Candidates, Elections,
and the Propaganda Apparatus

excerpted from the book

The Democratic Facade

by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Cole Publishing Company, 1991, paper

p62
Candidates, Elections, and the Propaganda Apparatus

Politics As a Media Commodity

... Campaigns have become an adjunct to the media industry principally since I the presidential election of 1980. Ronald Reagan's run for the presidency in 1980 relied on an advertising campaign adapted directly from corporate product advertising. Many individuals who had made their careers by selling Pepsi-Cola and other products turned their talents to packaging the candidate. The image-packaging techniques were substantially refined for President Reagan's reelection campaign of 1984. George Bush's campaign managers fine-tuned these techniques further in 1988. In all three elections, the Democrats had yet to learn how to apply the technology of persuasion as skillfully.

The political consequences of these developments are far reaching. The technology of persuasion used in American electoral politics makes campaigns into vehicles for elite "guidance." Modern elections can be understood as agents of legitimation and social control. This may explain why presidential election results in 198O, 1984, and 1988 went directly against the electoral decision that might have been predicted on the basis of the public's views on important issues. According to polls, on a wide range of issues - contra funding, abortion, spending for social programs, gun control-the Reagan administration was on the wrong side of public opinion. Interestingly, though the "L" word seemed to work against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential contest, as high a proportion of Americans considered themselves liberal or moderate as in 1975, the year before Jimmy Carter won the presidency. The voters' preferences have changed much less than the ability of professional campaign consultants to manipulate the images of the candidates.

p64
Part of the genius of the Reagan campaign of 1984-a product of its thorough integration into the advertising industry-was its exploitation of the "pride in America" theme then trumpeted in commercials ranging from cola, to hamburgers, to beer, to automobiles, to solicitations to join the military. Walter Mondale's attempts to contradict this image by suggesting that the future was less than rosy failed not only because the economic recovery of 1984 made people feel more optimistic, but-one can speculate-because through endless repetition commercial advertising had helped to create an optimistic national mood. In the 1988 presidential campaign George Bush capitalized on similar images, coupled with negative attacks on his opponent.

Advertising should be seen as an "extended message rather than a series of discrete units." Attitudes are projected by corporate elites through the advertising industry; their themes are aired in the mass media constantly, repeatedly, in a collage of images. With almost every major advertiser from brewers to automakers proclaiming in one form or another in 1984 that "the pride is back; born in America," it seems understandable that the political messages with the most persuasive appeal would have embraced military aggressiveness, rugged individualism, fewer social programs, and cultural chauvinism. The same images sold products and candidates in 1988 as well. George Bush's campaign ads featured crowds of flag-waving Americans and showed him visiting a flag factory and bragging about the bombing of Libya and the invasion of Grenada. The abstract images, designed to elicit emotional l reactions from viewers, were the point of these ads. They were devoid of any actual informational content.

p65
Electronic Elections

Elections are high stakes contests to politicians and to the profitable industry supported by campaign spending. Individual politicians battle to keep their careers alive by manipulating media coverage. Though they often complain about the media's impact on politics, politicians and their handlers forge a close symbiotic relationship with the media industry. The two sides are involved in an intricate dance. Neither politicians nor media professionals thrive on risk. Like the candidates they cover, media executives and newscasters prefer to emphasize image over substance because such an emphasis resolves a nagging dilemma-how to generate audience interest without raising controversies about the medias' own role. Media professionals are extremely defensive about charges of "bias." Coverage revealing an overtly political point of view is certain to alienate some portion of the intended audience, and even a slight drop in ratings may cost millions of advertising dollars, which are as important to televised political events as they are to sports contests. Hence news organizations eagerly embrace seemingly neutral definitions of news that they can apply to electoral contests.

The strength of candidates according to polling organizations is the perfect "neutral" news item, for it allows reporters to avoid commenting on or summarizing contentious or complex issues. The presidential campaign season, at both the nomination and general election stages, is characterized by "horserace" reporting. Day after day, newscasters and newswriters chart the speed and position of the various candidates, as revealed by the polls. Horserace reporting of this sort seems to produce "real" or "factual" information in the form of polling results, and a news organization that conducts its own polls can, in addition, take credit for generating "the news."

