The latest McCain ad, “Disrespectful,” gives new meaning to the phrase “negative campaign ad.” Several transitions segue into photos of Barack Obama and Joseph Biden from (literally) negative images. Notice also how frequently the shots cut off part of Obama’s and Biden’s heads.
Frame 82 5.455 seconds
Frame 83 5.521 seconds
Frame 86 5.721 seconds
Frame 88 5.854 seconds
Frame 114 7.584 seconds
Frame 121 8.050 seconds
Frame 144 9.580 seconds
Frame 151 10.45 seconds
Frame 194 12.906 seconds
Frame 199 13.239 seconds
Frame 248 16.499 seconds
Frame 254 16.898 seconds
Negative Language:
The phrase “How disrespectful,” spoken by a chiding female narrator, recalls the old stereotype of the uppity Black man (see frame 121) dissing the white woman. The commercial also uses negative terms like “celebrity” (i.e. a superficial attention getter); “star is fading”; “lashed out”; “desperately”; “wrong.”
Misrepresentation: The ad implies that Obama “dismissed” Palin as good looking (frame 121), when in fact the remark came from Biden, and in a humorous, self-deprecating way, with the audience about his own looks, (see Jake Tapper’s ABC blog entry and Andrew Romano’s Newsweek commentary).
The ad “McCain: Fact Check” uses a number of propaganda techniques in its brief 31 seconds:
Imagery
Positive / negative words
Poisoning the well
Misrepresentation
Imagery: The video paints the Obama camp as vicious predators via footage of a hungry pack of wolves (scavenging for dirt on Sarah Palin). Additionally, three photos of Obama (in black and white) convey anger and despair. In color photos (taken with the camera looking up at their faces), Palin and McCain smile and look determined.
Negative Words: “attacks”; “false”; “misleading”; “dig dirt”; “drops in the polls”; “try to destroy [Governor Palin]: [Obama's Politics of Hope are] “empty words.” Obama is referred to by his last name; Palin is called “Governor Palin.”
Poisoning the Well: The McCain ad uses this powerful logical fallacy not only to predict future bad actions by Obama but to associate such behavior with desperation: “As Obama drops in the polls, he’ll try to destroy her.”
Misrepresentation: The video associates the spoken statement “The attacks on Governor Palin have been called false … misleading” with an image (superimposed over the picture of a grimacing Obama) of the FactCheck.org logo and the phrase “completely false”…”misleading” 9/8/08.
McCain ad misrepresentation
But as FactCheck.org itself points out in its September 10 posting “McCain-Palin Distorts Our Finding,” FactCheck used the phrases “completely false” and “misleading” to refer to anonymous Internet postings, not to any statement by Obama: “We have no evidence that any of the claims we found to be false came from the Obama campaign.” FactCheck also notes that the McCain ad distorts its quote from The Wall Street Journal (the Journal did not use the phrase “dig dirt” to characterize the mission of a team of lawyers Obama allegedly sent to Alaska (a mission that Obama’s campaign say did not happen).
