Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 61

WEDNESDAY 13 MARCH 1996 61 EVENING STANDARD Media A message ffiromm yoeff camdMaite skMrt vote Did negative advertising affect die Republican primaries? BARRY DAY examines the latest research THE London Financial News launched on 4 March with the breathless hopes of many small investors One shareholder who may have i less time than he'd like to follow its progress is Airthoqy Jufint otherwise known as the Princess of Wales's favourite solicitor Editor Clive Wolman is an old university pal of Julius it is estimated has a stake of 7000 shares of £3 each Julius is currently researching his forthcoming lecture at University College Londftn on "Love Poetry and the Art of Those he will quote include Ovid Dante and Petrarch but not so far as we know Anna Pasternak pr the collected Rugby Ditties of Will Carling More Diana The notorious video Caught la the Act is released this week after finally earning an 18 certificate from the British Board of Film Classification The security-camera offcuts feature a reconstructed in-store performance hem the Princess of Wales in Harvey Nichols The man responsible for passing the tatty stuff was Lord Harewood president of the BBFC We feel it our loyal duty to point out that he is a cousin of the Queen Off with his account card Bulging mailbags were expected at Radio 1 after its decision not to put records by Status Quo and The Beatles on its playlist Bulging mailbags like jammed switchboards are hard to quantify: but the 50 letters received so far have singularly failed to test the biceps Perhaps British civilisation is not on the verge of collapse after all More episodes: soap-sodden OK magazine goes weekly tomorrow while Attic magazine Inside Soap has ust gone from a monthly to a fortnightly Highlights include the revelation that Ned Glover is played by the same actor Johnny Leeze who played milkman Harry Clayton in Coronation Street in 1985 Some guys get all the luck Last lunch for departing New Statesman editor Steve Platt was a bitter-sweet occasion In the Gay Hussar the conversation inevitably touched on likely successor In another part of London and all on his own new NSS proprietor Geoffrey Robinson was busy interviewing The four names on his shortlist are thought to be former Independent editor Ian Hargreaves Guardian columnist Francis Wheen economics writer Will Hutton and Roy Hattersley MP The Gay Hussar is the favourite restaurant coincidentally of Roy Hattersley It must all mean something Pity APTVs poor news teams Associated Press launched the station in late 1 994 as a rival to Reuters TV Recently though costs have been slashed and drastic choices are being made only got $1 400 a day to cover the whole of North moans one reporter That means we can either cover the Oscar nominees' lunch or Super Tuesday but not A piquant tale from radio station Heart 1062 FM which last week parted company with its morning DJ Lee Simpson His replacement David Prever successfully negotiated his debut show from 6am to 10am Then came trouble: the mid-morning DJ Liam Quigley had been delayed coming into Heathrow from Ireland Could Prever carry on? Gamely the new boy picked up his cans again By the time he finished he had broadcast unrelieved for seven hours Quigley was flying Virgin Now Heart's main opposition in London IN THE best-selling political novel Primary Colors a campaign consultant bemoans the fact that someone else has been given the task of cutting the attack spots for the candidate Then making the best of a bad job she shrieks: can do Positives you should see my Positives Political consist of shots of the candidate with smiling family wrapped in the American flag or walking solo along a pensive beach ft la JFK Research shows them to be a yawn As Richard Nixon once famously observed: only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being But to paraphrase a famous song the Republican race to the nomination in San Diego in August has been all about accentuating the negative Financier Malcolm Forbes has dictated the style of the communications battle for both good and ill by going immediately and almost exclusively negative in his advertising with what have come to be called attack ads In these the candidate usually through a third party or disembodied voice-over accompanied by doom-laden music lambasts the alleged record of his opponent while revealing little or nothing about his own plans Critics of the form and they are many and growing claim it to be denigrating to the democratic process to which the counter cry is of George Bush is popularly supposed to have cast the first stone in 1988 with his TV commercial in which he accused his opponent Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime by giving convicted murderers weekend passes On one such weekend the black Willie Horton kidnapped and raped a white woman thus adding a racial element to the story Despite the