Political TV

Chuck Tryon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138839991
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317556930
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book serves as an accessible critical introduction to the broad category of American political television content. Encompassing political news and scripted entertainment, Political TV addresses a range of formats, including interview/news programs, political satire, fake news, drama, and reality TV. From long-running programs like Meet the Press to more recent offerings including Veep, The Daily Show, House of Cards, Last Week Tonight, and Scandal, Tryon addresses ongoing debates about the role of television in representing issues and ideas relevant to American politics. Exploring political TV's construction of concepts of citizenship and national identity, the status of political TV in a post-network era, and advertisements in politics, Political TV offers an engaging, timely analysis of how this format engages its audience in the political scene. The book also includes a videography of key and historical series, discussion questions, and a bibliography for further reading.

1 SELLING POLITICS: ADVERTISING AFTER CITIZENS UNITED

DOI: 10.4324/9781315733098-2

The chief currency of television is time. And for politicians seeking to attract attention in the midst of a fragmented and cluttered media environment, the easiest way to ensure airtime and to craft a narrative that is beneficial to them is through advertising. This chapter addresses three major themes associated with political advertising. First, I consider the economic role of advertising in shaping elections. Specifically, I focus on the creation of a so-called “shadow primary” during the 2016 election, where candidates attended a variety of events that focused not on winning votes from Republican primary voters but on the billionaire donors who would be supporting their campaign. Although these donations have a powerful effect on federal elections, I also discuss their implications at the state and local levels. Second, I discuss the role of political advertising in creating narratives about individual candidates. Third, this chapter addresses the fact that political advertisements are rarely read in isolation. In fact, advertisements can actually have a multiplier effect through the creation of controversy. When a provocative ad attracts the attention of cable news, the advertisement will get replayed—often repeatedly—across a wide range of cable channels, allowing the ad’s argument to get replayed as well. Even if the advertisement is broadly criticized, the cable news discussion serves to provide increased visibility for that message, especially in an era where audiences may be more likely to shield themselves from advertisements through time-shifting technologies such as DVRs or streaming video. Thus, although most analysis of television focuses on the programs themselves, I argue that political advertisements play an important role not just in shaping political messaging but also in shaping wider perceptions about political culture.

Citizens United and the Shadow Primary

As I explained in the Introduction, the Citizens United ruling has resulted in a mass influx of money into politics, to the point that both major political parties are likely to see billions of dollars spent on the campaigns, with much of that money going to advertising. Although complaints about political advertising often focus on presidential races, the most significant effect of increased spending has been at the state level, where political candidates have fewer opportunities to define themselves to a wider voting public. In presidential elections, voters are more likely to encounter information about candidates from news coverage, debates, or televised speeches, but statewide campaigns rarely receive the same level of attention.¹ The exponential rise in political spending has come at a time when TV advertising revenues have decreased dramatically. As one general manager of a local affiliate in Las Vegas admitted during the 2010 election cycle, “political advertising has been a gigantic Band-Aid” for television broadcasters. In fact, during the 2010 election, in particular, some estimates suggested that political advertising would account for as much as 11 percent of spending at local TV affiliates.² But the floodgates opened even more dramatically during the 2012 election, with local television revenue growing by $500 million to a whopping total of $2.8 billion, money that likely went a long way to offset declining advertising revenue due to streaming video and other entertainment options. More crucially, outside spending—money that came from political groups not associated with the campaigns—was far more likely to be focused on negative advertising and far less likely to receive the detailed fact-checking and critical analysis directed toward national political ads. At the same time, voters are significantly less likely to watch a debate between candidates for a statewide audience than they would be for the presidential election, making it more likely that low-information voters in particular will be affected by ads. A study by Public Citizen noted that of the $600 million spent during the 2012 election, $520 million—nearly 86 percent—went to so-called negative advertisements that expressed opposition to a candidate. As the Public Citizen report went on to point out, these groups are essentially unaccountable, allowing them to do most of the dirty work, when it comes to tarnishing a candidate’s reputation.³

