Falsehoods Fly Fast and Furious in Political Ads

It's a striking claim: Alaska Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller will "destroy a third of Alaska's economy" if he gets elected by erasing "our fair share of federal dollars."

And like many political ads, it carries with it only the faintest whiff of the truth. While Miller does support less federal spending in Alaska and elsewhere, the ads' claims go "way beyond what the facts support," as FactCheck.org reports.

And therein lies the trick of much of the political advertising you're seeing on television these days: Admakers craft spots by "taking a small germ of truth and twisting it" for maximum political impact, as PolitiFact.com's Bill Adair puts it. (Here's one good example.) By the time the commercial airs, viewers get fed the striking claims, but not the dubious connections and unsupported logical jumps it took to reach them.

Critical Contests: Interactive Map with CBS News' Race Ratings

The flood of political advertising on television these days makes it virtually impossible for news organizations or independent groups to come up with a comprehensive database of which ads do or do not reflect the truth. But two men at the forefront of the effort to bring accountability to political advertising - PolitiFact.com's Adair and FactCheck.org's Brooks Jackson - say there are distortions from both sides that regularly pop up across the country. The websites overseen by Adair and Jackson have rated hundreds of ads for their truthfulness in the 2010 campaign cycle.

"We tend to see certain claims over and over again," says Jackson. Asked for an example, both he and Adair pointed to a charge by Republicans that Democrats want to cut Medicare benefits or "gut" the program.

That, they say, is a serious exaggeration. The claim is usually tied to the health care overhaul legislation, and while that legislation does reduce the future growth of payments to hospitals and the Medicare Advantage program, it does not cut core Medicare benefits.

Republicans and their supporters are far from alone in making dubious claims. For the most part, Adair says, claims by Democrats and their backers that a Republican candidate wants to privatize Social Security rate as "barely true" on the PolitiFact ratings scale, which classifies ads at six different levels, ranging from "true" to "pants on fire."

And Jackson says that anytime a Republican "has uttered even a noncommittal remark about this FairTax proposal, they get an ad saying they are going to slap a 23 percent tax upon everything you buy." That claim carries the implication that the FairTax would be assessed on top of the taxes people already pay - when in fact it is an alternative to federal income taxes.

Both men say they have not found patterns suggesting that one party or the other is more prone to distortion. But there has been one pattern that they both identify: Outside groups, which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence elections this year (largely on behalf of Republicans), are most likely to stretch or ignore the truth on their advertising. These groups, which have exploded in size and influence in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, are often funded by donors whose identities are not revealed to the public.

"The records for these outside groups is really dismal," says Adair. "Overwhelmingly they are exaggerating and distorting with their ads." Of the 31 claims in outside groups' ads that PolitiFact has checked out, just five were been found to be true.

One of the worst offenders has been American Crossroads and its arm Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-affiliated groups spending tens of millions of dollars to help Republican candidates in the midterm elections. As FactCheck.org detailed here, the groups have run misleading or false ads against candidates in Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, Nevada, Missouri and New Hampshire.

Candidates have little recourse when it comes to addressing less-than-truthful ads. The First Amendment's free speech requirements give politicians "a legal right to lie to you just about as much as they can get away with," as Jackson puts it. And a federal truth-in-political advertising law would be difficult to enforce - there is enough ambiguity in political ads to make it very difficult to reduce them to "true" or "false," and the potential punishment for running a "false" ad is an open question.

There is always the option of suing for libel, as Barry Goldwater did after a magazine labeled him emotionally unstable and worse - but libel is difficult to prove and, more importantly, an election would likely be over by the time a case was resolved. Since a court isn't going to overturn an election, any victory from such a suit would be moral and little more.

Hot Ads: The Best Ads of the Week

See the Ads and Vote for Your Favorite!

That leaves it to the media and independent groups to inform the public about which ads are not telling people the truth. "My job is not to get candidates to stop making falsehoods, nor is it to persuade voters," says Adair. "My job is to give voters the information they need." But since many ads never get fact checked - and most of us don't bother to go online to read up on the small percentage that do - misinformation ends up influencing voters, particularly when they are hit with it in ads over and over again.

