Wednesday, 10/31

Happy Halloween! And here's your scary thought for the day—you still have another seven days to sit through what seems to be non-stop commercial breaks filled with nothing but political ads.

Sorry. Didn't mean to send THAT much terror through you.

Doesn't matter if you're watching TV or listening to your favorite radio station (and you DO have a favorite radio station, right?). You'll either see or hear upwards of 20 political ads during an average one hour period. In fact, while it's not quite as bad on the station where I work, I have seen an hour of TV on a local station where they had nothing BUT political ads. It's almost enough to make you long for the days of non-stop drug commercials listing their side effects, you know?

Well, okay. Maybe not THAT bad, but I think you know what I mean.

It's probably not much a surprise, either, that in our highly polarized political climate most of the ads you see or hear aren't positive ads. For the most part, they don't tell you what the candidate wants to accomplish or what the candidate stands for. Nope; we're so lucky in the fact that most of the commercials we see and hear are negative ads, either telling you that one candidate is a horrid human being, or trying to twist facts so much that you start to believe if you vote one way or another you'll end up with brain cancer.

And that helps the democratic process how?

I don't know that their system is any better, but I think I wrote a few weeks ago about how German elections are relatively peaceful affairs. There are no non-stop orgies of negative ads, no dark money political action committees, campaigns are limited to a span of just a few weeks, and they hold elections on Sundays so that everyone can vote. In the end, they have a higher percentage of their citizens voting, and, if I had to guess, a lot less stress caused during their election season.

But, for better or worse, that's not how we do things here. And that's why for the next seven days any kind of media you consume will constantly remind you of that. So if you're looking for a scary Halloween fact, there you go. But at least one week from today, it'll all be over. Or at least it'll be over until, say January, when the 2020 Presidential campaign gets underway.

Boo!

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)