Ad Not Very Transparent

I had a chance this weekend to see the new Liberal tv ad everyone is talking about and I have to agree it is somewhat misleading. I say misleading because the people featured in the ad are anything but average citizens.

In case you haven't seen it, ( I refer of course to my Canadian readers over at RiteTurnOnly) a voice-over introduces a number of average Canadians who discuss why they will vote Liberal in the upcoming election. The ad ends with the voice-over proclaiming "there are 30 million reasons to vote Liberal, what's yours?" or something to that effect. Of course I don't mean to imply that Liberal party members or supporters or activists etc aren't average citizens in the broad sense of the word but they are anything but average when used in the context of those ads. An analogy: Acme Motor Company interviews several average motorists who proudly declare why they think the cars produced by Acme are the best. Now of course Acme is under no obligation to reveal the true identities of the people appearing in their ad but wouldn't you question the validity of the claims if you discovered those people are actually Acme employees? I would. Would it matter if Acme simply used actors in the ad as opposed to their own employees? I think so. When Paul Martin goes on and on about transparency and then I see an ad like this it makes me wonder how serious he is.

Edit: for the benefit of the readership here at A Western Heart the people involved in this Liberal tv ad are all party members. More at the NDP website.

I don't know about 30 million reasons to vote Liberal but I can think of 199 reasons not to.

Tags:

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments containing Chinese characters will not be published as I do not understand them