Television Advertising in Canadian Elections: The Attack Mode, 1993 ed. by Walter I. Romanow et al. (review)

humanities 569 Young rightly argues, end in political chaos and deadlock. Interesting insights indeed, but not for the faint of heart on either side of this protracted political/legal battle. (M.D. BEHIELS) Walter I. Romanow, Michel de Repentigny, Stanley B. Cunningham, Walter C. Soderlund, and Kai Hildebrandt, editors. Television Advertising in Canadian Elections: The Attack Mode, 1993 Wilfrid Laurier University Press. x, 252. $29.95 In the federal election of 1993 the reigning Conservative party nearly committed suicide. Towards the end of the campaign, desperate to stop the Liberal advance, Conservative strategists released two nasty ads in English Canada which focused attention on Jean Chrétien's facial paralysis, suggesting that he would be an embarrassment as prime minister. That followed American practice, where politicos often effectively used attack ads to `raise the negatives' on an opposing candidate. Perhaps the strategists hoped to emulate a success of 1988, when negative ads had worked to undo a brief surge in the popularity of John Turner. Instead the 1993 ads were so unfair they upset journalists, the public, even Conservative candidates, and they were swiftly withdrawn. But the damage was done. According to one estimate the Conservatives might have expected fifty to sixty seats; by another estimate, perhaps twenty-five seats. Instead they only managed two seats in the new Parliament. This exercise in attack advertising had proven a resounding failure; it had also demonstrated that attack ads could have a major effect upon voters' preferences. All of this and much more is chronicled in Television Advertising in Canadian Elections, a joint effort by research teams initially at Université Laval and the University of Windsor. Different authors write chapters surveying the literature on political advertising, the views of strategists, the respective campaigns in Quebec and English Canada (a special virtue of this book is its attention to both Canadas), the apparent effects of ads, even the ethics of political advertising. They employ content and survey analysis, some semiotics (in a chapter on images in Quebec ads), even a novelty called `Participatory Action Research' which explores through detailed interviews the multiple responses of people exposed to negative ads. The result is not a very friendly read B all those numbers, percentages, and categories so popular with the social scientists can swiftly bore. What a pity there is no close reading of some ads, particularly the anti-Chrétien nasties, to demonstrate how these conveyed intended and unintended meanings to viewers. It would have helped if the authors (was the publisher amenable?) had included pictures in their accounts B it is strange 570 letters in canada 1999 that a book on television advertising includes no images. But that aside, Television Advertising in Canadian Elections is a comprehensive and masterful treatment of a complicated subject, amply justifying the boast that this is a first in Canadian scholarship. The authors establish that television advertising was not a particularly useful tool for the parties in 1993, except possibly for the Liberals (though the authors cannot disentangle the import of the ads from other aspects of the campaign). Neither the Bloc Québécois nor Reform made much use of political ads. The NDP's largely negative ads may well have taken votes away from the Tories and the Grits, though some of these votes apparently went Reform, which is one difficulty with using attack ads in a multi-party setting. As to the Conservatives, their positive ads could not overcome Kim Campbell's failings, and their negative ads only accentuated the débâcle. Indeed the authors demonstrate that the Canadians surveyed and interviewed just do not like negative advertising, especially when it focuses on a person, no matter which party might practise this technique. One of the last chapters acknowledges that `a strong case ... can be made ... that such advertising does us a serious epistemic disservice.' But none of the authors boldly argue what seems all too obvious, that political advertising is fundamentally an anti-democratic form of communication. Perhaps that is because they pay little attention to political theory? My comment reflects a discourse-centred vision of democracy outlined by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, where dialogue, argument, and rationality are crucial to political...