[For more information on the subject of the following essay, please see the brief interview I conducted yesterday with Brooks Jackson — the director of FactCheck.org; co-author of a new book, unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation; and a former journalist whose 34-year career included stints with the AP, Wall Street Journal, and CNN.]
In roughly eight short months, the various Presidential campaigns will start their advertising assault on primary election voters — a prospect that should cause anyone who still remembers the sulfuric stench of the last campaign season to shudder.
Few officials from either major party rush to challenge questionable campaign ads and their reluctance may be rooted in a certain sense of loyalty to one of the great traditions of U.S. politics: reputation-smattering paintball, using bullets forged from out-of-context and largely unsupportable shards of reality.
Consider the 2006 U.S. Senate contest in Missouri, between Jim Talent and Claire McCaskill. Across multiple TV spots, Talent’s campaign attributed negative remarks about McCaskill to the state’s two major newspapers, the Kansas City Star and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania called the Talent campaign’s bluff at FactCheck.org. The Star attributions were sourced to McCaskill critics, not to Star journalists. Meanwhile, the Post-Dispatch attribution was derived from one of that newspaper’s editorials, which on balance praised McCaskill and point-blank endorsed her candidacy for Missouri Governor two years prior.
Of course, Republican candidates weren’t the only purveyors of half-truths in 2006. In the U.S. Senate contest in Tennessee between Bob Corker and Harold Ford, a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spot (one of the tamer ads in the larger contest) claimed that Corker “admits there have been years when he paid no taxes at all” and suggested he had something to hide. Once again, FacCheck.org cried foul: ” … there’s no evidence that Corker illegally evaded taxes, cut any ethical corners or paid one dime less than he owed.”
Multiple campaign insiders and political pundits have commented on the motives for this behavior and, in aggregate, their perspective boils down to, “It wins elections.” But despite the millions spent on negative and misleading ads against their opponents, and despite those who believe such ads help win elections, both Talent and Ford lost their bids for office. Was it because their campaign ads (and those run on their behalf) were so incredibly transparent that voters dismissed them? Or were their opponents simply more effective with their own negative ads?
In the end, the operative question may not be “What makes political advertising work or fail?” but “What can be done to clean it up before the 2008 season arrives and the mudslinging (or paintballing) starts anew?”
Of the various approaches, the most dramatic would be to ban or severely restrict political advertising — but those efforts are generally frowned upon, as I quickly learned late last year when I made just such a proposal to TMV and Central Sanity readers. I’m now revisiting that topic (and more) in this extended essay, complete with the aforementioned reader perspectives plus the benefit of some additional research. (Anyone pressed for time may want to bookmark this post and return to it later.)
When contemplating political ad bans or restrictions, there is first an economic argument to consider, namely, the revenue media outlets would lose as a result of any such action — a chilling prospect, especially for traditional media, which are already fighting the migration of ad dollars to their new media counterparts, including cable TV networks and various Web 1.0 and 2.0 sites.
In “Ad Costs Fuel Need for Campaign Dollars“ an article from the Fall 2000 edition of Capital Eye, the newsletter of The Center for Responsive Politics, author Joel Bleifuss wrote: “The investment house PaineWebber predicted in August that political advertising for local television stations could reach $1 billion this year.” Moderate inflation alone, averaging 2% per year, would add more than $170 million to that figure by 2008. Those figures represent serious cash to the bottom line of traditional media organizations, which still (even in their newly compromised position vs. new media) represent powerful voices in Washington.
Beyond economics, there’s another intuitive and potentially more compelling argument for opposing ad restrictions, namely, our beloved free speech and its protected position in the Constitution.
Thirty-plus years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court relied on that argument in the opinions it handed down in the 1971 Monitor Patriot Co. v. Roy and 1976 Buckley v. Valeo cases.
In the Monitor case, the Court was unanimous: “It can hardly be doubted that the constitutional guarantee [of free speech] has its fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office.”
In the Buckley case, the Court’s decision focused on campaign spending limits, not advertising per se, though it is often difficult to separate the two. In the aforementioned Capital Eye article, we find that, “Media expenditures are the single largest budget item for all campaigns, accounting for more than half of spending in competitive races. According to Federal Election Commission reports, the Gore and Bush campaigns spent 46 percent of their budgets on media costs between October 1999 and March 2000.”