In addition to dramatic increases in federal spending, these campaign war chests have also had a profound effect at the state level, where local elections could cost tens of millions of dollars. In fact, in the hotly contested 2014 Senate race in North Carolina between the incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan and Republican challenger Thom Tillis, there was a combined $82 million of outside spending, more than tripling the total of $25 million spent when Hagan won the seat in 2008.⁴ Because many political observers felt that the North Carolina race could be pivotal in determining which party would have a majority in the Senate, it became, in many ways, a national race. This spending was used to purchase—among other things—over 114,000 television ads that blanketed the airwaves in North Carolina for months.⁵ As a resident of North Carolina, I found it virtually impossible to watch any television, whether news, sports, or entertainment, without encountering multiple ads for Hagan or Tillis, the vast majority of which were incendiary attack ads that all but threatened the collapse of the nation if their rival candidate was elected. Most of this spending was by outside organizations such as Crossroads GPS, the PAC (political action committee) run by Republican operative Karl Rove, the National Rifle Association, and the National Education Association. North Carolina was certainly not alone when it came to costly elections. The 2014 Senate race in Colorado reportedly cost $70 million, while the Senate race in Iowa cost about $61 million. Another measure of how much money was spent can be gleaned from looking at the Alaska Senate race where $41 million was spent in a race where about 245,000 total votes were cast, about $167 per vote for the Senate race alone. In addition to these legislative races, Citizens United has also opened up the flow of campaign donations to judicial races, creating the potential for significant conflicts of interest as judges may find their impartiality called into question when they address cases involving corporations or industries that have donated to their campaign. Political donations can have an even more pernicious effect on judge’s elections. Although the Supreme Court has upheld state rules that ban political contributions to judicial candidates, these donations are legal in a number of states, and as one study by the American Constitution Society concluded, there is a statistically significant correlation between interest group donations and judicial rulings.⁶

By the early stages of the 2016 election, the role of unregulated money in politics was undeniable. In fact, David and Charles Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the United States, announced their intentions to make up to $889 million available to the presidential candidate they intended to support during the 2016 election. This public declaration would initially appear to be shocking; however, their announcement could have the effect of silencing or discouraging smaller donors from giving money to candidates, providing the brothers with even more control over the political process. Thus, although some forms of political media, such as satirical news shows and even partisan cable news shows, have been blamed for contributing to political cynicism, a more notable factor might be the huge increase in political spending. In fact, the Koch brothers’ projected influence on the 2016 election was so substantial that many observers claimed that Republicans were involved in a “shadow primary” or “Koch primary” focused not on collecting votes but on securing their endorsement—and the hundreds of millions of dollars in support that came with it. This Koch primary was structured around a private donor meeting held in August 2015, days before the first Republican presidential debate, in which five hand-picked candidates were invited to make their pitches for the Koch money. The majority of the summit was off-limits to the press, and reporters could only cover the event on the condition that they not reveal who was present without their permission. The Koch brothers’ political organization even came with its own data and analytics firm, as well as grassroots organizations targeted at attracting Latino voters and veterans. Although political observers breathlessly waited to see who would win the Koch’s support, their network also announced their intentions to support advocacy groups that promoted causes that were central to the Kochs’s interests, including lower taxes, reducing environmental regulations, and repealing the Affordable Care Act.⁷ As a result, Republican presidential candidates faced pressure to embrace these positions in order to garner the support of the Koch brothers’ donor base, whether or not those positions were in the interest of the wider public.

Influence of Political Advertising

Political advertising, as one of the most visible components of a larger election campaign, largely involves the creation of a narrative, one that positions a candidate as providing a solution to the problems confronting the nation at a given time. As Paul Waldman explains, presidential campaigns succeed because “the winner tells a coherent, appealing story, while the loser tells a bad story, or more often, no story at all.”⁸ Thus, during his 1980 election campaign, speaking to a nation shaken by a hostage crisis in Iran, high unemployment, and rising inflation, Ronald Reagan masterfully crafted a narrative around the promise of “restoring America’s greatness.” Four years later, against the backdrop of American success at the 1984 Olympics Reagan embraced a triumphalist account of national unity that could assure voters that things were improving. This narrative was encapsulated in Reagan’s “Prouder, Stronger, Better” advertisement, in which pastoral images of small-town American life (a paperboy on his bicycle, white picket fences, farm workers on tractors) appeared while a voice-over assured audiences that it was “morning in America.” During the 2008 election, Barack Obama’s campaign used the keywords “hope” and “change” to position the youthful Senator from Illinois as the face of a new kind of politics that was less cynical.

