Propaganda gets a ‘saturation buy’ in Minnesota

March 2, 2006

The midterm elections are still eight months away, but if you want to know what’s coming up, look no further than Progress for America’s ad campaign, being tested in Minnesota right now.

In an early sign of the imagery that may flood the nation’s television screens as congressional elections approach this fall, a conservative political group closely aligned with the Bush administration has launched a blitz of television ads to shore up sagging public support for the war in Iraq.

The television commercials feature vivid portraits of smoke pouring from the World Trade Center and the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Madrid and London as veterans of the Iraq war and parents of fallen soldiers make the case for continuing the U.S. military campaign in Iraq.

Progress for America spokesman Stuart Roy said the group purchased “a saturation buy” in which the average Minnesota television viewer saw two pro-war commercials a combined total of 22 times between Feb. 9 and 22.

The idea is pretty simple: Progress for America has spent more than $1 million — what the group called “a saturation buy” — to broadcast the commercials in Minnesota to test how they help shape public opinion. They’ll do a lot of polling, tweak the ads as necessary, and start a national ad campaign as we get closer to the election.

Of course, underpinning the campaign is the latest effort to connect Iraq to 9/11.

Though the ads feature the words of veterans and family members, their messages match familiar White House talking points on the war: that the nation must be in Iraq to fight terrorists who would otherwise attack America at home and that the effort is progressing well.

One of the ads includes complaints that the media coverage of the war has been misleading. “You’d never know it from the news reports, but our enemy in Iraq is Al Qaeda, the same terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” the ad says.

The ABC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul declined to air the commercial because of its charge that the media is misleading the public, but it was the only station that did not accept the ad.

And this is all coming soon to a TV near you in order to help scare people — again — in advance of the 2006 elections. Will it work or has this shtick grown tired?

They are really carpetbombing the sports channels. I think one Sunday I saw that ad about five times. It’s not bad, but if you disagree, it’ll definitely rub you the wrong way.

The new Rasmussen poll showing Rep. Mark Kennedy with zero forward progress (stuck at 40%) in his US Senate campaign came out after this ad started running, so I’d say, no, this isn’t helping their side one bit.

  • I think a Dem leaning group should mimic the ad, then finish it by stating something along the lines of “despite all this, the Republicans support giving control of our ports to the UAE, a country that has proven ties with OBL, unlike Iraq. If you are serious about national security, vote Democrat.”

  • It’s funny that you posted on this. I was just watching HGTV yesterday afternoon and an unusual commercial came on. The entire commercial is of a young girl, perhaps 8 or so, sitting in her kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal. While looking directly at the camera, she talks about where she should go… “maybe Grandma’s house since she lives so close or should I go to Suzie’s down the street. Would you know where I am?” Then the narrator says something like this: “you know a terrorist attack will happen again. Will you be prepared? Go to Ready.gov to find out how to protect yourself and know what to do.”

    I was shocked. Who’s their target audience? Obviously, they are beginning the scare tactics. This time, aimed at mothers of young children.

    Then I did a google search on “commercial ready gov” and this is the summary blurb comes up under the URL: “We must have the tools and plans in place to make it on our own if a terrorist attack occurs.” It’s part of the Dept. of Homeland Security website.

    Looks like Minnesota isn’t the only state where these commericals are being aired. They want us all to be afraid.

    This administration frightens me.

  • Maybe the stations should put a disclaimer after they run the ads:

    “The events depicted in this commercial are fictitious.”

  • God dammit, progress is OUR word! There should be some kind of law preventing organizations with completely regressive agendas from adopting such completely ass-backward names. Progress is the LAST thing they want.

  • So, there’s no problem buying time for pro-war ads, but if you want to buy time for an ad that promotes tolerance for gays, or questions the war, that’s a no-no because it’s an “issue” ad and issue ads are bad???

    Hmmmmmm….

  • I think a Dem leaning group should mimic the ad, -bubba

    I agree, enter into the Madison Avenue agency mind set..
    and borrow a page from the pepsi-coke and Bud-Miller image wars where there ad response to the opposition.

    They say this….but they do that (endless examples).
    or
    where do the repubs get all their money to buy so many ads?
    each time you see one, think of the corruption that pays for it.

    It’s a mistake to be “above” spin wars in this tube-addicted culture.

