Film: 30 Second Democracy

Explores the disturbing relationship between political parties and the advertising industry during election campaigns. Using television advertising, techniques perfected to sell commercial products are applied to political candidates, turning elections into marketing exercises and voting into another consumer choice. Do we elect leaders or buy them? 30 Second Democracy is unique among explorations of this theme, providing a comparative history of political television advertising in the U.S., Britain and Canada looking at how each of these countries has taken widely differing approaches to regulating political advertising on television, with very different results. 51 min, 1996