Queried for more recent data, a Center for Responsive Politics spokesperson said their records were not sufficiently updated for 2004 and 2006. He referred me, instead, to the Arlington, Va.-based Campaign Media Analysis Group or CMAG, which bills itself as “the leading provider of data and analysis for political, public affairs and issue advocacy advertising.” Evan Tracey, CMAG’s chief operating officer said, “While every campaign is different, it’s a pretty good rule of thumb that approximately 70 percent of what’s raised today by political campaigns goes to some form of advertising.”
Understanding this symbiosis (between campaign finance and advertising) is central to understanding how Buckley protects both. According to a summary of the Buckley opinion offered by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Court found that the expenditure ceiling imposed “direct and substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech and invalidated three expenditure limitations as violations of the First Amendment.”
Net: If the Supreme Court requires that we tread lightly on spending limits to avoid crossing the First Amendment, we should expect similar results on any efforts to restrict the content of campaign advertising.
Granted, the Buckley opinion has been criticized in multiple circles, including contemporary groups that are working for campaign finance reform under the auspices of the Public Campaign Action Fund. Their fundamental gripe, as explained by Public Campaign executive director Nick Nyhart in an interview with me last summer: The Buckley opinion equates free speech with money and suggests that those with more money have a right to more speech. Regardless, three decades later, the Buckley opinion not only stands, it was reinforced in a follow-up ruling last year (Randall v. Sorrell, June 2006), which up-ended a Vermont law passed when Howard Dean was governor of that state.
Of course, there’s more to the free speech argument than academic concerns or Supreme Court opinions. For BusinessWeek, CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo interviewed Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess guru and current chair of the United Civil Front, a group that’s working to restore Russia’s still-struggling democracy. In that interview — published last December and pegged to the assassination of former KGB’er Alexander Litvinenko — Kasparov noted that, “All major [business] activities in Russia depend on the approval of a certain group in government. [And a new law] bans criticism of the governing body. Can you imagine an election when you are not allowed to criticize your opponent? If you want change in Russia, you can’t discuss it. And if you discuss it, you are considered an extremist.” In other words, Kasparov sees the right to criticize — to go negative on an opponent — as central to a healthy democracy.
Similarly, a commenter on my original TMV ad-ban post (screen name “steve sturm”) wrote that “removing the ability of a challenger to say bad things about an incumbent makes as much sense as telling a supervisor trying to replace a poor performer that they can’t cite examples of the poor performance during the performance review.”
Indirectly, both Kasparov’s and steve sturm’s comments highlight an important distinction that, so far, we’ve glossed over, namely, the distinction between negative ads (which could be viewed as necessary to democracy) and misleading ads (which could undercut democracy).
In turn, this distinction suggests that, rather than restricting campaign ads, we should attempt to police them better, using the election equivalent of commercial truth-in-advertising laws. That’s a nice but ultimately naive concept.
Unlike commercial advertising — where the battle for market share never stops and there are generally longer periods of time in which to correct past wrongs — political advertising surges in a finite window and goes away when the polls close every two years, with the most intense (and often the most desperate and deceptive) ads running in a two- to six-week window before election day. By the time the forces of law-and-order had an opportunity to investigate and try allegations of false or misleading ads, the issues would likely be moot, the victorious candidates already in office, and the losers left to wage drawn-out court battles and appeals. That’s probably not the best way to run a democracy, as the nation learned painfully after the 2000 Presidential election.
Another category of possible solutions stem from the dual understanding that (a) advertising is a monologue: the communication is carefully scripted and controlled, flowing one way from purveyor to receiver, with no immediate challenge or response; and (b) the best cure for a monologue may be increasing the level of dialogue surrounding it, including live discussions and debates, where candidates and issue advocates have an opportunity to challenge each other’s claims in real time.
In his book, Delusional Democracy, published last year, author Joel Hirschhorn discussed the efforts of the Alliance for Better Campaigns to pass a federal law requiring TV stations to increase the free air time they give to candidates to talk substantively about issues. In support of such a law, Hirschhorn claims that, “A 2002 poll found that 73 percent of the public supports free airtime to candidates to discuss issues,” and that, “In 2000, just 20 percent of gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional debates held were aired by a network-affiliated local TV station.”