  • Well they are apparently not doing a very good job with their ad buy because I have seen exactly ZERO of these ads. Maybe I am watching too much Bravo or something. Here is what I have seen however;

    – Nightly local news reports about area soldiers being killed or wounded
    – Religious freaks (Phelpsists) protesting the funeral of a Minnesota soldier KIA in Iraq
    – Wingnut state politicians vowing to push a gay marriage ammentment in the legislature (for about the 15th year in a row)

    I’m not sure why they picked MN for this. Maybe they believed themselves when they said MN was going Republican. I seriously doubt anyone around here is buying bridges at the moment.

  • MNProgressive,

    Maybe they’re trying to prep for Al Franken running for office.

  • The soliders speaking in the ads are so obviously reading from a prepared script that it undermines their message, and they aren’t convincing anyone to believe their message about how all the bad news in the media is not real. The image of that destroyed mosque and the violence that followed are having a far greater impact on opinion here about the war in Iraq, and recent polls are reflecting that.

  • 2,

    Could be. I heard this morning that they were distributing CD-ROMs to their base to get out the message and collect information on where their people were on gay marriage.

    http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2006/03/01/gopcd/

    I don’t know what they are expecting to hear about gay marriage from a bunch of people on a Republican mailing list but whatever. Let them spend their money now on this kind of stupidity.

    I’m not sure how Al would play as a candidate. It would be interesting to see but I would be concerned about what a primary with Al would do to the DFL. The problem in the past few elections (excepting death by plane crash) is that the DFL candidate came off as boring and old hat. Time will tell.

  • Older readers will remember the anti-Goldwater commercial that showed the little girl plucking petals off a daisy, while the voice over went “Ten..Nine…Eight…”

    OTOH, I also remember the one where the big black limo careens through the tumbleweed while someone (guess who?) hurls beer cups out the window.

    I once owned a bumper sticker saying “Up and Out with Goldwater.”

  • Well, im not surprised that they will use scare tactics on the terroirst issue, because it worked so well previously. And with Karl at the helm, it’s all about fear and loathing – put the fear in the people and find a target for them to loath. However, it could backfire this time, as there isnt any reason to be any more fearful of terrorists, but there is every reason to be fearful that we are completely and woefully unprepared to deal with any eventual attack. I think the dems should go right back at them, saying, yes you should be scared, fear the terrorists, because your government has been given 5 years to make you safer and hasnt done a thing about it, except, produce a war which made more terrorists, and more people want to lash out against us. I say use their own tactics against them. Even use their own commercials…is there anything illegal about starting the commercial exactly the same way, but then changing the ending? Kinda like a reverse hollywodd…just no happy ending.

  • To echo what MNprogressive said, I live in MN and I did not see any of these commercials, this blog post was the first I have heard of it. Now I don’t watch a whole lot of TV except for the occasional Wild game, but my wife does watch some local news (and, coincedentally a fair amount of Bravo) and we have not seen any of the ads. So perhaps their definition of ‘saturation’ needs a bit of refining.

  • I would add that this saturation thing is just an indication of how desperate they are and how bereft of new ideas. This is the same old stuff regurgitated yet again. People are tired of it, tired of being manipulated and perpetually ordered to ignore the evidence they see around them every single day.

    I agree with G2, I think this will backfire on them because it’s just so transparently obvious now. And even if it doesn’t do so overtly, people will just shrug it off so it won’t help them except to drain their ad coffers in premature and useless exercises.

  • The soldiers speaking in the ads are so obviously reading from a prepared script -David W
    It’s funny you should say that. I am sure you all recall the footage of a group of soldiers being prepared to speak with Bush via satellite. I believe it was sometime last fall. When I read this post the first thing that came to mind was Dems could use that footage to undermine the credibility of the soldiers in this ad.

  • You all hve indicated how the Dems could take advantage of previous ads, news clips, etc. to counter this Rep ‘saturation’. Wanna bet the Dems will do any of this?

    Nah, they’re happy (the elected ones) sucking hind tit on the federal hog.

  • How ’bout this:

    Show the WTC footage with the towers burning, next show the footage of shrub in the Florida classroom-dithering, then show shrub saying “We’re gonna get OBL dead or alive”, then have a voice over-“It’s been x amount of time since the WTC attacks shrub still hasn’t gotten OBL dead or alive, if you want a politician that’s serious about national security vote for”-put whatever dem candidate here.

