or similar ads. don't forget, we get one version of an ad in week one of may. we may get the second which is in the third week of may which is just a slightly twisted version of add number one. add number one, a, b. so we want people to be able to see it for a few days so they can get an idea of what it is attempting to say or they will have no understanding what we're trying to tell them, even in those twos truth tests i showed you, they were three minutes long, about three times as long as a story i typically put on the air. so we're trying to give them a lot of explanation but it doesn't do any good if they don't understand wa they've been looking at. >> also, tell me if i'm right or if i'm wrong but it's my understanding that our viewers, voters, must see something many times before they do grok it, before they do understand it. is it 16 times that a commercial runs before someone actually believes it or does not believe it? that's not a reason that we do it, but we just feel intuitively and jour

and their ad about obama and debt. and then we're also having barack obama talking about his auto bailouts currently on the air. that ad is also running in the boston market which is significantly more expensive but to remind geographically most of the state, about two-thirds of new hampshire lives within 45 minutes or so of the border of massachusetts and a significant amount of the population, roughly half easily, could work in massachusetts. they don't. we're considered part of that market. when i first came to mur, i did not consider doing fact checking. management pushed it. they said from the get-go, look, we fwhu citizens united and figured this is going to a very important -- new hampshire in particular, wmur is going to be very important to that aspect because we're obviously a lot cheaper than the boston market stations and at the same time, we're the targeted audience. and i should say for a full disclosure, that our building at wmur is also called -- to show you how important political advertising is, it's

it was a very, very unfair ad. but that was a time when steel was doing extremely poorly because of the dumping. i mean dumping all over the place and steel was being heard. many, many steel companies at that time were going out of business. >> so a very significant omission in the ad and i will get to a romney campaign ad in a minute. but listen to -- i will play a sound bite, a part, about 23 seconds out of ad and tell me how potent you think it is politically in the five battleground states they will hear this part of this ad against romney. >> okay. >> i was devastated. it makes me angry. those guys were all rich. they all have more money than they will ever spend yet they didn't have money to take care of the very people who made the very money for him. >> bain capital walked away with a lot of money that they made off of this plant. >> there was even one point in that ad, donald, in which the term vampire was used. how do you tell the american people who are suffering so incredibly when a company fails, even

here is a romney ad by karl rove's superp.a. c. >> i always loved watching the kids play basketball. i still do, even though things have changed. it's funny, they can't find jobs to get their career started and i can't afford to retire and now we're all living together again. i supported president obama because he spoke so beautifully. obama added almost $16,000 in debt for every american. how will my kids pay that off when they can't even find jobs. chris: it's getting pretty hot right now. why are they raising it's stakes and going at it head-to-head this week so hard when we're so many weeks ahead of the election? >> the obama campaign knows that the economic news is not to be great before the election. it's mediocre. they need to attempt to disqualify romney now on the is central basis of his campaign, economic mr. fix it. if they don't and the economic news worsens for the president, then romney who is already close on the president in the polls has a structural advantage. go after romney now on a central qualification. if

he's very successful ad producer. but on this particular issue, ricketts saw the mccain ad. and he loved it. he's quoted in "the new york times" as saying if that ad had run, they never would have elected barack obama. so i think it's -- i don't think it's fair to say -- chris: you're saying ricketts believes that going after jeremiah wright -- >> he's trying to distance himself from that now. but obviously there was a conversation in which that idea was sort of embraced as -- >> and given the reaction, they realized quickly that it would be a mistake. chris: the matthews meter. 12 of our regulars including john and clarence this time, would ads playing the race card help or hurt romney? bottom line, 10 say they would hurt. and that's two of you guys, and that includes you, clarence. >> a very close call. i wanted to say that it will be a wash. but i think on balance, it doesn't help romney to go that route for a number of reasons. some of which have been mentioned. and also, well, it helps to fire up obama's base. and badly needs firing up right now. there's a reason why th

one of the ways we get ads, ad agencies go digital. we are seeing more donations because a lot of them don't want to low away a lifetime worth of analog tapes. so they send them to us. that's been a fantastic way we've gotten donations recently as well. >> what type of political advertisements do you have in this collection? >> just about every type. we have ads from positive imagery and negative imagery of candidates to ads discussing the issues at hand. issues that have changed over the course of many decades, but many relevant patterns still stay the same. negative advertising. concern with, quote unquote, flip-flopping positions. establishing a candidate's values and so forth. >> what type of races? >> everything from local races all the way up to presidential. we do focus on north american, united states ads, but we do have some foreign spots as well. but the bulk of the 95,000-plus commercials in our collection are united states political commercials. this is our equipment storage room, and this is our refrigerator, where we keep

