Inaccurate Campaign Ads

A recent article written by Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times reveals a number of election ads in the current American Presidential race to be misleading. It is becoming an apparent tall tale campaign (by both Democrats and Republicans) leading most of the public to believe these phony facts. According to the one of the aides of a presidential candidate on these ads, "There's only so much you can do in a 30-second ad"...obviously a brainless reason. The question is, where is the democracy in this?

"Even people who don't think there is much information in these ads and say they don't learn anything from them tell us they believe factoids they could only have gotten from these ads, and they're wrong," said Brooks Jackson, director of Factcheck.org, an Annenberg Public Policy Center Web site that vets political advertisements for accuracy. "It's beyond subliminal — it's something else I haven't come up with a name for."
Several other commercials this year have been criticized as pushing past the facts when they could have indisputably conveyed similar points with less sensational-sounding claims.

For instance, one of Mr. Kerry's new commercials boasts that he provided ''a decisive vote'' for President Bill Clinton's 1993 economic plan, which, it maintains, ''created 20 million new jobs.'' The bill passed by a single vote in the Senate, giving anybody who voted for it a claim to have provided a decisive vote. But at the time, it was the last-minute support of Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, that was considered decisive. And even economists who credit the plan with playing a significant role in the 1990's boom say Mr. Kerry's spot goes too far.

''To say that any one economic package was responsible for all of the stuff going on in the 90's is kind of ridiculous,'' said L. Douglas Lee, president of Economics From Washington, an economic policy analysis firm. Still, Mr. Lee said, the 1993 package was an important factor in the boom.

Asked why the spot did not simply say that Mr. Kerry voted for a package credited with helping to set the conditions for the boom, Michael Meehan, a Kerry spokesman, said: ''That's why we have elections. People get to decide. We said it created 20 million jobs. If people don't believe that, they should vote for someone else.''

Aides on both sides said privately that it was hard to fit all the nuance of complex policies into a vehicle designed to convey thoughts no more complex than ''Tastes Great, Less Filling.''

''There's only so much you can do in a 30-second ad,'' said an aide to Mr. Kerry, making a point that was echoed by a senior strategist for the Bush campaign.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, does not accept that. ''When they could make the 30-second ad accurate and they don't, you've got to believe that they're intentionally misleading you,'' she said.

Kenneth M. Goldstein, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, said that it was to be expected that the campaigns would take liberties, and that with both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush flush with cash, there was plenty of time for them to answer each other's claims.

''Politics is about putting your best foot forward and putting the other person in the worst light,'' Mr. Goldstein said. ''Do we expect someone who's advertising to say, 'You know, I really don't want to put this person's record in the worst light because that's not fair'?''

In the end, Mr. Jackson of Factcheck.org said, it appears that a new rule requiring candidates to appear in their own advertisements and express approval has not reduced the number of misleading claims. All that can be done, he said, is to continue to vet commercials for accuracy and try to set the record straight as publicly as possible. That, he said, can be a thankless task:

''I've had consultants tell me, 'Your ad watch runs once, my ad runs many times; who's going to win?'''