I'd have preferred seeing the actual ads rather than have them reformatted and butchered into a modern format, which makes the whole argument lose credibility.
The actual ads would have just been words on a piece of paper, which would appear quaint & not terribly insulting to modern eyes. This reformat does an excellent job of giving the attack ads the immediacy and bite that contemporaries of the ads would have felt.
I think the argument is more "It's as bad as it's been since 1800, so we shouldn't treat negative political ads as historically unprecedented signs of our country's impending demise."