there are dueling ads out today. i wonder what you thought about the obama campaign ad, zeroing in on governor romny and when he was handling the gs stine steel mill. >> it's getting particularly nasty. when they make an ad like that, which is so unfair. they want to save companies, whether it's bane or somebody else, in most cases, they want to save companies. governor romney did a fantastic job at bane, not only in terms of the jobs he bruce produced, but creating and saving companies. he did a great job. it's very, very unfair to pick a company and say, gee, let's do an ad. very unfair. >> the thing i was curious about -- you are a business guy. there are two things. one is that gst went under 2001. he left bane capital in 1999. nonetheless, some of the things that bane capital put in place had an effect on 2001. but dia little research. i found out that in 2001, about 17 steel mills went under, including bethlehem steel, the second largest at the time because there was dumping by foreign countries of cheaper stee

but you said you don't believe in negative ads, give me a bring, you guys all run negative ads, don't sni. >> i ran very few. but chris, do you think vampires is a good way it describe what they did, what bain did? i don't think they are vampires, but i didn't think they are job creators. john, correct me if i'm wrong on the facts here. they took a hundred million out and i understand workers lost part of their pension and almost all of their health care. couldn't they have taken 80 million out and save some of that money to give work ears little pension and healthcare relief as they are losing their jobs? isn't that a legitimate question about where your values are? >> of course it a legitimate question. look, what case is that there are and i will cite steve ratener on this point, i know the obama campaign has all of them, where they behaved in a way where there is a case where they were -- where workers were harmed in way that is atypical of private equity. so you will hear about those cases. it is not the majority of what bain did. but they are real cases and those are the cases t

burton puts out ads on behalf of obama. will he disclose who contributed to that ad?int that the people paying for the ad are not the single women out there voting for obama the last time. there is no "we" involved in this, cynthia. >> they don't have the money. no, no, no, they don't have the money to fund the super pacs. >> these are the people voting against obama with everything they had. the people that dumped so much last time that couldn't beat him or doing it this time. >> you're cutting the angle but not make anything sausage. you can make whatever assumptions you want about the donors. the money goes into the pot, the pot is churn had, the ad is produced. that the reality. >> i believe in cleansing the fact of daylight, michael steele. >> so do i, chris. >> your own secrecy campaign. thank you, cynthia, tucker. you can defend the darkness of the fund-raising efforts. i know you're a clean guy, but why you defend these people mazes me. >> i don't defend them. full disclosure. i agree, there should full disclesh you're but the law doesn't require that. >> i wa

. >>> and finally the ad wars.s week team obama is spending more than $8 million on advertising and they're outspending team romney 4-1. anyone can claim they know which states are the true battleground but let's let the money tell the story. still think north carolina's no a battleground? the romney campaign sure thinks so. they're spending half a million on advertising there this week. that's just one of four states where the romney campaign is putting its money. they're also spending in iowa, ohio, virginia, those are the only four states they have money up. they're getting an assist from the superpac crossroads in those states plus six more as you see pop up on the map there. in other superpac spending the pro-obama superpack is shelling out money in florida, ohio, and virginia. the campaign is spending in those states plus four more as you see, colorado, florida, ohio, as you see there, north carolina, iowa, nevada, and new hampshire. if you want to see where this presidential election fight is playing out loo

let me roll the dnc ad.y mitt romney is severely conservative. >> i find it interesting that he continues to describe himself as the real conservative. this is a guy who voted against right to work. this is a guy that voted to fund planned parenthooded. voting to fund planned parenthood, to expand the department of education during his term in the senate. rick santorum is not a person who is an economic conservative to my right. >> don't try and stop the foreclosure process, let it run its course and hit the bottom. >> let detroit go bankrupt. >> planned parenthood. going to get rid of that. i'm not concerned about the severely poor. >> i was a conservative republican governor. >> sean: that is such a lame ad. >> if i were george clooney and other democratic voters i would want my money back because that is a waste of money. it is just not believable. >> sean: they are are saying that democrats are all come patent. for romney to be leading that the point dangerous for them. >> how many months was the left sa

it's a current ad.these people in the focus groups their heads would explode out of anger. the right look at wall street with some sort of kind of distance. it's not that they are supportive,ite not they are opposed, it's just part of business. left thinks wall street is evil. and to see that barack obama gets so much money from wall street, they would look away. they would quite literally, i don't want to pull the mic out, but they would actually shift around because they didn't want to look at all the evidence. but then they would kind of look over to the tv screen and find out what else was happening. sean, that's an effective ad. >> the obama campaign comes out with an ad, brian from ohio. gets to 66% democrats. doesn't resonate at all with the republicans. one. lowest scoring ads overall as we run it. this is one of the two issues that biden said they are going to run on, bin laden and the auto bailout. here's brian from ohio with the campaign. >> the auto industry was crashing down. i was scared t

