Political Advertising and Propaganda Within Spiral of Silence-Agenda Setting Theory

Political communication is an interactive process by which politicians transmit information and political discourse to voters and receive feedback through media. This communication process is a two way process of communication between politicians and voters by which, on the one hand, politicians transmit their thoughts and wills to voters, and on the other hand voters communicate their opinions to politicians, after interpreting, in different ways, the messages that they received. The key objective of political communication is to persuade or influence and cause voters, who are the target audience, to vote for a particular party by convincing them. In order to ensure the smooth operation of political communication processes it is essential that the parliament, government, political parties, non-governmental organizations, environmentalist groups and pressure groups also actually take part in this process The decisive and transformative power of mass media and advertising phenomenon on the political systems has grown to become more and more influential in the recent years. The use of information considerably increases in line with the increase in the use of propaganda. No doubL this information age has turned the world into ＂a universal village＂. On the one hand, the concentration in media and on the other hand rapid developments in Internet technologies expose societies to the bombardment of messages. Being exposed to or bombarded by numerous varieties of messages in their daily lives lead to the creation of variabilities and instabilities in individual＇s behaviors. Accordingly, political organizations while trying to convey messages to masses through political communication and advertising have to deliver systematic, comprehensible and influential messages by taking the advantage of visualization as much as possible.

Shifting Goal Posts： The Interplay Between Political Advertisements and Editorial Slants in Newspapers During Elections

Advertising revenue is generally regarded as the lifeblood of the mass media since it largely contributes to the financial fortunes of both commercial and so-called public media houses. There is a consensus among political economy scholars that gives advertisers power over media content. It has also been argued that advertisers usually do not associate with ideological enemies. This research therefore sought to find out whether political advertisements especially, during election time, influence media content and whether political advertisers do not associate with media houses they are not ideologically compatible with. During election times, political parties also become big advertisers and newspapers together with broadcasting media compete to get advertisements from political parties so as to boost their financial fortunes. The research focused on the March 29, 2008 Zimbabwe harmonised elections with Network Guardian News a Kwekwe based privately owned community newspaper being used as a case study. This study utilised critical discourse analysis on purposively selected newspaper stories published during the period under study; while in-depth unstructured interviews with editors, reporters from the newspaper and politicians were also conducted to gather information. The findings revealed that in spite of the pro-ZANU-PF Network Guardian News newspaper carrying both MDc and ZANU-PF advertisements, its editorial stance remained hostile to the MDC-T party.