"I'm sure that a lot of it is believed," says Jackson. "People get upset when we challenge some of these things. And people want to believe these ads. If you're a strong partisan you don't want to hear that what your guy is saying is factually incorrect."

Neither Adair or Jackson would say whether the problem is worse that it has been in the past -- though the record-breaking levels of television advertising this campaign cycle has meant more ads, and with them, presumably, more distortions. (Quips Jackson, on his inability to measure the percentage of falsehoods compared to past years: "At this point it's like drinking from a fire hose.")

What they can tell you is that a vote based on an uncritical acceptance of claims in campaign ads is probably going to be less than informed.

"Any voter who assumes a political TV ad is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is making a very risky assumption," says Jackson. "And they might well cast a vote that is based on completely wrong information. Because there is a lot of completely wrong information out there."

---

Brian Montopoli is a political reporter for CBSNews.com. You can read more of his posts here. Follow Hotsheet on Facebook and Twitter.

[ETSEN]

Companies are not PEOPLE. If they want to go back to 1773 fine, there were no laws that gave companies the right to unduly influence the elections with enormous amounts of cash. One person, one vote. companies couldn't hide behind limited liability. If they committed illegal acts the owners where held accountable. A few rich CEO's are getting to spend investor money to gain control of our government. The tyrants are not the democrats, they are the Multinationals who send jobs overseas and fight to lower our wages and prevent us from having health care. Wake UP! VOTE!

[liberalme]

What we're voting for in 2 weeks are hand picked by each party--we HAVE to learn from this and choose who WE want next election!

[ETSEN]

The main stream media is in this as well. Gone are the reporters like Woodward and Bernstein. They are a business and they know which side the bread is buttered. I have looked at all the major media web sites and the reporting about the issue of "Huge" Quantities of corporate money being dump into GOP campaigns is largely ignored. Democracy requires three things: Informed and involved Electorate. Representative and truthful politicians and a questioning and impartial media. We sorely lack all the above.

[rightbehind]

What people should really be concerned about is the amount of foreign money from China and India pouring into republican campaigns from the chamber of commerce. Our founding fathers warned bout this and considered it treason.

[liberalme]

This is nothing new---Both parties in every state PICK the person who can bring in the most money for that party and probably less than 1% are qualified.-----------------------------------------
They hand pick the candidates then tell us it's our fault for not voting for the right one------We voters are at the mercy of the democratic and republican parties---the tea party is disgusting, we need to JOIN together as a Nation and start picking our own candidates----starting now for the next election---voters in every state need to agree on someone to "write in"--we have control, we just need to use it smarter than the dems and repubs.

[oldbasicgal]

Just read this article - Falsehoods Flying Fast and Furious in Political Ads. I'm wondering....just how much of this article is fact, and how much of it is fiction? What CAN Americans believe?

[noloyalisti]

If the Republican Tea Bag Party think that it is bad with the government in control, just wait and see what happens when private enterprise takes over.

Oh wait, we already have that. And as you can see, it's not pretty.

[MooseReiver]

Don't forget that ads are crafted by advisors and advertising "experts." Politicians are merely led around by their egos. What we need are statesmen -- who do the leading. I will not vote for anyone who participates in a smear campaign or brags about their political experience.

[pragmatist1]

The truly informed will hear both sides, research, challenge, question and then pragmatically formulate their own opinion and move forward from there. It is ridiculous for an individual to only believe one side is being representative of the issues or facts. Things get twisted and re-interpreted. Only saps fall for that approach. Then, sadly there are many saps who prefer others doing the thinking for them. It's easier that way.

[Birdman04]

Since when did the truth or honesty actually mean a "hill of beans" to a politician seeking office? They are all worthless fruitcakes once they get in office no matter which side of the pasture they graze on.

[OnTheRoad01]

The one lie that really makes me sick is the one where the politician says "I'm in this election for YOU"!