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your own interview of the experts.
4
How
necessary is so-called 'negative' advertising?
PAUL
TAYLOR replies:
The
research is mixed. There is one set of scholarship that says it actually sort
of cuts the baby in half and says the people these negative ads fire up are
the people at the polls, are the true believers left or right: "They're attacking
my guy. They can't do this" or "Yeah, go get 'em!" And the broad middle, the
50, 60, 70% of the population that's not strongly identified with a party
or ideology looks at this back and forth "So's your old lady, so's your old
lady" and says to himself, "I'm out of here. I don't need this sort of childish,
back and forth. I got more important things to do with my life." So it's possible
that both things are true simultaneously. There's no question turnout has
been on a steep, steep decline. It's happened over thiry or forty years. That
happens to be the same period where the paid political spot, the 30-second
spot, has become the coin of the realm.
Has
one caused the other? You know, it's hard to know, and the scholarship is
mixed on it. It seems to me that there is some connection somewhere.
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