included body armor funds was coupled with his support of a bill to provide the same support while paying for it with tax increases on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. Kerry's legislative positioning translated miserably into his "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" comment that was immediately and incessantly broadcast in Bush-Cheney ads. Lost in the translation was the fact that it was President Bush that had sent the troops to Iraq in the first place without providing sufficient funds for body armor (http://www.factcheck.org/article155.html).

On the merits, then, the specific claims of the Bush-Cheney campaign amount to a pattern of outright falsehoods and grotesque distortions. And while the ad cops at Factcheck.org set the facts straight, they rarely addressed the audiovisual reinforcements of the ads master narrative. Those elements were substantial on their own.

"Risk" begins with an image from Ground Zero after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center with an American flag flying in the wind. The image is chopped into various sized squares and rectangles, each of which can be replaced by either a black box or image. The Ground Zero imagery may prime viewers to think of September 11, 2001 when several seconds later they hear the narration about Kerry favoring cuts in intelligence "after the first Trade Center attack," (emphasis added) which sounds to the ear a lot like "after the World Trade Center attack." The independent boxes within the video echo the use of simultaneous video windows in "24."

	A fade transition joins the Ground Zero image with that of an armed, masked terrorist.
	The terrorist image fades into that of the face of a young child. The haunting musical score builds in intensity as the camera zooms in on the child's eye ...
	... reaching a climax as the rectangles and boxes disappear, the camera zooms in on the eye of the child drawing closer until the child's eye begins to reveal an image that appears to be Ronald Reagan, followed by quickly by a series of military and intelligence images.

The Reagan image begins a collage of images as the camera pans across the decades; with each new image, audiovisual punctuations heighten the ad's allegations. In the 1990s image below, the helicopter silhouette moves down the screen as the sound of its whooping rotors follows immediately after the narrator says Kerry voted against the first Gulf War. The audio punctuations preceding and following the allegations about Kerry's call for intelligence cuts after the first Trade Center attack are a high pitched and rapid series of electronic beeps, conveying the sense of the powerful computer resources used to fight the war on terror that would presumably be at "risk" were Kerry to be elected. Such compute effects permeate "24."

As the timeline fades out, the child's face fades in, along with the text, "John Kerry and His Liberal Allies. Are They a Risk We Can Afford to Take Today?" as the soundtrack draws silent, followed by President Bush reading the ad's disclaimer.

In "Risk," the imagery focuses for the most part on military and intelligence actions in the field, bracketed by the image of the child's eye. In "Peace and Security," the focus shifts to the home front, with scenes of domestic life punctuated by images suggesting the urgency of ticking time, the very essence of the underlying plot line in "24."

The narrative and imagery are only loosely conjoined logically, but as an audiovisual package they become one. The alleged sins of Kerry's voting record extend risk from the soldiers in the battlefield to the suburban warriors on the home front. In contrast to "Risk," the aural punctuation of "Peace and Security" has a more domestic ring to it. Crashing cymbals and special effects accompany images of ceiling fans and window blinds rather than attack helicopters and the computers at the counter terrorism center. But the core emotion is the same: an ever present tense fear.

The Bush ad "Weapons" presented the charge that Kerry opposed various weapons and body armor for the troops in Iraq through images of soldiers in the desert and fighter jets vanishing.

BUSH AD "WEAPONS" GEORGE W. BUSH: I'm George W. Bush, and I approve this message. NARRATOR: As our troops defend America in the War on Terror, they must have what it takes to win Yet John Kerry has repeatedly opposed weapons vital to winning the War on Terror: Apache helicopters, C-130 Hercules, and F-16 fighter jets, components of which are all built here in Florida. Kerry even voted against body armor for our troops on the front line of the War on Terror. John Kerry's record on national Security: troubling.

The ad begins by visually opposing our troops defending America and Kerry's opposition to Weapons. Military style drumbeats are heard at the beginning. As the voice over and text on the screen turn to Kerry, a bell chime sounds, and the troops begin to move in slow motion as the soundtrack turns more ominous.

As the ad charges Kerry with opposition to specific weapons, a jet swoops in (left) only to be engulfed in the dark clouds symbolizing the threat posed by Kerry. Frightening sound effects mark each charge against Kerry.

The plane continues to fade out as two others appear on the left of the screen. As "built in Florida" is highlighted, soon all the planes have disappeared, leaving the troops without the weapons (presumably the ones Kerry opposed).

