All Slander All the Time

ALL SLANDER ALL THE TIME
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: John Ellis, Boston Globe]
[Commentary] According to Advertising Age magazine, the total amount spent this year on political advertising will reach $2 billion, a hefty increase over 2004. If one conservatively estimates that at least half of all political advertising can be fairly described as "negative," then 2006 will be the first year that negative political advertising expenditures reached the $1 billion mark. That's a dollar amount greater than all of the television, radio and print advertising buys done by Anheuser-Busch in 2005. Look through the list of the major advertisers in the U.S. and what strikes you is that all of them spend vast sums of money building and strengthening brands. What makes our politics so sensationally awful is not just the amount of money spent denigrating the category and the profession, but the equally stunning amount of energy that is expended by party apparatchiks to amplify the negative in news-media coverage of politics. And the news media are only to happy to comply. The truth is they can't get enough of it. The net effect of this constant and unrelenting assault on politicians and the political process is voter resignation and ultimately a kind of doomed acceptance.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116295075531916551.html?mod=todays_us_op...
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