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Journalism of Courage
In one of his last television commercials before the election, US President George W. Bush waxed eloquent and emotional on the sacrifices of the military and its zeal to defend the country. In another, wolves lurked in a forest — symbolising terrorists on the loose — as a narrator denounced Senator John F. Kerry for proposing to cut funding for spy agencies.
New data released yesterday on airtime purchased for campaign advertisements show which spot Bush favored for his closing pitch. The president spent about $53,000 last week to air the uplifting pro-Bush ad, called Whatever it Takes, an independent report for the LA Times found. He spent about $758,000 that same day to air the anti-Kerry ad called Wolves.
Kerry had 34 different spots on the air at one point last week — compared with Bush’s nine — and the themes in many of them matched up with a given state: Wisconsin jobs, Pennsylvania jobs, a closed Ohio factory, a New Mexico governor’s testimonial, a Nevada nuclear waste dump. In each case, Kerry found a local angle to attack Bush. With the two major parties and a plethora of outside groups also pouring money into the race, spending for the 2004 presidential ad wars crested last week and continued to set records with each passing day. The final week’s television frenzy put an exclamation point on a stunning year for political ads in which viewers in battleground states were barraged with more than 675,000 commercials.
Kerry and pro-Democratic sources spent more than $31 million on cable TV and local broadcasts in the top 100 markets for the week ending midnight Saturday, said a report for the Times, compiled by TNSMI/Campaign Media Analysis Group. In all, these players had spent more than $357 million since the general election campaign began March 3. By comparison, Bush and his allies spent more than $29 million on TV last week and about $229 million for the year. And the figures don’t include millions of dollars spent on radio and newspaper ads and TV time in smaller broadcast markets. Bush ad strategist Mark McKinnon, traveling with the president in Milwaukee, said the Republican campaign invested heavily in the 30-second Wolves spot because ‘‘it reminds voters what the race was about’’. He said Bush put more money into the 60-second Whatever it Takes towards the end of last week. — LAT-WP
