by frog
The increasing emergence of US style attack campaigning in recent years (John and John, Taxathon etc) is disappointing.
Mr Carson, who came up with Labour’s “Keep it Kiwi” and “This one’s about trust” campaigns, says the key to advertising a political party is to pit yourself against your opposition. In the commercial world, you want to be positive about your product. In politics, you want to malign your rival.
All parties should and do criticise each other on various issues and sometimes more generically they will criticise each others’ very reason for being. But when parties have only 15 or 30 seconds of advertising time to get their message across and they choose to use that to abuse or denigrate their opponents it shows a lack of vision and commitment to improving things for New Zealanders.
Under MMP attacking the opposition rather than promoting yourself misses the point. Labour voters who enjoy denigration and abuse of political opponents would be better voting New Zealand First – Winston is better at it. If however they want a positive, practical vision they can choose Green.
Published in Campaign | Media by frog on Wed, October 29th, 2008
Tags: , advertising, labour party, national party, New Zealand First
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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Seed Magazine has an article discussing if evolution science can explain both the appeal and recent failings of negative campaigning:
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While we (or to be more accurate just me) are on the topic of negative campaigning, check out this juvenile effort from 08wire.
Does anyone honestly believe that John Key loves money and hates children, while Helen Clark selflessly tends to children in their hospital beds. If you disagree with Key’s finance and investment policies and their likely impact on child poverty good on ya, you’re probably right. But these efforts to paint National as a evil rather than wrong are over the top and just make the accusers look either foolish or dishonest.
That’s the main reason I have an ongoing problem with 08wire – it often campaigns in a destructive and mean way, and then keeps linking the Greens to their team LPG efforts, as though we would support that kind of thing. (Well, that and the fact that it continues to treat the Greens like an offshoot of Labour rather than a separate party with a distinct political position.)
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Some great points here, but aren’t the Greens rather hypocritical on this. Even in this current campaign the Greens have been using negative, personal attacks in your advertising. Take, for example, your viral video on YouTube. In this, you attack Trevor Mallard over his fight with Tau Henare, bring up stuff about Ron Mark, John Key etc. In light of your above critique, what’s your defence of this? Or does this viral video prove that the Greens just the same as the other negative, trivial parties? When you focus on the Trevor Mallard assault in your campaigning, aren’t you just as guilty for acting to ‘abuse or denigrate their opponents’ which ‘shows a lack of vision and commitment to improving things for New Zealanders’?
Bryce
http://www.liberation.org.nz
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Frog
I think Bryce is right – you’re happy condemning everybody else when they go negative, but reserve the right to go ad hominem and simplistic and negative yourself. That isn’t cool.
I’m happy for everyone to go as negative and hunourous as they like. It turns out the negative effects of negativity on democracy are hugely over-stated, and that negative advertising actually causes interest and participation in democracy to **rise** among partisans (Lau and Pomper 2001 if you want the reference). And guess the partisanship level of political blog readers.
Lastly, you don’t think our tongue is in our cheek just a little bit when we do our ads? Maybe our underlying message was that Key and the Nats prioritise monetary causes of happiness more than Team LPG, who are more likely to promote non-monetary causes of increased utility. But try putting that into a 30 second ad without coming across as a boring dork.
Lighten up, Frog!
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