We re doing a better job talking about why the candidates are running particular ads. As my friend David Broder said a long time ago, we could spend a lot of time using all kinds of campaign advertisements to explore the very issues of concern to the voters that we say we want to explore in our coverage. Take the ads in New Hampshire right now on health care that Gore and Bradley are running, particularly Gore in this case. The actual content of the Gore ad is pretty anodyne and you could analyze it and say, Well, he s trimming here, or he s not trimming here. But you could use that advertisement to talk about a lot of fundamental issues related to health care.
Advertising is something that viewers understand.
I think advertising creates some real opportunities to create interest in the campaign. Up to now, advertising has tended to create disinterest in the campaign people kind of shut it off but precisely because advertising is visual, precisely because the average person thinks, quite legitimately, that because he or she is bombarded with hundreds of these things every day, they understand them. I think advertising can be used as a route backwards into issues and into the substance of things that we want to talk about.