BROADCAST ADWATCH EFFECTS - A FIELD EXPERIMENT

Several national news networks adopted a strategy for responding to mi sleading, attack ads during the presidential campaign of 1992. These w ere called adwatches. The adwatches evaluated the content of political commercials for errors and deceptive and misleading claims. They did so, not simply by replaying the offending material and then offering c ommentary, but rather by interrupting the ad with commentary and repos itioning the ad on the screen. The purpose of this study was to evalua te the effects of the adwatch on people's attitudes toward the source of the ad, the target of the ad, the ad itself, and recall and interpr etation of the ad's content. A field experiment was conducted to evalu ate overall effects of the adwatch procedures on an ad generated by th e Buchanan campaign during the Michigan primary. The ad attacked the c redibility of George Bush and his advisers. Particular formats were al so tested. The adwatches affected attitudes toward the source of the a d and toward the perceived fairness and importance of the ad. Adwatche s did not affect attitudes toward the object of the attack ad nor inte rpretation of the ad's content. Education interacted with experimental condition such that interpretations of the ad by the least well-educa ted portion of the sample were adversely affected by the adwatches in contrast to the better educated.