Not that I enjoy throwing cold water on a popular left-of-center idea, but this from Media Matters seems unfair for two basic reasons.
First, you get “free” airtime by airing an ad so outrageous that it forces the other guy to react or offends enough people that the reaction become news. The RNC ad warning people to vote ( R) or die a fiery death did a decent job of that, although I think that kind of nakedly frivolous scaremongering better deserves to be ignored. At this point, with the bloody hash that the GOP has made out of their “central front” in the terror war, it just looks silly. The DNC spot is a great ad but unless the GOP decides to get wooly about it I don’t see the ad earning more airtime than the DNC paid for. It isn’t clear that the major Dem committees even even know how to do outrageous.
Second. Look back at the Michael J. Fox-Rush Limbaugh flare-up and tell me how this is not a case of free airtime played perfectly. You have the outrageous, or at least highly memorable ad in an area, stem cell research, where publicity can do nothing but help the Democrats and hurt the Republicans. It can be hard for a great pol to avoid responding to a provocation like that, and Rush Limbaugh isn’t a great pol. Rush Limbaugh is a dimwitted sack of horse dung whose hamfisted reaction sent this ad into the proverbial free-airtime stratosphere. Now the story moves on to the controversy over Rush Limbaugh’s nutjob performance (C&L has the vid, of course) and which GOP luminaries will stand behind the talking dungheap.
News coverage of the Fox ad news may not have been that insightful or particularly “balanced,” but keep in mind that the RNC ad scored much more negative reviews. The value in free airtime is getting the ad up where people will see it and pushing the other team off message. To a point anyway the news copy per se is incidental.
As much as the corporate media has a GOP lapdog syndrome (believe me, I see it), in this cycle both sides have scored in the contest for free airtime. In my view the RNC lucked out with a bloop single while Claire McCaskill hit a solid drive to center-left field, and it’s still going.