"In Florida, television is the key media and advertising, properly presented and properly repeated, has a much more dramatic impact than the daily newspapers. "There never has been an attempt to hide her," Hawkins' chief strategist, Charlie Black, said, adding, "Like any candidate, you pick your shots."īlack, one of the Republican Party's most successful strategists, spelled out how the campaign intended to deal with the "free media" and "paid media" (commercials) in an unusually frank breakfast meeting with reporters last winter. Hawkins' advisers kept the senator, an unpredictable maverick with a habit of making controversial remarks, in Washington, away from the campaign trail and skeptical reporters, until the final two weeks of the campaign. The Hawkins and Graham campaigns offer instructive, but contradictory, case studies in the time-honored art of media manipulation. The campaign, Levy said, provides a revealing and disquieting look at where American politics is heading - campaigns waged largely out of television studios and tightly controlled "media events" with candidates spending much of their time raising money to buy TV time. The problem is this kind of campaign doesn't serve the public or democracy very well." One side slings some mud, and the other side picks up the mud and slings it back. "So what we've got is two very slick media campaigns. There is no substance," said Art Levy, a political scientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Hawkins isn't saying anything whatsoever, and Graham isn't saying much either. "The media focuses on the ads because they're the most visible part of the the campaign. 20, for example, 11 of the 17 stories about the Florida Senate race in The Miami Herald were about ads by the two campaigns and their advertising specialists. The ad wars, to a large extent, have shaped coverage of the nation's second most expensive Senate race in "the free media" - newspapers, television and radio. The candidates spend much of their time giving speeches, holding news conferences and answering questions about their paid advertisements. The advertisements don't reinforce the candidate's agenda or image they are the agenda. The trend is magnified in large, fast-growing states such as Florida with shifting populations and uncertain political allegiances. Bob Graham (D) mirrors the biggest trend of the 1986 political season: Campaigns have become highly personal mini-television dramas, waged in 30-second commercial bursts of highly negative charge and countercharge. "I feel amazed and embarrassed when the coverage of a major Senate race is reduced to an examination of their television ads," he said, working in an editing room at WTVJ-TV, the CBS affiliate here. "But we keep getting drawn back into the ad wars. You keep trying to report what the candidates are talking about," he said. Michael Putney, a television reporter covering one of the biggest television campaigns in the country, is frustrated with the Florida Senate race.
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