Stripped of fighter jets, helicopters, and troop transport planes, the desert encampent stands alone as the superimposed text and narration level the vicious attack that Kerry opposed body armor, followed by a second bell chime. The sound effects suggest a windstorm or even tornado as the ominous clouds continue to roll across the landscape. A lone soldier looks in the direction of the others off in the distance as the dark cloud threatens them. Then he looks toward the screen as if to appeal to the viewer to support the troops by opposing Kerry.

"Weapons" began airing early in the campaign. In the final days of the campaign, the ad "Whatever It Takes" began to air. It is a stirring response to the most searing indictment of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the suggestion that Bush was oblivous or uncaring about the human costs of the Iraq War. The ad is based on a section of Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in New York. His words are solemn and inspirational. The ad interposed imagery of audiences of soldiers and veterans, including an image of a particular soldier that had been edited into the same crowd scene more than once, providing minor embarrasssment for the campaign after it was initially exposed by a posting on the liberal weblog DailyKos (Rutenberg 2004). The ad ends in with an emotional crescendo and a frenzy of flag waving enthusiasm.

BUSH AD "WHATEVER IT TAKES" PRESIDENT BUSH: These four years have brought moments I could not foresee and will not forget. I’ve learned first hand that ordering Americans into battle is the hardest decision, even when it is right. I have returned the salute of wounded soldiers who say they were just doing their job. I've held the children of the fallen who are told their dad or mom is a hero but would rather just have their mom or dad. I’ve met with the parents and wives and husbands who have received a folded flag. And in those military families, I have seen the character of a great nation. Because of your service and sacrifice, we are defeating the terrorists where they live and plan and you’re making America safer. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes. (voiceover): I’m George W. Bush and I approved this message.

Bush is doing that which only the president can. The "set" at the convention featured a gigantic presidential seal, and "Whatever It Takes" invokes the full range of the office, both commander-in-chief and Chief of State and the full palette of audiovisual evocations of leadership. Bush not only orders troops into battle, he returns the salutes of wounded soldiers and he's there for the reception of the "folded flag." The ad's uplifting musical score emphasizes what, in Bush's convention speech, was already an emotionally moving moment. Visuals show rapt interest in viewers looking "up" at the president. It was the high point of the speech, and serves as an emotional high note for the campaign. The ad concludes with the tagline, "whatever it takes." The very essence of the Bush campaign was devoted to the notion that this is literally the case, and that, implicitly, John Kerry will not do "whatever it takes" to defend America.

The twin Bush messages that John Kerry is an unreliable foe to terror and that the terror threat is frightening are manifest in the ad "Searching," and especially in its use of visual transitions to punctuate each clip in the ad. According to Factcheck.org, "(t)his ad is the most egregious example so far in the 2004 campaign of using edited quotes in a way that changes their meaning and misleads voters" (http://www.factcheck.org/article269.html). If "Whatever It Takes" is designed to define Bush, "Searching" is the Bush's campaign's attempt to define John Kerry, narratively and audiovisually.

The Kerry statements quoted by Bush in fact are perfectly consistent, especially when taken context. Kerry voted to authorize force against Iraq (while hoping Bush would use the vote as a bargaining chip rather than green light); he praised the way the military conducted the first phase of the war and consistently argued that Bush went about the way the wrong way by not allowing more time for diplomacy and by failing to secure a broad coalition of allied support. The subtlety of Kerry's positioning is ransacked first by the narrative distortions of the ad, and then more forcefully by the searing video attack. The video portrays Kerry in a monstrous light that would be implausible even in a Bush-Cheney ad if attempted with word alone. The evocative imagery relies on viewers to fill in the horrifying details on their own; the ad provides the match to the preexisting kindling of audiovisual associations in viewers.

Recognizing that campaign ads draw upon popular culture to convey the emotional substance of their persuasive appeal is one thing; effectively countering such evocation is quite another. One could argue that if the appeal itself is grounded in the unarticulated premises drawn from the audiovisual and narrative conventions of popular entertainment, so too must be the counter appeal. The first step would be to recognize the cultural referents, then name them. Once identified, counter arguments can be offered in context. Here, for example, if George Bush is suggesting to viewers that he is the Jack Bauer of the real "war on terror," then perhaps the most effective counter arguments that have to be made are those pointing to the flaws in the Bauer approach. Rather than attempting to argue the specific merits of this or that surveillance or interrogation technique of the Bush administration, which may fail to sustain the attention of many voters, the more fundamental task may be to document why Jack Bauer's approach to fighting terror is ultimately flawed.