Despite appearances, horserace reporting is far from neutral. Even before the first caucus has been held or primary vote cast, networks utilize polls to determine which candidates to cover most heavily. Before the first event of the delegate selection process (the Iowa caucus in January), the amount of coverage on the major television networks is closely correlated with poll results. Candidates who do best in the polls are scheduled for interviews and special feature stories. All through the process, polls provide the guidance: A study of the 1972 presidential election found that 73 percent of the coverage focused on standing in the polls rather than on what candidates were saying.

Unlike a real horse race, in electoral contests the speed of the horse depends considerably on how much it is watched. Because they are watched the most, incumbents tend to run the best, with the "sure winners" among them attracting the most attention. According to a study of 104 House races in 1978, "sure winner" incumbents received an average of fifty-two mentions in their (respective) district's major newspapers, but their challengers averaged only twelve mentions. Challengers averaged many more mentions, an average of 107 news items, when they faced vulnerable incumbents. But they still received far less coverage than the incumbents they faced, who were mentioned an average of 161 times. There is a "catch-22" aspect to this media bias in favor of incumbents: Challengers have little chance of winning unless they attract good media coverage, and yet they will not receive as much coverage as incumbents unless polls show that they already have unusual strength. When an incumbent is vulnerable, about one-third of campaign stories about both candidates are negative. But when the polls show the incumbent far ahead, as is usually the case initially, critical stories about the incumbent appear half as often. Of course, this translates a media assumption that the incumbent is safe into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

p77

Elections As Mechanisms of Social Control

The most important messages sold by public relations specialists may not be, in the end, about the candidates or political parties. The most enduring messages convey impressions of American culture and politics. Katherine Hall Jamieson, a specialist on political advertising, has concluded that ads serve as a "safety valve" that "by underscoring the power of the ballot," teaches people that "your vote makes a difference." With unbridled admiration, she extols the virtues of media campaigns:

Political ads affirm that the country is great, has a future, is respected. The contest they reflect is over who should be elected, not over whether there should be an election. The very existence of the contest suggests that there is a choice that voters' selection of one candidate over the other will make a difference Ads also define the problems we face and assure us that there are solutions. If there are no solutions, a candidate would speak that truth at great risk.

In The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Murray Edelman observed that elections are ritualistic acts that legitimize the political system. They could not serve this function "if the common belief in direct popular control over governmental policy through elections were to be widely questioned." Another political scientist has also noted the symbolic purpose of elections:

What voters decide, and thus how they come to vote as they do, is far less consequential for government and politics than the simple fact of voting itself. The impact of electoral decisions upon the governmental process is analogous to the impact made upon organized religion by individuals who obey the injunction to worship at the church of their choice. The fact of mass electoral participation is generally far more significant for the state than what or how citizens decide once they participate.

In his analysis of the outcome of the 1984 election, Wilson Carey MacWilliams argues that media dominance marks the death of the pluralist style of campaigning. Modern presidential elections entail the manipulation of public opinion, and the "gatekeepers" for these elections are professionals in the media industry.

p79
Considering the huge resources devoted to managing information, it is remarkable that the American public is ever able to arrive at opinions that contradict the government's agenda. But despite a carefully orchestrated media blitz utilizing fabricated stories and calling the contras "freedom fighters" and comparing them to the Constitution's Founders, for example, the Reagan administration failed to convert the public to its policies on Nicaragua. In fact, it is likely that only the weight of public opinion restrained the administration from launching an invasion of Nicaragua.

Elections are necessary but not sufficient to produce democracy. The reality in America is that the spectrum of choices available to voters is narrow. The information presented to voters is circumscribed by the homogeneous, superficial, and unimaginative coverage of elections in the news media. The propaganda apparatus of the advertising industry is used to manipulate and manage, not to enlighten. American electoral politics not only fails to provide for the accountability of government to the people, it has become a principal tool for elites to manage politics and political choices.

The Democratic Facade

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