More on Truth in Political Advertising

Reality for Men

One kind of truth in advertising

In the commercial sector there are legal requirements that mandate “truth in advertising.” General principles are outlined on Business.gov, the site of the US Small Business Administration.

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:
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If You Spend Enough Money, Will People Believe Your Lie?

"Perry pushed for a law that lets insurance companies raise homeowners’ rates without having to justify the increase." Back to Basics, --Wednesday, September 8th, 2010.

Spending by interest groups, so-called Political Action Committees and Unions most notably, is up well over 5 times what it was in the 2006 midterms, according to an article in New York Magazine.  Spending is up on both sides of the aisle, but these third-party groups are putting most of their money behind Republican candidates by a huge margin, approximately 7 to 1, according to The Washington Post!  This was all made possible by last years Supreme Court decision saying that limits on spending were essentially the same as limits on free speech.

I have a problem with this because I don’t think a pharmaceutical corporation should have a stronger voice than a network of cancer survivor groups just because they can spend more on campaigns, but I suppose outside spending isn’t all that different than spending by the candidates themselves.  Nothing stops a multimillionaire candidate from using his own funds to vastly outspend opponents on advertising.  In a sense this is buying the election, but legally it’s not seen that way.

What is disconcerting is the out and out dishonesty of the campaigns.  I am not naive.  Politics has always been a dirty game.  But in this election it seems that the fact that the backers of those PACs with the patriotic names can remain anonymous has emboldened them.  Politifact.com, a non-partisan service that evaluates the claims of political discourse, evaluated 31 claims made in the advertisments of these third party groups in the current campaigns throughout the country.  Only 5 were rated “mostly true” and two “true.”

Think about that for a minute.  31 claims were made in the political ads of third party organizations analyzed by Politifact.com.  On 16% of those were claims were based substantially on fact, on only 6% were essentially true.  All others were significant distortions of the facts or outright lies.

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Virginia’s Attorney General and the Universities

Colleges and Universities in the State

The University of Virginia said Monday that it would continue to fight state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II‘s efforts to obtain documents related to a climate scientist’s work, just hours after Cuccinelli reissued a civil subpoena for the papers.

The new Civil Investigative Demand revives a contentious fight between Cuccinelli (R), a vocal global warming skeptic, and Virginia’s flagship university over documents related to the research of Michael Mann, who worked at the university from 1999 to 2005. A judge blocked Cuccinelli’s first bid to obtain the documents.

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Mann, whose research concluded that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming, works at Penn State University.

Cuccinelli has been trying to force the public university, technically a client of his office, to turn over documents related to Mann’s work since April. Cuccinelli has said he wants to see the documents to determine whether Mann committed fraud as he sought public dollars for his work.  — The Washington Post, October 5, 2010

Third-Party Groups Taking Over the Election

The President has begun slamming campaign commercials paid for by funds from third-party independent groups that, thanks to Supreme Court decisions in January, are now able to spent unlimited amounts promoting candidates and agendas. Democrats are outraged about these groups because the GOP-leaning ones have spent $24.8 million on Senate and House ads from Aug. 1 to Sept. 20, but Democrat-leaning groups also spent $4.9 million according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group. Here’s the ABC News Report. The article is at this link.


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This year it is Liberals who are are upset, because Conservative groups are outspending them 5 to 1! I worry about that, too. But while I’d be more comfortable about the outcome if the ratio were inverted, it would still bother me. I don’t see how unidentified, undisclosed contributions are good for a democracy. If, as Supreme Court justices have argued, spending money is a form of speech, shouldn’t it be clear who is speaking?

FactChecking ‘The Pledge to America’

Get a load of that title! Click for text, with pictures.

FactCheck.org is the website of a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics for voters

by monitoring the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

They are a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and not related to any political party.  They simply check facts.  In these midterm elections, they are a good place to turn for the truth behind the spin in any given campaign.  This post, for example, shows that both the Republican and Democratic candidates for Senator in Nevada are making false claims about each other.

So what about the Pledge to America that Republican Party leaders recently made?

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Health Care Reform Provisions Take Effect Today

Key provisions of the new health care law that was ratified six months ago went into effect today.   Critics say they will raise the cost of insurance unbearably.  The White House acknowledges there will be increases, but they estimate premiums to go up by 1-2%.  Most independent estimates don’t expect huge huge increases.

