Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2015

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Borger J.
Dirty rats leave Gore a subliminal message
The Guardian 2000 Sep 13
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/sep/13/uselections2000.usa

Abstract:

It was only visible for a thirtieth of a second but here’s proof the gloves are really off

Special report: the US elections

Full text:

The increasingly accident-prone Bush presidential campaign was accused of dirty tricks yesterday, after it was discovered that the word “rats” appeared subliminally in a Republican political broadcast targeting Democratic health care proposals.

The offending word, in large white capital letters, flashes against a black background for a thirtieth of a second as a woman narrator criticises Vice President Al Gore’s plan for government funding of prescriptions for pensioners.

George W Bush ridiculed as “bizarre and weird” accusations that his campaign was trying to use such underhand techniques to discredit his opponent. Yesterday, however, he announced that the $2.5m (£1.3m) advertising campaign would be withdrawn.

Alex Castellanos, the Republican campaigner responsible for producing the advertisment denied trying to send subliminal messages.

“We don’t play ball that way. I’m not that clever,” he said.

However, Mr Castellanos has been involved in controversial political broadcasts before. In 1990 he produced an advertisement for the rightwing Republican senator for North Carolina, Jesse Helms, which used racial imagery in a contest with a black businessman, Harvey Gant. At one point a white pair of hands receives a job rejection letter and crumples it up, but for a fraction of a second the letter fades to a picture of Mr Gant and the hands appear to be crushing his head.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who analyses the advertisement in her book Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction and Democracy, said Mr Castellanos insisted then that the imagery was accidental. Ms Jamieson believes the Helms advertisement was the first instance of subliminal imagery in US political advertising and Mr Castellanos’s “rats advertisement” is the second.

Gore campaign workers were scarcely able to contain their glee yesterday as the Bush campaign was forced into emergency damage limitation for the second time in eight days, at a time when it is losing ground in the polls.

Last Monday – apparently unaware that he was speaking close to a live microphone – Mr Bush was overheard describing a New York Times reporter as “a major-league asshole”. The reporter, Adam Clymer, had written a critical account of the Texas governor’s record on health care, and the gaffe made Mr Bush appear peevish and unsettled.

Campaigning in Florida yesterday, the candidate seemed rattled by the new controversy yesterday, struggling to pronounce the word “subliminal”, and raising doubts as to whether he understood its meaning when he argued: “The idea of one frame out of 900 hardly in my judgment makes a conspiracy.”

After seeing a double-digit lead in the polls evaporate in less than a month, splits have emerged in the Bush camp over how to pursue the campaign, and when to “go negative”. Last week the candidate’s staff were trying to increase their control over the Republican National Committee’s campaign office responsible for producing political broadcasts, because it was unhappy about the harshly negative tone of some of its output.

Mr Castellanos insisted that the word had appeared accidentally as part of a visual effect which broke up words from campaign slogans into fragments and flashed them across the screen. The word “rats” was supposed to be part of “bureaucrats”, he said.

In the controversial segment of the advertisement, other words and groups of letters appear before the slogan “The Gore Prescription Plan: Bureaucrats Decide” crystallises on the screen. However, the word “rats” is larger than the other word-fragments.

The word was spotted only after 4,400 screenings in 33 regions, by a Democratic supporter in Seattle, Gary Greenup, who alerted his local party.

“Initially, I was just kind of intrigued… but when I taped it and looked it I thought this is not really very good. It’s somewhat underhand and a little bit devious and it should be brought to light.”