Medium-Same Versus Medium-Different Inoculation Against Candidate and Political Stealth Group Sponsored Political Attack Advertising (Paperback)

The 2008 presidential campaign contextualized this study of soft-money sponsored political spot negative advertising, its content, its influence, inoculation's blanket of protection against it and print versus video media effects. The functional theory of campaign discourse (Benoit, 2006) guided a content analysis of over 300 televised presidential advertisements. Chi-square analyses showed that political stealth groups (PSGs, like 527 and 501c) were more negative and more personal than FEC-compliant groups, like candidates, political parties and PACs. Students (N = 354) at a small mid-western university participated in a three-phase experimental study examining the influence of extreme attack advertising (control, candidate sponsor, political stealth group sponsor), inoculation against negative advertising (control, generic, and candidate specific), media (print versus video) and partisanship (low versus high) on campaign-related attitudinal, emotional and behavioral outcomes. The inoculation process and the relative processes of video versus print-mediated influence were also examined. Various data analytic strategies (e.g., factorial ANOVA's, t-tests, regressions and mediation analyses) answered 20 multi-part hypotheses and 8 multi-part research questions. Results showed that video-mediated political attacks exercised influence through source factors; video-mediated generic inoculations worked against all political attacks; and print inoculation worked better against print attacks than video attacks. Results are discussed within the context of political campaigns, inoculation theory (McGuire, 1970; Pfau, 1997) and medium theory's (Meyrowitz, 1994) claim that media are epistemic (McLuhan, 1967).