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C H A P T E R S I X What Did They Know and When Did They Know It? T HERE ARE PROBABLY few people (besides the four of us) who sit down in front of their television sets during election season and say, “Let’s watch some campaign ads!” Rather, advertising comes to people uninvited and mostly unwelcome. But campaign ads do not appear automatically and are not distributed randomly. Ad exposure varies geographically—as described in Chapter 5, the most advertising shows up in the most competitive markets, for example. Ad exposure also varies individually—a citizen who steers clear of local news, for example, devoting all of his or her television-watching time to movies on premium cable channels, simply will not bump into many political ads, no matter how competitive the presidential (or Senate or House) race in his or her state or district. But for a neighbor who watches local news broadcasts and talk shows, daily exposure could be considerable. What effect does ad exposure have on individual citizens? Do the ads these neighbors see matter when it comes to what they know about politics or whether they take part in the political process? Does someone living in a “perfect-storm” market, such as Detroit in the 2000 campaign, who has seen hundreds of ads from the more than 30,000 aired in the Motor City market, know more about the candidates and have a higher interest in the campaign than her sister living in Corpus Christi, Texas, where not a single ad aired? Consider the respondent in the 2000 American National Election Studies who had the highest estimated exposure to campaign ads. She was a forty-yearold woman living in the St. Louis media market (we do not, of course, know her name) who reported watching a morning news program, the national news, the early local news, and Wheel of Fortune every day in the week before she was interviewed. She also reported watching late local news five times, daytime talk shows three times, and Jeopardy! once in the previous week. Obviously, W H AT D I D T H E Y K N O W A N D W H E N D I D T H E Y K N O W I T ? 69 she was a very heavy television viewer. Moreover, she lived in a media market that saw over 30,000 ads aired between January 1 and Election Day. More than 6,000 of these were aimed at the various U.S. House races in the St. Louis area, and over 7,000 were aired for Missouri’s tightly contested U.S. Senate contest. Another 6,000-some ads were aired for Missouri’s gubernatorial contest, and over 8,500 ads were aired in the presidential contest—both for the primaries and the general election. Might our respondent have learned at least something given all of her considerable ad exposure? Three of our main hypotheses, presented in Chapter 2, suggest that increasing exposure to political ads affects individual voters embedded in particular campaign environments. First, the information hypothesis holds that citizens exposed to campaign advertising actually will learn something about the candidates and their messages. Second, the differential effects hypothesis suggests that these effects will be greatest among those who need the information most: citizens who have lower levels of political information at the outset. Finally, our partisan hypothesis asserts that the effects of advertising will be greatest among those least set in their ways when it comes to politics: political independents. In this chapter, we begin the process of testing these hypotheses. The Informational Content of Advertising Conventional wisdom suggests that political advertising is a distraction, diverting viewers’ attention away from issues that matter by deluging them with meaningless , irrelevant, or bogus information. Ads, in this view, are primarily venues for candidates to sling mud at each other, tearing each other apart while dragging democracy down in the process. But as we noted in Chapter 2, scholars of political communication have been much less willing to accept this conventional wisdom, with some going as far as to suggest that people actually learn more from advertising than television news broadcasts (Patterson and McClure 1976). So how much informational content is there in political advertising? Our analysis of the Wisconsin Advertising Project data showed that in the 2000 general election presidential campaign, 69 percent of all ads focused on policy matters and fewer than 7 percent focused solely on...

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