Lynn Espinoza is a broadcast news veteran with more than a decade of media, presentation and executive coaching experience. She has developed personal coaching sessions for Fortune 100 C-level executives, corporate communicators of all kinds, doctors, lawyers and leaders in non-profit.
Putting Lipstick on the Negative Ads
Posted on September 11, 2008. Filed under: Latest News
It seems to me there is a fair amount of passive-aggression going on, and I don’t think it serves the process of election well.
The ads, you may have noticed, have gone crazy.
“He called her a pig!”
Can we just stop for a moment? We all know that both campaigns were blowing smoke when they promised a higher campaign season. They’ve both gone for the juglar, and have their teeth in arteries instead of issues.
But there is a way to stop it. OK, that’s too optimistic. But maybe there’s a way to cut down on the absurd rhetoric. If reporters would ask the presidential candidates - to their FACES - if they stand behind the smear ads, I believe the answers would be different than what the ads would suggest.
Reporter to McCain: “Did you really think Senator Obama called Governor Palin a pig??”
Though he “approved this ad”, I don’t think he’d be so bold as to answer “yes, he called her a pig” in real time. Obama is hiding behind some half-baked ad-accusations as well.
Reporters, I believe, are pandering. Not to the candidates as much as to their “base”. No news outlet wants the blogesphere to turn on them. So they’re going easy, and running the ads, and feeding this climate of passive-agression.
***UPDATE*****
Ah HA! The AP asked the question, and the answer was as predicted:
JACKSONVILLE, Fla.—Did Barack Obama really call Sarah Palin a pig, as a John McCain ad leads people to believe? “No,” McCain said Monday. The Republican presidential nominee defended the ad anyway, saying Obama “chooses his words very carefully.”
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