When TV ads don't translate into votes

[dsewell]

Today's Tucson Citizen has an excellent article analyzing the effectiveness of primary candidates' TV ads in Pima County by comparing amount spent to votes gained.

Lieberman did the worst, spending about $36 a head to gather under 3000 votes (a case of beer per voter would have been a better investment...). Wes Clark did second-worst; despite a huge TV ad campaign ($385K in Pima County alone), he got only one vote per $26 spent. Kerry, on the other hand, began TV ads only in the last week before the election, spending about $1 per vote and gathering 1 2/3 times the vote total of runner-up Clark.

So what's the lesson? As a Clark supporter, I have to say that this is a reality check: Clark campaigned about as well as he could have in Arizona (I'm an ex-Tucsonan who has watched long-distance from Virginia), but as with Dean, the huge infusion of Internet-generated cash couldn't compete with Kerry's late momentum. Does this mean that voters simply judged Kerry the better candidate? Or is the power of TV ads trumped by the power of TV punditry and news spin?

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. The mass media is so much more pervasive than a 30 second spot.

Polls don't turn upside down on their own.

[CWebster]

2. Most likely what matters most is who owns the airways

"...But most journalists and pundits touted such estimates as reasonable because the media pros were predisposed to believe the pronouncements from administration officials. Now we're told that only hindsight has provided us the chance to see how wrong those estimates were. That's nonsense.
Extensive information, poking huge holes in key deceptions, was readily available at the time -- but major U.S. media outlets are still reporting as though Bush's pre-war claims were credible when they were made. In reality, any "intelligence failure" was dwarfed by a contemporaneous media failure.

(If you have any doubt that the Bush gang's WMD claims could have been recognized as transparently bogus from the start, take a look at dozens of news releases assembled during many pre-war months by my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy. Those releases, from 2002 and the first months of 2003, remain posted at www.accuracy.org without any change in wording.)...

... After 27 years as a CIA analyst, Ray McGovern knows a few things about propaganda. He notes that "the 'investigation' is slated to go past the election. Members will be picked by the president, and the scope is unconscionably wider than is necessary." McGovern contends that "the key question for 2004 is whether the administration's stranglehold on the media can be loosened to the point where the electorate can wake up, take away the president's driver's license and put an end to the reckless endangerment."

The media war of 2004 is well underway. To the victor goes the White House. "



http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0205-03.htm


In order to escape accountability, will the media simply transfer to another safe candidate who will maintain the illusion, and consciously seek to destroy candidates who would challenge the integity of media and the Senate?