The parallel between Bauer and Republicans and the Bush administration has not gone unnoticed. New York Times editorialist Maureen Dowd wrote that "(i)f the Democrats are like the dithering 'Desperate Housewives,' the Republicans have come across like the counter terrorism agent Jack Bauer on '24': fast with a gun, loose with the law, willing to torture in the name of protecting the nation. Except Jack Bauer is competent" (Dowd 2006). From the right, Patrick Buchanan has referred to Bush as our "Jack Bauer in the war on terror," and writers for the conservative American Spectator and Washington Times have made the linkage as well (Orr 2006). In a piece on the politics of "24" in The New Republic, Christopher Orr describes the series (which he sees the defining TV show of our era) in a way that echoes the fabric of the Bush ads described above:

Now wrapping up its fifth season, the show plays like a breakneck rundown of Richard Clarke's apocalyptic nightmares: loose nukes, weaponized viruses, nerve gas attacks, assassination attempts, government conspiracies, terrorist cells and subcells. For those not yet on the edge of their seats, the urgency of these threats is further upped by "24"'s signature gimmick: The show takes place in "real time," with each episode constituting one hour-- complete with ticking clock bracketing commercial breaks--and each season adding up to a single, frenzied, 24-hour day (Orr 2006).

It is possible, then, that one might be more effective in engaging the central issues in confronting terrorism by confronting Jack Bauer than by confronting George Bush. Orr, for example, notes that, "the contours of Bauer's character have far less to do with the demands of geopolitics than with the demands of genre .... Bauer is not a hero because he does whatever is necessary; whatever he does is necessary because he is the hero" (Orr 2006). Bauer is right when he uses any means necessary; so too is he right when he chooses a more humane approach. Orr also points to the simultaneously maddening and endearing tendency of Agent Bauer to put the nation at risk, jeopardizing national security as he applies his whatever it takes mentality to protecting his family. George Lakoff has argued that the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is that while both use the metaphor of the nation as a family (with political leaders as the parents and citizens as the children) to reason through the otherwise daunting complexities of politics, conservatives embrace a strict father morality while liberals value a more nurturant parent morality (Lakoff 1996). Lakoff's work pre-dates the September 11 attacks, and the implications of his approach for such issues are not completely obvious. Yet, if in fact he is right about the differences between liberals and conservatives, the Bauer case offers a potentially clarifying template. In Bauer's private-before-public morality, the issue becomes joined in a vivid, accessible way. The very characteristics that initially appear strong may in fact be weak; the issue of whether there is a larger "we," beyond the family or tribe, to which Americans owe allegiance can be brought to the fore. It can be done, moreover, in a way that engages ordinary Americans without becoming bogged down in wonkspeak.

Orr concludes his analysis by suggesting that the politics of "24" are far more ambiguous than conservatives fathom, and not entirely inspiring:

"24" is, in some ways, the perfect cultural artifact for this post-September 11 moment. It extols patriotism but doesn't quite believe in it, preaches a self-sacrifice it practices only intermittently, and offers up a world in which the choices are always impossible but the answers are always right. On the surface, it flatters our belief that we're better now, more stoic and unselfish, committed to ideals larger than our individual wants and needs. But, below, it reassures us that it's OK to place our own households first, that politics is empty if not actively corrupt, and that belief in a cause will only lead to disillusion or betrayal (Orr 2006).

The move to engage fact through fiction is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Former counter terrorism chief Richard Clarke explained why he turned to fiction writing to convey his fact-based concerns about future terrorist threats in an article written for the Atlantic Monthly (Clarke 2005): "(i)n both the Clinton and Bush administrations, the only time I was really effective in getting senior officers to pay attention was when I had tabletop war games ... (t)hat did more than any briefing paper I might write'' (Rich 2005). Clark told interviewer Frank Rich of the New York Times that ''(p)op culture is frequently ahead of where the news media are on these things." Clarke noted that while in 2002, then national security advisor to President Bush Condoleeza Rice said "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center,'' in 1994 Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor involved a 747 crashing into the Capitol during a Joint Session of Congress at the hand of a Japanese pilot, and the 1996 movie "Executive Decision" featured Islamic terrorists who had seized control of another 747 so they could detonate a biological weapon in the nation's capital. (Investigations have shown that actual threat reports within the U.S. government did predict the airplanes as missiles scenario repeatedly before September 11, including one threat specifically targeted the World Trade Center in 1998) (Rich 2005).

