state for the election. so bob shrum states that it was a negative thing that played rep hencivee reprehensible. it's something that's in the eyes of the beholder. i thought that was one that was more memorable than what we're seeing right now. >> mccarthy said he was the proudest of that which was an interesting comment. >> there was an interesting story behind that. i was working on a project by a friend of mine, craig hillbert. it was not a bush campaign ad, it was actually an ad by a group and they were using it to raise money and it raised a lot of money and they're like, wow, this is a very powerful ad. and i think it is a powerful ad,

but we also have to be really careful of overascribing -- there was one magic bullet that ran the election, the daisy ad, fantastic, did not win the 1964 election, the willie horton ad, powerful, did not lose the 1988 election for mike dukakis. in 2000 and 2004. it was that one ashley ad that beat john kerry. i think if you talk to the people who run campaigns, they're working at the margin now. i mean you win a presidential election by 537 votes in florida and the margin matters in american politics. but i don't think it-- air that

and put a bunch of money behind it and it automatically wins you the election. >> no one sees any evidence that this is trickling down below federations. i was just watching what was trickling down to the local news elections. you begin to see negative ads appearing in places like austin. . . . is anyone study iing -- so we definitely notice in tracking the lower level ones that there was a lot of negativity. this is a -- i'm a too old professor. but this is a terrific project for a graduate student or someone to write a dissertation on.

>> it's an inefficient use of money to have to buy an ad that reaching a whole station area. if you did it on youtube. >> cable. >> cable, whatever, there's a lot of ways to communicate the negative now. >> the target for a lot of these ads are you guys, the press. and, you know, it was always the case that campaigns would air an ad maybe once or twice. daisy, the greatest example of that is probably the most memorable ad ever, but the first swift boat ad that was ard. it was very much not a national buy. and then got huge attention from the free media i think the bush

campaign at the time was equally scared of that ad, they didn't want to be talking about vietnam war records. was equally scared at the time. >> it was the same thing with -- beating up on himself was oh, my god, the biggest mistake i ever made was not responding to that ad. >> if your wife was raped and murdered, would you support the death penalty. no, empirical evidence shows that -- >> tony schwartz which was one of the first geniuses.

the thing about the willie horton ad is that it resonated about dukakis on crime and it resonated with voters and undercut them and i don't know if you can do a negative ad and i would be curious about someone who completely undefines them and get away with it. maybe that's what the john -- it turned him into a war criminal in vietnam or something. >> he chose not to respond in the same way that dukakis has. we have kind of been operating under the unspoken assumption that negative ads are bad. i want to just challenge that for a little while here. >> it's very good for all the business that we're in here, but someone wrote in after the 2008 campaign about a negative ad, he

wrote, what would we glean about current candidates about watching only their positive ads? that john mccain is a common sense conservative, that mike huckabee is unabashedly in favor of christmas. that rudy giuliani will kill terrorists with his bare hands? what's wrong with them? they work. i said why do -- is there any reason why they're not just a useful information device for voters. >> sometimes think they are actually quite useful. they were probably getting people useful information that they needed to have about certain parts of his background. >> it seems to me the test for all these ads is, are they true? and is it important.

>> there's true and there's true, you know, mark twain talked about lies and statistics and there's a whole other category which i think are political ads which are lies because mike murphy charged was pejoratively true. without the context, it's very misleading. dukak dukakis, that furlow program took place when he was senator. was that cogent as an administrating against him? is that really fair? i think they tend en masse to

make the whole product category look pretty sordid, which is politics. >> political media consultants will tell you if you give them a couple of beers in them that they tell a lot more lies are told in positive ads than negative ads. i mean you can't -- i'm a family man, i love my country, i love puppies, i love christmas. those are not the demonstrable statements that can be checked and you can find someone torturing santa claus or something, you're not going to be able to disprove that, the facts are presented in these negative ads and occasionally, you know, maybe more often than not, you have people like john kerry and michael dukakis that are confident when it comes to knowing how to respond in an effective way. using, marshaling the -- they

engage people in a way that i don't think positive ads go. . >> are there serious problems in america? yes, are incentives for our political leaders to pay attention to our problems? yeah, are statements taken out of context in speeches or news reports? or statements taken out of context 100 years ago in yellow journalism? absolutely. i grew up in massachusetts with a mother in democratic politics in massachusetts. but we can pick on massachusetts democratic politicians, our system at some point demands someone responding. dukakis had the money to respond, had the chance to respond, decided not to. professional decision.