    It’d be interesting to see if these TV stations would accept something like that.

  • Face it – people cannot think by themselves. They need television, radio and Britney Spears to tell them how to think. It’s our job to lead them where they should go.

  • Haven’t been around for awhile but I just took a look at Progress for America’s 990 informational return filed with the IRS for 2004. Something’s screwy. At the end of 2003, Progress for America had total assets of $77,502 in cash. In 2004, it raised $4,358,141 through direct public support and spent $1,984,710.

    The officers and home addresses of Progress for America are as follows:

    Brian S. McCabe
    157 Shaker Road
    Canterbury NH 03224
    President/Director

    Ralph R. Brown
    703 Vine Street
    Dallas Center IA 50063
    Secretary/Director

    Mary Anne Carter
    1400 Kenesaw Avenue #12C
    Knoxville TN 37919
    Treasurer/Director

    McDonald, Brown & Fagen
    502-15th Street
    PO Box 250
    Dallas Center IA 50063-0250

    No other officers or directors are listed which is required. What connects these people? I’m thinking of calling them up and asking them some questions. Like who gave the speeches that are listed as an accomplishment of the Progress for America’s program? Other than $10,000, none of the directors/officers draw salaries. So who does?

    Here’s where it gets really interesting. Progress for America is related to Progress for America Voting Fund, registered with the IRS in May 2004. Progress for America and Progress for America Voting Fund are listed in each other’s 2004 990s as related parties with the same officers. Again, the officers do not report drawing salaries.

    In 2004, Progress for America Voting Fund raised a staggering $44,941,205 and spent $35,629,804! Where the hell is all this money coming from? Something is rotten and it’s not in Denmark this time.

    I don’t have time to go through the 990s closely right now but the disclosure leaves a lot to be desired. If I remember correctly, there’s a rule about disclosing donations over a certain amount minus the donor’s name but I have to check.

    If anyone is interested in tracking info about not-for-profit organizations via their 990s, you can find many of them at either the Foundation Center’s 990 Finder or Guidestar. Guidestar requires free registration. (I hope these html tags work, I’m not versatile with them yet.)

    I found a wealth of info about Grover Norquist’s Americans
    For Tax Reform through the 990s. I still have a bunch of unanswered questions on my to-do list for Mr. Norquist such as what is the National Alliance in Fairfax VA that Americans for Tax Reform made a $650k grant to in 2004? The only National Alliance I could find is a neo-Nazi group. Hmm..if I remember, Mr. Norquist did work for the apartheid crowd in the late 1980s. Perhaps the right wing really is extreme in DC these days.

  • Hi, MNProgressive. I ran across a similar article and emailed CB with it. Here’s the link, followed by a couple of telling quotes:

    GOP Anti-Gay Marriage CD Stirs Up Tempest

    (St. Paul, Minnesota) A CD-ROM that the Minnesota Republican Party is sending out to build support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage has another purpose: building up a voter database.

    And that’s stirred up a technological tempest on the Internet and among Democrats who say the disc will improperly gather data from people who examine it on their computers. Privacy experts say they’re concerned that the GOP won’t adequately warn users that it’s collecting the data, and they worry where the information will end up.

    …..

    The rules aren’t so clear in politics.

    “In the political field, candidates and parties have gotten away with a lot of practices that would clearly be illegal if a business did them,” Hoofnagle said. “Both parties are using detailed databases of personal information that are completely unregulated. And they’re not likely to be regulated, because the politicians themselves would have to limit their activities in order to do so.”

  • I live in northern Minnesota, the “bluest” part of the state, and those ads made my skin crawl. They were especially prominent during Olympic coverage. But the most infuriating thing was our local NBC affiliate’s station manager going on the air a few days after they first started running, and defending their decision to continue airing the ads “in the interest of equal time”, and drawing extended comparisons to political ads during election season. Clearly they were hearing from their audience that we were offended, but they chose to take the money and run them anyway.

  • MN Progressive, you didn’t see the ads because you don’t watch sports.

    This is still all about the wingnuts preaching to the faithful. They know they can’t convert anyone to the pro-war side, so they’re spending this money to buck up their base.

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