-- 3% of the ads in 2008. one group alone, karl rove's crossroads gps, has aired nearly 17,000 spots, mostly against obama. and all together there have been 33,420 anti-obama, pro-republican spots run compared to 25,516 anti-republican, pro-obama spots. what do you make of that? >> well, first, third-party advertising, that's non-candidate advertising, has historically been more attack driven and more deceptive. and that's true this year as well. secondly, when there are imbalances in money tied to messages, the side with the higher dollar amount of messaging has the advantage. we showed this in 2008, interestingly, when the advantage was with the obama campaign, which in some media markets outspent john mccain four to one. we documented the effect of that difference in the presence of controlling everything else that might have affected voters. and we showed a difference in vote choice based on the amount of money -- differential in the amount of money spent by the two campaigns. and the biggest problem occur

it then checks ads manually before posting. yet ads like this are not hard to find. i'm having a hard time with this, too. make me beg, smack me, spit on me, degrade me, choke me -- >> but that's online. that's a mistake. that should never be permitted. that violates our terms of use and our policies. >> reporter: the policy prohibits ads selling sex for money. yet ask this mom we'll call violet. what was your initial reaction when you clicked on escorts? >> i was actually disgusted. all i saw was naked behinds. naked breasts. >> reporter: violet's 14-year-old daughter ran away. and police say she was later prostituted by a man she met at a bus stop who advertised her on backpage.com. >> the worst part was the torture i had to hear about. you know, the torture she endured from different people along her way. >> reporter: her daughter was missing for more than three years. it just seems morally wrong to have this as a business model. no? >> to me it would be morally wrong to have the opportunity to rescue women, children, boys, out of exploitation, and to walk away fr

tv ads, radio ads, robo calls, good old-fashioned mailers, everything.ons of dollars in ads and attacks spent in his iowa district against bruce braley by this group. even though he had won his previous race by 29 points, congressman braley only narrowly survived this assault in 2010. he had won by 29 points before. in this same district, he barely squeaked by with 2 the% this sometime around. so who did that to bruce braley? who was putting up the money to run tv ads and radio ads and robo calls against him? where did that money come from? largely, it came from here. a p.o. box located in the lonely boulder hills post office on the outer edge of phoenix, arizona? the america future fund, it turns out, which paid for that spending blitz against congressman bruce braley got a majority of its funding that year from a pretty much unknown pop-up organization known as the center to protect patient rights. have you already forgotten the name that i just said it? don't worry, you're supposed to. and don't bother trying to google that name, they don't have a web

ads. here it is. >> some say our best days are behind us, but not him. he believed in us, fought for us, and today our auto industry is back, firing on all cylinders. >> you know, when this came out, the campaign made a point of talk about how he's running positive ads. i know it's one thing to say that and there's place for these positive, warm and fuzzy ads, but negative ads work. i wonder what you're expecting here, what we're going to be seeing. there were a couple of articles written in the last couple of days how early this was getting negative and it's going to be obviously the most negative campaign we've ever seen. >> first of all, you are the incumbent, so you have to say positive things about the last four years. i not only don't think they don't have any choice in doing this. i think they're wise to do it because this goes straight up against the negative ads that will be shown about obama saying, look, they may be saying all these negative things about him, but look at the goo

you deserve at takes ads -- attack ads. >> i certainly expect attack ads in commercial but what i don't expect is for it all to be secret. we're trying to fight back, stephen, with little bits of money. $5 clairemccaskill.com. >> stephen: you want $5. how much of this untraceable money has been running into to you so far? >> $4.3 million in anonymous money. >> stephen: you are shooting low with $5. >> i want lots of $5 i want millions to give $5. we'll clean this up to put a lot of little money in and take the big money out. >> stephen: why don't you get your own spooky pac? why not fight fire with fire instead of fighting fire by going oh, my god i'm on fire. >> i don't want a spooky pac. i want the voter it's look the who giffing me money and make up their mind. for the spooky pacs we don't know. we have no idea. i think that's the important part to find out. >> stephen: you think that's important. knowing where the money came from do you think it's important to the voters in missouri? >> they are not known for wanting people to show things? >> no, no, no, you've got that wrong. we ar

the ad is unfair. this is part of capitalism. this is part of life and i don't think there is anything bain capital did that they need. >> they chose to do it this way. that is business they were in. if you're going to say you were a job creator, you have to take the totality of the record. >> joining me now, nationally syndicated radio talk show host michael smerconish. we have us ann kornbluth, and with us again, zachary karabel. is this a fair ad? what's your take? >> i think it is a fair ad. it is in the high of the beholder. while wondering is how will it play with independents? and i don't think we look at commercials in a vacuum. the big story today, not only this ad but the $2 billion loss by jpmorgan. i wonder if you put the two together, might people come away and say there's too much volatility. because we have so much power concentrated in the hands of a very few number who control the markets and perhaps we need more regulations of this sort of thing. >> an interesting point that michael i

