One kind of truth in advertising
Advertising laws are aimed at protecting consumers by requiring advertisers to be truthful about their products and to be able to substantiate their claims. All businesses must comply with advertising and marketing laws, and failure to do so could result in costly lawsuits and civil penalties. So before you start an advertising campaign, it’s important you understand some basic rules.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the main federal agency that enforces advertising laws and regulations. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act:
- Advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive;
- Advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims; and
- Advertisements cannot be unfair.
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This means that if I were to start canning and marketing my mother’s spaghetti sauce, there are limits on what I can say to convince people to buy it instead of my competitors products. I could talk about taste, because that is based on a subjective judgement. I could say all kinds of good things about my ingredients of cooking process.
But I couldn’t claim It was because I use garlic grown in the ashy soils of Mount Vesuvius, if that wasn’t the case. More importantly, I couldn’t promote my sauce based purely on the deficiencies in my competitors’ products, particularly if my claims were not based on fact. I couldn’t claim those other sauces cause cancer, use rat meat instead of beef, or are owned by people with ties to organized crime if none of it was true.
Any yet in political campaigns few such requirements exist.
If the charges made in a campaign are reckless enough, one could be sued or prosecuted under libel or slander laws, but there is considerable time, effort and costs involved, and the bar on what constitutes those offenses is pretty high, and even more so in an election season. Obviously candidates seek to undermine the credibility of one another to some degree. It is an election, after all. Simply lying about your opponent is not enough.
But it goes too far when you get advertisements like this:
That’s a Democratic campaign ad from Illinois. I want liberals to take every race they are in, because that is my personal political tendency, but not this way. This ad tells me nothing about the candidate, it simply smears his opponent with vague charges which, according to Politifact.com, aredistortions of the facts at best. It’s unacceptable. We as voters don’t like them, but we have to means to stop them, so they keep coming.
Of course the Republicans are doing it to. For example, the Republican candidate in the same race has twisted facts in a claim that his opponent made loans to mobsters that caused the collapse of a bank.
There is another set of ads running in Congressional races all over the country demonizing incumbents for voting with Nancy Pelosi at least 90 percent of the time. How Nancy Pelosi became the symbol of evil I’ll never know, but conservatives tend to do that to strong liberal women. The ads are full of dark images and ominous effects.
Here’s one example:
FactCheck.org analyzes the claim and finds the number of votes Davis cast with Pelosi is just shy of 80%. That’s quite a difference.
The NRCC ad against Davis is one of several released in recent days that criticize Democratic incumbents. We found five ads that claimed the Democrat voted more than 90 percent of the time with Pelosi. Actually, none of them voted 90 percent or more of the time with the speaker.
A couple of things are happening. Voting with Nancy Pelosi is being used as a synonym for voting with one’s party when, as the article points out, it is not. The ads also pick and choose time frames in order to get the best number possible.
The arguments of the Republicans and their sympathizers are generally reaching more people because they have more money to spend on ads, thanks to last years Supreme Court decision revising campaign finance rules. In all honesty, however, I’d have considerably less of a problem with that if I felt they were using that treasure chest to fight honestly in the “marketplace of ideas.”
It’s not that I believe that elections should go to the highest bidder. That is a tragedy, and it is increasingly the case. But winning because you used your treasure chest to get your message out and to make people aware of who you are, or winning because you used facts to point out the deficiencies of your opponent as a potential leader or of the faults in the platform is infinitely preferable to what is happening now. Cowards are channeling their millions into shady third-party political groups that are using it to make shady, inaccurate, sometimes deliberately false claims.
No one ever has to take responsibility. The candidates themselves don’t have to say these vicious things, and even their parties and campaigns are somewhat insulated, because they have surrogates. It is a group with a patriotic name like the US Chamber of Commerce or Citizens United for Better Health Care that is paying for this irresponsible advertising and the wild claims it makes. But who are they? sometimes just a PO Box and an answering service. It only serves to obfuscate the truth.
So how do you you find it? The only thing I can tell you is to investigate all the claims you hear in political advertising. Politifact.com and Factcheck.org and even Snopes.com make it a lot easier. VoteSmart.org can really help!
I wish there were consequences for misrepresentation in politics just as there are in the commercial sector. Our political system has made sorting out truth from fiction a lot of work, much more than any of us wants to do, and definitely much more than most of us have time to do. How about a little truth in political advertising?
In the meantime, try the sites above and don’t trust the ads. Demand candidates that represent your interests, not just the one that delivers the best attack ads. If all else fails, and you can’t sort out the positions of your candidates from the sites, (because believe me, they don’t make it easy) try the Vote Easy Wizard!
Were it possible, I’d have a song start just as you read that last paragraph, John Lennon’s “Gimme Some Truth.” But since I don’t have the technology embedded in this blog to know when you reach the last paragraph, if you want to hear it, just click the play button.
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