Vote for me and I’ll set you free

Michael Hedges - November 19, 2007

Election campaigns are always newsmakers. Politicians, political parties and their messages become the stuff of media for weeks, and in some cases months. Political advertising augments what time and space they can get for free. Two recent studies, one from Russia and one from the US, show it is all very irritating.

Last week the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) quickly drafted an amendment to the Russian advertising law to allow political ads on billboards, earlier ruled forbidden. The Central Election Commission (CEC) asked the FAS if a recently launched outdoor ad campaign by political party A Just Russia might be allowed. First the FAS said ‘no,’ then ‘yes.’

Little items like these are typically noted in reports by international election monitors. We’ll hear a bit less from those reports this year as the two primary election monitoring organizations, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), will not be nosing around Russian cities and towns, counting minutes of television time given to or bought by one or another political party ahead of the State Duma elections December 2nd.

But, the Russian Agency for Social Information says more political advertising results in more irritation. Their survey of St. Petersburg residents showed just less than half “react negatively to political advertising,” reported the St. Petersburg (Russia) Times last week. In the article Rosbalt Media producer Igor Burenkov noted that commercials, “political or not,” cause Russian television viewers to hit the mute button.

Billboards have no mute button, one reason for their popularity with political consultants. Television and radio ads are the preferred message bearer. Russian TV and radio channels are, mostly, inundated with political spots.

So it is wherever elections are held, around the world. For media outlets political campaigns and major sports events are reasons to celebrate. The revenue boost is considered a gift from heaven.

In the US, where the political advertising won’t stop for another 12 months, total spending may exceed US$500 million (€340 million). One candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, is spending US$84, 000 (€57,000) on advertising per day, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG. French election rules limit first round presidential campaign spending by any one candidate to €16 million. 

Political advertising in France, unlike Russia or America, is tightly controlled and limited. Even a politicians’ exposure on television and radio is monitored and regulated, creating headaches for news producers. Each candidate receives the same amount of time on broadcast media. Paid television advertising is banned during the official campaign period. Both Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, however, invested considerable resources in internet campaigning, posting hundreds of videos to YouTube and Dailymotion.

The recent Polish election had its side of new media adventure. An SMS message - "Hide Grandma's ID. Save the country. Don't let her vote." – was sent to cellphone users.

This tangle (and jangle) of political messages is a tune-out, says Princeton University  political science professor Markus Prior. And with more media choices, people are tuning out more. “Before cable television, many people who were less interested in politics were often inadvertently exposed to the news,” he says. Today, noted in his study Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections, 80% of Americans just tune-out.

“A sizable segment of the population enjoys having this additional political content. About 20 percent of the respondents in my survey liked news better than all or almost all other program genres. They are the ones who actually take advantage of the increased political offerings on television. If you put together all the cable news channels and the smaller providers of political information on television, you get several million people watching these kinds of programs. And the Internet is obviously a paradise for news junkies.”

Americans and Russians, it seems, are using their increased media choices to choose something other than political messages. “Audiences do not see anything behind the slogans,” said St. Petersburg State University political psychology professor Natalya Sveshnikova, “and therefore their attention is wandering. Most Russians do not perceive political advertising as a reliable source of information.”

OSCE election monitors reported a “generally calm and diverse media environment” during the recent campaign in Ukraine. They did spot, however, “cases of hidden political advertising.” Outgoing Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski famously blamed a get-out-the-vote campaign on Polish public television for losing the recent election.

In political campaign media outlets are like bankers, they always win. A Moscow Times article last week observed that the revised regulation on the use of outdoor media for political ad benefits News Outdoor Russia, owned primarily by News Corporation, which owns 60% of Moscow’s billboard space. News Corp also controls the Imedi television channel in Georgia where, come to think of it, a snap election was just called.

“You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war,” wrote legendary publisher William Randolph Hearst to legendary journalist/illustrator Frederic Remington in 1897.

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Vote for me and I'll set you free. Rap on, brother, rap on,” wrote Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong in 1968.

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