we have the famous daisy girl ad. it's easy in the medium of a short ad to connect things with powerful imagery. >> ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. these are the states to make a world in which all of god's children with live or to go into the dark. we must either love each other or we must die. >> vote for president johnson on november 3rd. >> you also see patterns of flip-flopping. we have several commercials from the famous john kerry wind surfing ad. the carter cartoon, that has a caricature of president carter flip-flopping. >> he promised to create more jobs and now, there are 8 million americans out of work. he promised to balance the budget, but he gave was was a $61 billion deficit. he promised not to raise taxes, but taxes have risen more than 70%. the time is now for strong leadership. reagan for president. you see in the changes of political advertisements over time, not just changes in political approaches, which actually have pretty continuous patterns, but you see changes in t

the ads.bama's campaign has raised more than double with the romney campaign has raised, but look at the biggest super pacs. karl rove's super pac american cross roads, and that's only part of the story for american crossroads. when you combine it with crossroads gps, they have raised $100 million, and they have expected to rake in $240 before september. that's a lot to run negative tv ads from the top of the ticket on down. ezra cline is an msnbc contributor and chris freights is a reporter. we did a couple stories on this, we're going to keep doing it, let me read from your column. it's about the influence of super pacs not as much on presidential races but on your regular local congressional race, just as youth is wasted on lay that out more, it's interesting how you said you can scare a member of congress into voting for a break on corporate taxes just by scaring them, you will run $200,000 or $300,000 in negative ads. >> if voters know a lot about the candidates, they don't care about the

we're digging deeper into a new ad challenging the president on his own ad. they feel he's taking credit for what the navy seals did. take a look. ♪ >> i said that i'd go after bin laden if we had a clear shot at him, and i did. i did. i did. i did. megyn: chris stirewalt is our fox news digital politics editor and host of "power play" on foxnews.com. chris, if you watch the full segment, it is powerful. there's no question, it is a powerful shot at president obama, and they are suggesting that he is spiking the football contrary to what he said he would not do one year ago. it's an ad organized by a bronze star winner who fought in iraq, who is himself a veteran, who will be here live in about an hour to discuss the ad. but what is your take on it and its impact, potentially, in this race? >> well, the first sellingway, megyn, is that i bet the obama campaign wishes they had never run an attack ad on mitt romney as it related to the killing of bin laden. big mistake. because what it did was open them up and open the president up to this kind of criticism, an

there was so much money behind this ad. it's a $10 million ad buy. it's going to be playing in so many places that i don't feel guilty giving it free air time because you're going to be seeing it any way no matter how hard you try to get away from it. >> obama started spending like our credit cards have no limit. we've had stimulus and bailouts. obama added almost $16,000 in debt for every american. how will my kids pay that off when they can't find jobs? now obama wants more spending in taxes. that won't fix things. i had so many hopes. cutting taxes and debt and creating jobs, that's the change we need. tell president obama to cut the job-killing debt and support the new majority agenda at newmajorityagenda.org. >> you can see at the end, at the bottom it says paid for by crossroads grass roots strategy. karl rove and his three billionaires. that's supposed to be the grassroots. it's getting a $10 million roll out. the ad shows the random piece of paper with the word student loan written on it. that's to show you that president obama has somehow be

aren't simply ads that attack. and what happens when you have a high level of attacks and a high level of deception is that you disassociate campaigning from governance. and you minimize the likelihood that the candidate who is elected has made a case for a presidency that he can actually act on and mobilize the american people on behalf of. >> so negative ads are all right if they're true, right? >> i don't like to use the word "negative" because it conflates legitimate and illegitimate attack and because negative to most people means duplicitous. it means you're not looking at the ads that make the case for a candidate that may be deceptive. but the -- one of the problems with high levels of attacks is that it doesn't give you a basis to vote for a candidate. one of the advantages of attack at some level is it creates legitimate issue distinctions. when it's fair and accurate in relevance to governance, attack is what makes politics work. i'm not going to tell you bad things about me when i'm running. you're goin

they argue they're running positive ads because the president put out his positive ad messages in addition to these and i would also point out, john, this isn't even new from the democrats. when i was in iowa before the rep an primary, the republican primary, the democrats brought someone to town who had been laid off by mitt romney, or that's what he argued, and the democrats were making the case that bain did this before, so this has been a message the democrats have been pushing for many months now assuming that romney would be the nominee, for some months now, and they have been pushing this argument and so expect to see it and this is just the first in a series of ads pushing this narrative that romney in their words doesn't create jobs, he kills them, and this is just a start. >> even if this is a tiny ad by the yeah website as well as and this will not go away. >> yes. >> thanks. one approximate earn that knows a bit about bain capital is howard anderson, one of the first investors and calls himself a recovering venture captain list and teaches business at mit. >> thanks for your ti