In the last month, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain has put out two undeniably dishonest campaign ads. The first, titled “Education,” claims that Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s one contribution to education legislation in the Senate was to support a bill that advocated “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarteners. Non-partisan, not for profit political watchdog Factcheck.org declared the ad “a factual failure.” In fact, Obama voted for (but didn’t officially sponsor) a bill that advocated enough sex education for kindergarteners to make them aware of the dangers of sexual molestation and predators.
McCain’s second ad, “Fact Check,” purports to quote Factcheck.org calling Obama’s attacks on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin “completely false” and “misleading.” Factcheck.org was, in fact, referring to ludicrous anonymous Internet attacks on Palin. Showing Alaskan wolves on the prowl, the ad in question also claims that Obama sent “a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers” to Alaska to “dig dirt” on Palin. The Obama campaign said this was “completely false” and that “no one from the Obama campaign, or the DNC, has been sent to Alaska.” John McCain thinks sly, less than honest campaign ads will help him win the election and he may be right, despite efforts by the news media to expose these falsehoods.
We know and accept, unfortunately, that political candidates, Democrat and Republican, bend and distort the truth regularly. We look to the news media to expose the lies and set the record straight. But with mountains of campaign cash to pay for slickly produced campaign ads and the air time to carry them, candidates can bombard many millions more voters with fictional claims than working journalists could ever hope to reach with the truth.
If a candidate lies in a speech or at a press conference, a healthy press should jump all over it, in which case it will be covered, scrutinized and criticized by commentators on the air and in print. Responsible news outlets would find out we were lied to and broadcast it. As a result, more people will hear about the lie than heard it in the first place. But when a campaign ad maliciously misleads, the news media just can’t reach all those afflicted by the misinformation; the damage seems to be irreversible. According to a Wisconsin Advertising Project press release, by mid-September McCain’s ads had run nearly 600 times in Detroit, Michigan, a key battleground state, with nearly two million reachable households. Do the math. News outlets just can’t compete with that kind of exposure.
Even if a Detroit voter saw one of McCain’s deceptive ads fact-checked on the local news, it might not matter. A study by John Bullock, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, found that correction doesn’t necessarily fix bad information. Bullock found that when shown an ad by an abortion rights group against then nominee for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, many Democrats still thought worse about Roberts than they had originally, even after they were told that the charges brought against Mr. Roberts were completely false.
When confronted about his misleading ads on ABC’S The View and MSNBC’s Morning Joe, John McCain shamelessly insisted they were factual. In his campaign, the Republican candidate has been religiously antagonizing the media and accusing them of bias toward Barack Obama. His supporters no doubt applaud his defense of his own self promotion along with his spurious attacks on his opponents. Well aware of their effectiveness, the candidates spend hundreds of millions on ads, spending months if not years before every election to raise the money for them.
What can be done to undercut campaign ad deception? Perhaps the fairest solution would be to ensure that a campaign ad never runs alone – a rival would be guaranteed equal airtime in the next slot. This way, instead of a platform for shameless self promotion and deception, campaign ads could become mini multimedia debates. Also, with the knowledge that an opponent will have a chance to view the ad and craft a response before it airs, a candidate might think twice before bombarding us with baloney.
