The colors red and blue have taken on an undeniably political character, at least as portrayed by the televised media, news show producer John Carroll said in lecture titled "Political Advertising in a Red and Blue Age," Wednesday night.
Carroll, the executive producer of the WGBH nightly news show "Greater Boston," spoke about this election season's rampant use of political advertising and the effects this deluge will have next Tuesday.
"Political advertising is sort of advertising on steroids," Carroll said. "Everything is pumped up."
Carroll showed examples of political advertisements from both the Kerry and Bush campaigns, including the infamous one sponsored by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The ad shows a series of Vietnam veterans who condemn Kerry's wartime service and his leadership ability.
Carroll also showed political action committee MoveOn.org's rebuttal ad, which addressed Bush's dubious wartime record and called on the president to denounce the Sift Boat veterans' ad.
Every soldier who went to Vietnam has "his own reality," Carroll said, but the veterans in the Swift Boat ad were not actually in the boat with Kerry. They were not in a position to share their perception of Kerry's service with the nation, he said.
Nevertheless, the Kerry camp made a grave mistake in delaying its response to the Swift Boat ad, assuming that it would just fade away, Carroll said. The ad continues to haunt Kerry.
According to Carroll, though the bombardment of audiences with political advertising is a waste of taxpayer dollars, the greatest problem it causes is apathy.
"It turns people off and away from the polls - they don't think they can change things," he said. "It pushes you away from the process that you should control."
Carroll also played some of the candidates' official ads on terrorism. Kerry's campaign focused on Bush's inadequate funding of chemical weapons and border protection, while Bush's ad was modeled after the famous "Bear in the Woods" Reagan commercial.
"This campaign is the least-informative, most-emotional, most fear-focused campaign in history," he said. "It's all about frightening you away from the other guy and into the arms of the guy running the ad."
Carroll said all this advertising is nothing but an arms race - an analogy familiar to his audience, the students of ExCollege course 51, "Horse Race: The Press and the Presidential Election."
The arms-race comparison holds that both sides know that at some point, all the advertising they employ will cease to do any good, but no camp wants to be "out-advertised," and so the money poured into political advertising multiplies with every new campaign.
Though he knows the American people would reject his suggestion, Carroll said he would like to see campaigning restricted to three weeks.
Carroll displayed a bipartisan sense of humor, commenting that Kerry "looks like an elite, snobbish nancyboy from France" and that "Bush can't put two sentences together with a stapler."
"A lot of [the presentation] was just reinforcing what we've learned in class, but it was very interesting to see some ads that we aren't exposed to in Massachusetts," junior Rebecca Plofker said
She was discouraged, however, by the apathy that all the advertisements are generating.
A former commentator for National Public Radio and The Boston Globe, Carroll said this campaign season has not only broken records with unprecedented levels of funding poured into advertising, but that it has been particularly vicious. "It's more important to tell people what's wrong with your opponent than what's right with you," he said.
But, Carroll said, Kerry's advertising strategies are not yet working. While much of the country is at a stage where they are willing to replace Bush, they are not yet convinced that they would rather see Kerry in office.