there plenty of ads that i think are clearly unaccurate. but i don't think it's my job or your job as journalists to say i bless that ad and i don't bless that ad. and sometimes the market doesn't work, let's be honest, but there's a lot of reporters out there, there's a lot of money out there, it. >> it's also important to remember that everything we're talking about are messages that are broadcast to a large audience, they're clearly targeted an audience, but it's not like that most people, if you're putting it around the channel are going to encounter these negative ads, these

positive ads and these advertisements. the dark corner of political advertising is mail and what i think is coming down the pike at this nanotargeting, google long tail nanotargeting, and look another what fran lynn -- 140 distinct groups that they slice and dice the electorate. that the message -- one message is going to your neighbor and another message is go to you. and mail is so nefarious, it comes so late in some cases and it does its damage before the target of that negative attack even knows about it. >> i want to schedule another google long tail argument this year.

in the last few days, i note that the romney super-pacs. ron paul has kicked in another million dollars and i think in the last couple of days, barack obama campaigned has actually spent a quarter million dollars in michigan attacking romney. would someone like to sketch out where the next four or five months are going in terms of how much money, i'm looking at ken, might be spent, just take us through, say, august. >> yeah, you know the austin powers movie when he sort of goes back in town, if you don't give me $10,000, i will blow up the world. i sort of feel like that's the conversation we're having now. we're going to see $2.5 billion

conservati conservatively, we could see as high as $3 billion on local, spot, television. dogcatcher to president of the united states. >> i won't hold you to this. has hard a guess how much of that will be positive and how much of that will be negative? given current trends. >> i think the booobama campaig and people have written about this, will be very much like the 2004 bush campaign. i think the obama campaign will be trying to define who the republican is. i think the republican is going to have a choice whether they want to talk about themselves or whether they think they need to go after obama more. one of the things we saw in 2004 is the kerry campaign actually didn't air any negative ads, the democratic groups, people sort of forget that groups also

existed before three weeks ago. so media fund and move on, a big $20 million gifts given by george thorose and if you talk to people in the kerry campaign, they would say we might have been better off if our allies actually would have been building us up than going after an incumbent president. why is that the case? attitudes were pretty well formed about george w. bush, attitudes are pretty well formed about barack obama. there's people who like barack obama and are going to vote for him. and there's people who dislike barack obama and are not going to vote for them. there's a very thin swathe of undecided voters. and their attitudes towards barack obama are probably out of the realm of advertising. what's going on in the economy, and what's going on in the

world. and at the margin, how those people can be influenced. there's still people who are going to decide the presidential election in november of 2012 who absolutely haven't tuned in. now i will give an example of the super bowl, not as an advertising example, people only watch the sboechlt uper bowl. if you're someone who's watching the whole season, you've got a favorite team. so everybody now who's paying attention and going on websites and going on msnbc and going on fox and listening to rachel mad dow. at some point, this election is going to be decided like my wife in the super bowl. she only watches the super bowl. at some point this election is going to be voted by those who tune into the presidential election two weeks out.

>> because of citizen's united and the ability of corporate funding to flow into these outside groups, you're looking at so much more money. [ inaudible ] . >> you can't see what's going into the certain kind of groups. so it's hard to chart. but i wrote a piece -- >> most of the money in there now has been, you know, it's been shell aidleson, it's been those big givers. >> i think it's going to be privately held corporations, because public held ones have to deal with stockholders. and the coke brothers they have a privately held company that does a pretty good business. they have a strong political agenda. i think it could make tremendous difference in a race. i think the outside groups are

going to be what i'm going to be watching because i think that's maybe what, the amount of money they have to play with is more than before. >> clearly the story is outside groups, the question is, are the coke brothers ingoing to spend more than they would have? because they also have a lot of money personally also. >> this is going to be a lot easier to do this time afternoon. >> it's going to be more organized this time. >> narratively, though, i think we're kind of already seeing the contours of the general election while the gop primary campaign is continuing. my colleague wrote a story about whether or not romney has been predestroyed at this point by the sort of democratic effort to define him, which has been picked up very vigorously by his republican opponents. i have seen one thing that were written on tpm one day and were anti-romney ads by the next day.

>> i haven't seen the anti-obama message yet. i think this is all sort of pre-game. the real thing in the general election is going to be amazing, i think, and very, i think negative. >> i think the president has 50 opposition reseahe i'm guessing that it's not those 50 people are going to be going door to door. okay, we only have 15 we'll take some questions. there in the back. wait for the microphone and identify yourself. >> jim snyder, fellow in communications policy and also one of the former colleagues, maybe also tim cook was one of my dissertation advisors in political communications. he was also a communications

fellow in congress. one comment, just a caveat, there's about 500,000 elected positions in the united states. the presidential election is clearly the most important, but it's still only one. and it often happens that local and state politics are qualitatively different than federal elections, it's not just a matter of trickle down, what works in terms of analysis, it's often very different and unfortunately, as an academic who wants to go work at a major university or speak at a major think tank like this, you've got to focus on president elections and that's what you study and it's unfortunate because we have to be very cautious about the comments we make. but my question relates to something different and that is in order to get these ads on the airways, if has to go through a gateway, which is your local tv

