Television political advertising has been criticized for focusing too much on candidates' image rather than on their issue positions. Yet, image advertising has been largely ignored by the press as a source for news stories. This study examined the effects of a proposed type of television adwatch story—one that critiqued political advertisements that focused on a candidate's image. Image adwatches produced less positive candidate evaluations than the control group, which saw no adwatches. This pattern did not hold for issue adwatches. Participants did not apply information from either the issue or image adwatch to ads that were different from those critiqued in the adwatches. Recall of the ad was lower for issue adwatches, but only when they critiqued a different ad. Participants did not penalize journalists for their image adwatch stories. Findings are discussed in an information processing perspective.
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