fact that Dukakis was simply continuing a policy initiated by his Republican predecessor he never found a way to answer the accusation and his campaign began to stall there and then Since then has proved a positive pleasure for candidates who want to undergo close scrutiny of their own records or proposals Forbes is now inclined to agree with those who with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight conclude that he went too negative too soon He should have told the voters who he was to gain the credibility to tell them what his opponents were not Does going negative have any positive effects? Not surprisingly opinions are divided The prevailing point of view would seem to be that they do have an effect if not always the specific effect their creators intend For one thing likely to be more interesting The Devil does tend to have the best tunes Repeated often enough they raise a question about the opponent that sticks in the mind of the uncommitted voter Their very brevity and incompleteness actually help in that context People who have seen a negative ad at least eight times begin to move away from the candidate attacked The line such ads walk is thin and pain-hilly sharp As political academic Kathleen Hall Jamieson concluded: is dangerous for political ads to lie outright but an ad that takes something out of context is much harder for the opponent to deal The more concerning effect is the cumulative one A recent study summarised in a book Going Negative concludes that the result of the kind of negative barrage voters have been exposed to in recent years and from which there now seems no escape is to alienate them from the whole political process Attack ads lower voter turnout the authors conclude and if you happen to be a candidate who believes he will benefit from the undecided staying home you suddenly have a new weapon in your arsenal They farther concluded that this is a fact political advisers Elephant's graveyard: contenders for the GOFs nomination Steve Forbes (top right) and Pat Buchanan have found attack no defence against favourite Bob Dole have been well aware of and kept to themselves for some time So a political diet rich in bile it seems threatens to demoralise the electorate and nibble away at the sense of civic duty But even if they believe that will it affect the way candidates conduct their campaigns from now on? Will they come to see it as another form of environmental pollution and start to clean up their act? Most unlikely for the simple reason that it works They all deplore it but none will agree to disarm unilaterally preferring to follow the Ailes Dictum promulgated by Roger Ailes former adviser to Nixon and Bush you get punched punch So viewers at this stage of the game this is the way it looks On the road to San Diego Bob Dole ponders the issue of whether and Trusted A Proven will do it or whether he needs a touch of War Hero Draft -knowing in his heart that his best slogan would undoubtedly be Dole Get Powell In the Oval Office sits a man who believe his luck beginning to wonder whether Mount Incumbency be turned into Mount Rushmore Barry Day is director of creative communications at the Interpublic Group qf Companies and was election adviser to former prime minister Edward Heath A gift from Murdoch from reformist campaigners like Common Cause and media saints like retired CBS journalist Walter Cronkite America's leading news presenter in a less cynical age Mr Murdoch his Mr Cronkite wrote in a letter to the Washington Post may not be everyone's favourite media baron but last week he came up with an idea that might lift American political campaigns out of their television idea has gone down less well among his television competitors the three US networks ABC NBC and and some Fox officials also object to Murdoch's proposal The network they point out has no nightly newscast Thus its only foray into the campaign would be these free advertisements Still the basic logic of Murdoch's position is difficult to assail Even if Murdoch's proposal is ultimately self-promoting it has been welcomed by those who have fought a futile battle to reform American campaigning since the 1970s A half-hour with Bob Dole will never rival Baywatch in the ratings but it would expose a political bimbo for what heorsheis MICHAEL MORAN PERHAPS nothing says more about the bedraggled state of American democracy than the emergence of Rupert Murdoch as the shining knight of political reform Mr Murdoch owner of the Fox television network in America has promised to give major-party presidential candidates an hour of free airtime this autumn in the final days of the presidential campaign The United States is one of the few democratic nations that doesn't provide free airtime to political candidates which partly explains the enormous costs involved in running for office Murdoch's offer has drawn immediate praise Edited by Mark Jones Reporters: Alexander Games and Lisa.