broadcaster. i have never seen a study about how broadcasters exercise their discretion and possibly abuse their pow their power, they have inside information as to when these commercials are going run. some of them work with politicians on their campaigns. giving them advice on negative campaigns. both sides could do this, it's fair, well not necessarily. broadcasters do exercise discretion, the issue arises most when they have a direct economic ownership interest on an issue. there are lots of anecdotes in the literature about broadcasters exercising this discretion, but i have seen no academic study. so the question is, do you feel that the gateway to getting on

the air, those -- the local broadcasters are significant players in any way in shaping what happens? i don't think it happens in a presidential election, but i do think at a local level, they have a lot of discretion as to what they carry and don't carry. >> they certainly have the third party ads are -- they're not entitled to say anything they want. the broadcasters have more -- have more control over what they air and what they don't. and i think in some cases, those broadcasters ought to exercise their right to insist that this be accurate. a lot of times it takes a lawsuitcandidate, forcing the station to do that and i think most stations don't want to get into the business of playing umpire, but they have that right. >> yes, sir, in the blue shirt. >> hi, mark nadel, i'm an independent. the message i get from all of you is tha not up

this year, i mean overall, you look back to 1800 so that's kind of stable. my question is what is going up? is it per capital spending on advertising. and having super pacs will rise to a greater percentage of misleading ads? i think ken mentioned that he didn't think his role was criticize, when there are misleading ads out there, it's up to the voters to decide. but i thought the pres to go af ads too. correct me. >> i'm not the press, but i think the press does discuss these ads and i think they do. i mean if anything, the press probably discusses the ads too much.

it's, i mean, thank god, it's my career, but it's like cat nip for the journalists to get the advertising information. what's different about this year? and i think this would be a nice segue into the discussion about why commercial advertisers tend to not go as negative. this is an unusually negative primary. and the reason why people tend to not go negative in a primary is not because it's a family -- you know, family fights can sometimes be more brutal, right? it's because sometimes you'll have multiperson races and so the 2004 howard dean richard gephart, it's famously called a murder-suicide in iowa. gephardt went after dean, and then kerry and edwards were able to take one or two in iowa. and i think actually a bit of santorum can be explained by

romney and gingrich going after each other so heavily in iowa, there wasn't much advertising in new hampshire, actually, in iowa, in south carolina, in florida. and what happens is, you know, one of the reasons why burger king might not go after mcdonald's is that if they go after mcdonald's, it then benefits wendy's. so if you -- so i do think there has been an unusually high level of negative advertise iing in t particular presidential primary. and also the ability of, what jane was saying, it used to be, you would win a primary and then it would take you a week or two to raise money.

now a win can be a $5 million check within 30 minutes and that can be wired right to the television stations. it's the speed at which that request happen, i think. >> you talk about how you can see something on a website one day and an ad the next day. the information months before the ad actually being ran. that seems like a quaint period of time now. >> under citizens united, is there disclosure? how did we know that foreign entities are putting muffin into american politics? >> well, other citizens united is their disclosure. it allows -- the super pacs -- a lot of people are confused and think there's no disclosure as

to who's giving to the super pacs. but there is disclosure. but there are other categories that are on the margins, the 501c3s and they're not supposed to be explicitly involved. the lines have gotten so muddy. citizen's united was seen as a green light that basically told people with a lot of money that don't want to give it secretly, don't worry, you're not going to be prosecuted. before it was kind of iffy and nobody wanted to take the risk. now no one's worried about taking the risk, they're just throwing the muffoney out there. at least that's how i read it. >> don weiss, now with senior

create ty people. we were talking about the history of negative advertising and we see how far back it's gone and that it continues and that it's not in many ways very different. however, due to citizens united, isn't there more of it, along with the internet and everything else, isn't there a much greater flood of it so that while it may not be different in content, it's different in quantity? >> i -- i hesitate to speak about things without the data, but i imagine if you want back to the '30s, '40s, '50s and ' s '60s, some of those newspapers

were more partisan. fox news as a tv station, or msnbc as a news station, that was sort of the norm for many newspapers and how they did coverage. in this country. is there more negative television advertising? absolutely. what was said in speeches before, what was said in places of worship before, what was said in partisan newspapers before, what was said in newsletters before, what was said on the radio before, i don't know, i don't have the empirical evidence but i guess i would be suspicious that it was the good old days. >> the money just keeps going up and up, correct?

>> compared to inflation, it's one of the sectors of the economy that's booming apparently. >> what you're seeing in the advertising is, the big effect of a lot of these campaigns, finance decisions, sort of the twin of mccain feingold, the bipartisan format and the citizens united decision, what it's really done is eit's weakened parties. the size of the pie, in terms of the spot advertising on television has not grown tremendously. now there's obviously the internet and there's other ways of communicating, but the slices of the pie are different. where the slice that the party controls has gotten much smaller, and the slice that these groups control is much bigger. so the decision and the