To add color to Hirschhorn’s argument, we need go no further than last year’s mid-terms and the previously noted McCaskill-Talent race in Missouri. During that contest, KMBC, the ABC television affiliate in Kansas City, Mo., was roundly criticized for its decision to delay the airing of a McCaskill-Talent debate, because station management din’t want to interrupt an episode of “Dancing with the Stars.” It’s difficult to argue with the soundness of that decision from a business standpoint: Many viewers would rather watch Emmitt Smith cut a rug than understand where U.S. Senate candidates stand on the issues. On the other hand, broadcast TV has always had a unique business model that’s established on a balancing act: The government provides broadcasters free access to the public spectrum in return for them “serving the public interest” — which holds true whether or not the public wants its interests served.
Commenters on my TMV ad-ban post offered two other suggestions that generally fit in this same category of encouraging dialogue in order to mitigate the more onerous examples of political monologue.
The first came from Paul Silver, also a contributing writer at TMV. Paul suggested we consider a “requirement that you can say anything you want about your opponent or his party as long as you allow equal time and space in your ad for a rebuttal.” In other words, if a campaign takes half of a 60-second spot to level a charge against an opponent, the opponent receives the other half of the same ad to rebut the charge. This concept would probably earn screams of protest from virtually every candidate running for office, but as Mr. Silver noted, the requirement could also make campaign ads more “useful” to the voter and misleading ads “a lot less frequent.”
The second suggestion of this ilk came from a commenter (screen name “Kim Ritter”) who encouraged us to respect the expanding ability of Internet movements to identify, dissect, and expose un-truths and half-truths, in real time, as they are parlayed. She also suggested that the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org might be a cornerstone for such movements, coupled with public petitions of voters who pledge to “not vote for candidates that willingly use false advertising.”
Of course, in modern elections, where voters are often saddled with only two choices, the effectiveness of such petitions could be severely limited if both candidates engaged in false advertising — a limitation that will only be lifted when the efforts of groups like the Committee for a Unified Independent Party and Unity ’08 make legitimate the campaigns of third- and possibly fourth-party candidates.
Those issues notwithstanding, the heart of Kim Ritter’s suggestion — using online dialogue to help set the record straight — resonated with the observations offered by other commenters at both TMV and Central Sanity.
One of them (screen name “Marlowecan”) suggested that “Public standards — reinforced by bipartisan criticism — might work better than laws.” Similarly, a commenter with screen name “kathy” wrote: “I agree advertising is not necessarily adding much to the political climate, yet, with so many people under 30 turning away from television and getting information from alternative sources like the internet, I have some hope. Perhaps it would be better to encourage internet dialogue to grow and continue to drown out TV monologue than using the blunt force of the law.”
Unlike proposals for restricting or policing political ads, the populist approach described above relies on and respects the oft-maligned intelligence of U.S. voters.
Last December, Dave Johnson and James Boyce, contributors to The Huffington Post, bemoaned the “smear” campaigns of the GOP against opposing-party candidates, writing: “This is what the machine does to Democratic and Progressive leaders. It smears, and attacks and destroys them. It leaves millions of Americans with an uneasy feeling about John Kerry or Hillary Clinton, a bad taste in the mouth, “I don’t know. I just don’t like him.” It’s emotional. It’s not rational. But it is very, very real. Those powerful negative stereotypes were carefully created by the use of brilliant marketing, coordinated messaging, virtually unlimited budgets and a complete lack of morals.”
Translation: “Voters are a homogeneous group of mindless puppets whose choices can be manipulated with enough sophistication and money.” Wrong. In 2006, as we’ve already noted, a majority of voters in Missouri, Tennessee, and elsewhere demonstrated that they are not puppets; that, in aggregate, they can see through the smear machines and make judgments that transcend what misleading ads tell them to believe.
These real-world outcomes suggest populist movements to encourage dialogue — on and off the Internet, with or without the benefit of intervening regulation — are already taking root and mitigating the effectiveness of misleading ads. Or, as another blog commenter (screen name “DosPeros”) wrote: “I believe speech promotes speech, end of story, that there is not a finite amount of speech and that we have to pick and [choose] the type we want.”
This down-in-the-trenches, power-to-the-people method may not work swiftly, surely, or orderly enough to suit every ad-disgusted voter. Furthermore, we know from experience that politicians and their handlers can be remarkably deaf to the will of the people, even when we scream. But in a society that prides itself on wide-open political debate, the populist approach to campaign advertising reform may be the most viable approach of all. Or, as Bill Moyers wrote regarding the new book by FactCheck.org’Brooks Jackson and Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson: “[They] equip us to be our own truth squad, and that just might be the salvation of democracy.”