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We’ve all seen them.
Advertisements are filling our television, taking up our paper,
practically screaming for attention. But while ordinary ads focus on
making the company’s product look good, these are a different breed. Those
who pay for them focus their time and effort on making other products look
bad. They make products look unreliable, useless, and even harmful. The
products are politicians.
Negative advertisements
have been targeting politicians since before America began, some of the
first being political cartoons created by the opposing party. But it seems
these negative ads are only increasing. One likely reason is simply that
the sheer number of advertisements we are exposed to daily has increased
over the decades. In the 1970’s, the average person saw about five hundred
advertisements per day, while that number increased tenfold by last year.
More ads mean more negative political ads.
Or perhaps it had to do
with the importance of the individual voter. Back in Revolutionary times,
very few people had the power to put a leader in place, the Electoral
College was taken a bit more seriously then. Even more were too poor to
get involved in politics, and women and minorities were hardly even
considered citizens until the twentieth century. Now, everyone over
eighteen can vote and so politicians must appeal to everyone, not just a
select few.
For whatever reason, we can
turn on the television at any given time around and upcoming election, and
find personal hate messages. They pick apart political candidates, usually
taking a less attractive photo of the opposing party and speaking over it
with an unidentifiable voice. Every single slip of the tongue is found and
recorded for both Democrats and Republicans.
But are these messages
really all that effective? Many of the ads seem superficial, attacking the
personal life of a candidate, or a badly worded sentence. The idea of any
of these things being all that important to the voter seems ridiculous.
And yet, millions of dollars are poured into these ‘public notices’ every
month.
I can understand that the
political weaknesses of a politician-- such as corruption and conflicts of
interest-- should be made known to the public. But the blatant insulting
and name calling of opposition should be stopped, for the dignity of
everyone involved. After all, even corporate advertisements have the sense
to avoid building themselves up by beating others down.
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