[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed6vr4hjhmA
Starting today and through the weekend, Ohio citizens will experience something very different on their televisions: silence.
unPAC, a coalition devoted to getting money out of politics, has produced the first silent political ad. The idea is to give Ohioans 50 seconds of reprieve from the constant political attack ads that bombard the crucial swing state—especially the weekend before the election.
Ever since Citizens United, companies can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. GOOD teamed up with Ben & Jerry’s on this video, "Get the Dough Out of Politics," highlighting the growing, ridiculous amount of cash spent on political campaigns this election year: over $2 billion—making this the most expensive presidential campaign in the history of the world.
Roughly half of the "dough" is used to buy airtime for advertisements. This election year, over 900,000 ads have blared across American televisions—up 40 percent from the 2004 and 2008 elections—showing the current influence of Big Money in our democracy. TV stations in Washington, DC are even cutting into regular programming in order to run the ads paid for by Super PACs and other groups.
According to unPac cofounder Matt Palevsky, the silent political ad is a message sent to politicians, the media, and fellow Americans that “we won’t stand by idly while our democracy is bought.”
The ad will air in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio the weekend before the election on Fox News, MSNBC, NCC, and HLN.
Visit here to help unPAC buy more airtime for silence to get their message out.
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