Of course, while positive ads can help to define a candidate, negative advertising also plays a crucial role in shaping perceptions of the opposing candidate. An effective controversial ad may be successful in redefining a political candidate or reshaping a political narrative. Notably, controversial ads can allow candidates to acquire what amounts to “free” airtime as the news media replays an advertisement in the guise of analyzing it. In fact, what is considered the first political attack ad on U.S. television, Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy,” was shown on television only once. The advertisement shows a young girl in a field counting the petals of the flower, her counting gradually replaced by the ominous sound of a booming male voice counting down before a nuclear warhead goes off. The implication of the ad was unmistakable: elect Johnson’s opponent, Republican Barry Goldwater, and face the possibility of nuclear war. For voters who had just endured the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, these dangers were certainly palpable. Republicans immediately responded with outrage, and while Johnson had the ad pulled from circulation, “Daisy” was shown dozens of times on the nightly news by journalists who dutifully reported the story while objectively presenting both sides. Thus, even if Johnson’s campaign was scolded for its excessive portrayal of Goldwater, the message that he was a danger to innocent children repeatedly came across loud and clear.⁹

Another notorious example of this attempt to foment outrage was a 1988 advertisement produced by George H. W. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, used to depict his opponent, Massachusetts governor, Michael Dukakis as being soft on crime. The ad told the story of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who committed a series of violent crimes while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison and prominently featured a threatening mug shot of Horton, who is African-American, staring menacingly into the camera. The ad explicitly played to white fears and seemed to imply that a vote for Dukakis would be a vote for allowing violent criminals to roam our streets.¹⁰ A similar strategy was used at the state level in North Carolina during a competitive 1990 Senate election between the white Republican incumbent Jesse Helms and the African-American Harvey Gantt. The ad, “White Hands,” depicted a blue-collar white worker crumpling up a job rejection letter, while a voice-over explained that the company had been forced to hire a black worker because of mandatory quotas, a narrative that played to perceptions of white victimhood. Like the “Willie Horton” advertisement, “White Hands” used dog-whistle politics to play to white fears while also dramatically misrepresenting Gantt’s position on affirmative action. Thus, both advertisements not only played to political fears but also helped drive policies such as tougher crime laws and the elimination of affirmative action programs that shaped legislation for years.

Negative advertisements can also play a crucial role in shaping perceptions of government policies as well. One of the most effective negative advertising campaigns focused not on an individual candidate but on the health care plan promoted by Bill Clinton. The “Harry and Louise” campaign featured a white suburban couple in their 40s, and faced with increased costs and bureaucracy that were attributed to Clinton’s plan. The most famous ad in this cycle featured the couple sitting at their kitchen table, where they struggled to navigate a giant stack of bills and other documents associated with a recent hospital visit, but later advertisements showed the apparently healthy couple—Harry is playing basketball and Louise has returned from a bike ride—complaining that everyone with health insurance would pay the same rate, regardless of their health. All of the advertisements encouraged viewers to contact their representatives in Congress to express opposition to the bill.

More recently, soon after Barack Obama announced a treaty in which Iran agreed to stop trying to produce nuclear weapons in exchange for the United States and several other countries agreeing to drop economic sanctions, a number of political organizations immediately sought to undermine the deal. To some extent, these efforts took place in the usual settings of Congressional press conferences, in which a number of Republicans—and some prominent Democrats—announced that they would oppose the treaty. But alongside this more public attack on the deal, a group called the American Security Institute also began running advertisements that sought to turn public opinion against it. The advertisement uses many of the fear tactics common to political advertisements, playing to concerns that Iran will attack the United States, even while offering little evidence that Iran would violate the terms of the agreement signed with the United States and several other countries. In the ad, a woman’s voice dramatically asks, “If Iran has nothing to hide, why does it feel like they are hiding something?” This question is posed over images of political protests and bombs exploding intercut with a stereotypically Middle Eastern “shell game,” in which someone (who is presumably Iranian) hides a ball under a shell in a game that we know to be rigged, suggesting again by insinuation that Iran is playing a shell game with the American people. The advertisement helped to reinforce the perception that Obama is naïve, while also neglecting the fact that several other world powers, including the United Kingdom, Russia, China, Germany, and France, had all agreed to the treaty. More crucially it created a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Political TV and Mediated Citizenship
• 1. Selling Politics: Advertising after Citizens United
• 2. Political News in the Post-Network Era
• 3. Fake News and Political Satire
• 4. Comedy and the Political Spectacle
• 5. Political Process Melodramas and Serial Narrative
• 6. Surveillance Culture: Melodramas of National Security
• Conclusion
• Political TV: Questions for Discussion
• A Select Political TV Videography
• A Select Political TV Bibliography
• Index