MTV: get out the vote campaign

By: Shauna Agan

While watching MTV tonight I saw a commercial where a bunch of young adults, including the members of Fallout Boy, were sitting around having conversations about the election. In this particular commercial, a young man was speaking about how many opportunities Barack Obama is providing for minorities and that this has never happened in a campaign before.

As I continued watching my show and more commercials came on, I saw four more MTV made political commercials. Two were repeats, but two were new commercials.

One of these commercials featured musical artist Pink. Pink was briefly explaining the need to voice your opinion and vote.

In the end of Pink’s commercial, she expressed that she had the right to her opinion just as Sarah Palin has the right to her opinion. To me, this insinuates that their opinions are different, and Pink is an Obama supporter.

The final commercial I saw was another group of young adults in a conversation about the election. While I cannot remember exactly what was said in this commercial, I do remember that the commercial supported Obama also.

These commercials do not specifically tell individuals to vote for Obama, but rather they promote the power of voting. However, every one of these commercials does mention support for Obama somewhere in them.

MTV has a lot of power and influence, especially within the community of young adults. Teenagers and young adults are the target audience for MTV.

By running these ads, MTV is campaigning for Obama and promoting his name to young voters. I do not have any problems with MTV running advertisements for Obama because MTV has a right to voicing the opinion of their company just as any other company has the right to voice their company’s opinions.

The problem I do have with these advertisements is that MTV has always been about getting out your vote no matter which candidate you vote for or which party you are in favor of. These commercials do promote individuals voting, but they also add towards the end of all of them that they are supporting Obama.

If MTV wants to openly endorse Obama, they should do that rather than running commercials that just insinuate they want Obama to win.

Furthermore, I believe that commercials promoting to get out and vote and voice your opinion should be separate from commercials supporting Obama. It is okay to have both, but MTV should keep them separate so it does not look like they are saying get out and vote for Obama.