Week 12 News Post: Facts Don’t Lie

In the LA Times article, “The good, the bad and the ugly campaign ads of 2016” there were many similarities between the date in our readings and the ones they found. A few amazing facts they discovered were that, “[s]ince Jan. 1, candidates for president and their supporters have aired more than 210,000 television commercials, almost all in those four early-voting states. The Wesleyan Media Project, a research group at Wesleyan University, has calculated that spending on ads has already reached $156 million, almost triple what was spent by this point in the 2012 campaign.” The staggering number of ads and the amount spent on them all to discredit the opposing candidate is astounding. It works though. Negative ads do have more of an effect at public recall than positive ads do, and they definitely can sway a crowd one way or the other in regards to a candidate. One of the ads mentioned is “Clear Difference” from Donald Trump’s team. In this ad he repeats his ignorant claim of how immigrants are flooding America and how we only need look at the rise in crime to see how this is a major problem when statistics show net migration has declined and U.S. citizens tend to commit crimes more often than immigrants. The facts do not lie.

Week 12 Reading Post: Negative Nancies

This whole election has been one huge Negative Nancy. There have been so many negative ads about Clinton and Trump that I cannot even begin to recall all of them. Trump pointing his finger at Clinton listing all of her faults, Clinton doing the same towards him, these ads are everywhere on every media platform. They are also so repetitive that each time I see one pop up before my YouTube videos, I hit that “Skip Ad” button as soon as possible. In our readings, my reaction is actually quite a common response after negative ads have been broadcasted too much. Negative ads are effective to a degree in their aim to sway public opinion against or towards a certain candidate, but after awhile the ads tend to get old. Too much negativity breeds negativity, and candidates do not want that. Especially with undecided voters, you do not want to annoy them to the point of disliking both candidates and running them off to where they just do not vote at all, but that is what is happening. Many people are so turned off by all the negative ads and everything else negative that has come out in the news about each candidate. Our reading said the campaigning of 2010 was the most negative up until that point. I think we have them beat with this election. On a positive note, negative ads do show to have better public recall and are more issue based than image, so people tend to be more informed about the issues being covered. Another disadvantage of negative ads are how they can create a negative feeling in voters towards the sponsors of the ads. The main issue is voters may find the negative ad, unethical or untrustworthy and those feelings could filter over to the sponsor as well. Overall, negative ads are affective but damn, are they annoying.