In essence, then, the question raised by the Bush-Bauer link may be whether America really needs a president modeled after a "superpatriot with ADD" (Sternbergh 2006).

Engaging the politics of "24" also invites analysts to reverse the flow of inference. If "24" helps explain how Bush-Cheney campaign ads work, does it also tell us something about the Americans who make up the audience for those ads? The award-winning British journalist Johann Hari describes Bauer as a "torturing hero," and laments the "lurch in post-9/11 American culture towards the sympathetic, no, glorified, depiction of torture" (Hari 2006). In a review of two books on U.S. torture in Afghanistan and Iraq appearing in the New Statesman, Ziauddin Sardar writes that

The truth about the torture of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq is simple. The Bush administration sanctioned it, the military deployed it, and the American public gave it a tacit nod of approval. Most of the people who were and are being tortured are innocent. And they are all Muslims ... There is a seamless connection between what happens in American society, the way society is represented by Hollywood, and the torture meted out by US soldiers abroad. In movies, torture is an everyday activity. ... Jack Bauer, the counter-terrorist agent in the TV series 24, tortures indiscriminately, not caring whether his victims are suspected terrorists, colleagues or teenaged girls. The relationship between American society and Hollywood is like a feedback loop. The extremity of one reinforces the other. ... This is why the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were not content simply to take photographs to send to the folks back home, but found it necessary to stage their atrocities as special events for the camera (Sardar 2005).

Ad Watch 3.0

Glenn Leshner (2001) suggests that while much of the focus of ad watch journalism has been on "issues," candidate images are also critical to their electoral appeals, and scrutiny to such imagery may provide for a more engaging ad watch. Setting aside the limitations of the issue/image demarcation, Leshner is surely right in suggesting a broadening of the gaze of the ad watcher. At the very least, the recognition that candidates are propagating claims about their character might prompt a more thoughtful discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of various archetypical character types. Perhaps more pointedly, observers may seek to probe more deeply into the fundamental underpinnings of candidates' personalities and psychological make-ups. Not that journalists haven't tried to do this at least since James David Barber's Presidential Character argued that personality shapes presidents, and journalists ought do more to help voters understand potential presidents' personalities. Somehow, however, it was very difficult for journalists to get much beyond the somewhat misleading brain tattoos they had regarding Gore (exaggerator), Kerry (flip-flopper) and Bush (unflinching if not so smart). For while the Bush campaign was incessant in picturing Bush as a steadfast leader in a time of terror, there were alternate readings of the same character traits. Perhaps most notably, (though little discussed in the media or elsewhere), Bush's steadfast stubbornness (and what some would see as wishful thinking) have all the earmarks of the "dry drunk," or individual who has substituted one obsession (in Bush's case, the war on terrorism) for another (the bottle) without going through a full therapeutic rehabilitation (see for example Schweizer and Schweizer 2004 on Bush's addictive personality). Whether or not this is actually the case with Bush is not the point so much as that such discussions need to become part of the palette from which candidate evaluations (and ad watches) are drawn.

As we gaze into the future, we might also expect that Ad Watch 3.0 will be: interactive and communal (wiki?), multimedia (audio, video, and hyperlink), multiargumentative (policy, metaphor, genre, myth, and personality) and multicontested. At least on more concrete proposal is also worthy of mention: perhaps the single most urgent innovation in the ad watch (after greater attention to audiovisuals, their pop culture referents and concomitant emotional evocations) would be to maintain a running tally score of candidates' violations of the ad patrol's code of conduct.

That code of conduct ought not unduly restrict debate, discussion, emotionality, or candidates ability to contest the conventional depictions of matters of fact as well as value. The problem isn't that the Bush campaign offered the Bush as Bauer linkage. It is instead that while Bush ads and speeches drew such linkages, the ad police, academics and opposing candidates appeared largely unaware, even if such depictions more readily resonated with the American voter than their own preferred menu of policy prescription

 

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