Moreover, the benefits and protections of the reforms may be worth small premium increases to most people.  Some of them already went into effect yesterday!  There’s not been very much coverage, but what there has been has focused on these provisions.

  • Parents may keep their children on the family health insurance to age 26, if the child is not offered coverage through an employer.
  • Children can no longer be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions.
  • Lifetime limits on essential benefits like hospital stays are abolished.
  • Insurers must cover preventive services such as immunizations, mammograms and colonoscopies, without charging consumers deductibles, co-pays or co-insurance fees.
  • All of those provisions are valuable and important protections.

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    In Memory of Mohamed Arkoun

    Few of Arkoun's Books are available in translation, but this is on Amazon.

    Mohamed Arkoun, a great philosopher and scholar, particularly on the role of Islam in the development of Maghrebi society and on the relationship of Islam and the West, died Tuesday September 14 in Paris and was buried the following Friday, September 17 in Achouhada cemetery in Casablanca. He was 82 years old. In Robert Altman’s cinema adaptation of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, the angel of death whispers to a woman weeping over the discovery that a loved one has died peacefully, “The death of an old man is not a tragedy.”

    That struck me as fundamentally true. But I thought to myself that it doesn’t make it less painful to those close to him. And while it may not be a tragedy, it is certainly still a loss, especially when the man is a figure of the stature of Mohamed Arkoun. I remember reading his writing when researching my dissertation, and it returned to my mind in the weeks and months after 9-11. It comes to mind again now, as we see nasty rhetoric against heating up again in this country.
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    Academic Freedom Media Review, July 31-August 6

    Academic Freedom Media Review
    July 31 – August 6, 2010
    Compiled by Scholars at Risk

    The Scholars at Risk media review seeks to raise awareness about academic freedom issues in the news. Subscription information and archived media reviews are available here or at their site. The views and opinions expressed in these articles are not necessarily those of Scholars at Risk.

    U. of Miami President Halted at Israeli Airport
    The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/6

    Iran’s publish ‘at any cost’ mentality blamed for surge in academic fraud
    Hannah Fearn, Times Higher Education, 8/5

    I swear I am just doing my job
    Rebecca Attwood, Times Higher Education, 8/5

    Three Student Activists Appear in court
    The Students Solidarity Trust, The Zimbabwean, 8/5

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    Checking Facts on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster

    The April 20 explosion that started oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico has prompted a slew of claims and counterclaims about the disaster. What caused it, how it’s being handled, the history of drilling accidents in the area – all are subjects ripe for false or misleading statements by politicians and others.

    We keep track so you don’t have to. Some of the lowlights so far, in no particular order.
    * Some Republicans falsely claimed Obama was slowing the cleanup by not waiving the Jones Act, which actually doesn’t apply to the cleanup operations.
    * Obama said he issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf. Not quite. Much drilling continues.
    * A Republican governor keeps saying the spill is the first big blowout in the Gulf, failing to note a 1979 disaster that continued for 10 months, and numerous smaller blowouts.
    * A DNC ad claimed that a GOP lawmaker spoke for his party when he said BP deserves an apology. But that apology had already been rejected by other leading Republicans.
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    There are plenty more where those came from. See our “Analysis” section for a roundup of the oil-spill whoppers we’ve encountered.

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    Academic Freedom Media Review, July 17-23

    Academic Freedom Media Review
    July 17 – 23, 2010
    Compiled by Scholars at Risk

    Note: The Scholars at Risk media review seeks to raise awareness about academic freedom issues in the news. Subscription information and archived media reviews are available here or at this link. The views and opinions expressed in these articles are not necessarily those of Scholars at Risk.

    UC-Irvine Urged Not to Suspend Muslim Student Union /
    The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/23

    BP and Academic Freedom
    Cary Nelson, Inside Higher Education, 7/22

    Ultimatum to Illinois Over Catholic Studies Instructor
    Inside Higher Educatin, 7/21

    A Tougher Conflict Policy at Harvard Medical School
    Duff Wilson, The New York Times, 7/21

    What if College Tenure Dies?
    The New York Times, 7/21
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