During the 1972 presidential election campaign, both Senator McGovern and President Nixon used the longer, documentary-type, paid announcements of five-, fifteen-, or thirty-minutes in length. Critics asserted that the shorter spots did not allow enough time for the voters to learn substantive information about the candidates. A telephone survey of 743 voters in central California, conducted the weekend before the election, however, revealed that the new media strategies utilized by both candidates did not impart adequate information to the public. This lends credence to the idea that the media strategy itself is not the critical variable; instead, the content of the message is still most important, no matter how it is presented. Longer commercials seem to offer little benefit to the voters in terms of additional information on which to make their political choices. (EE)