(no subject)

[netmouse]

Does anyone besides me wish there was a rule that television broadcasters had to pull/cancel political advertising that was demonstrated to contain out-and-out lies?

I mean, somewhere in there where you get a broadcasting license, you agree to serve the public. Permitting deceptive advertising just because you've received your pieces of silver is not serving the public.

ETA: this post is in reaction to this ad, which as discussed here posits a lot of things unrelated to Prop 8 as an argument for it, as though it defends people in the state against things other than the state's recognition of the right of gay couples to get and be married. Further discussion here.

Comments

[sethb.livejournal.com]

Who gets to decide that something is a lie?

[nicegeek.livejournal.com]

Precisely. You'd need to have some government agency in charge of enforcing truth in broadcasting. Consider what the Bush administration would have done with that kind of authority.

[nicegeek.livejournal.com]

The root problems here are that:

• The truth is generally nuanced, and doesn't fit in a sound bite, but many Americans won't pay attention to anything longer.


• The public doesn't want to spend the time to check the facts, and doesn't sufficiently punish the liars.

One step toward improving the system would be for a site like FactCheck.org to offer a trademarked "Spin-free" logo for ads that are factually accurate. I suspect that a candidate who submitted their ads to that kind of inspection would gain some ethical high ground. If the public rewarded them for it, it could dramatically change the calculations of the political advisers who do these things.

[andrewfeland.livejournal.com]

The public doesn't want to spend the time to check the facts, and doesn't sufficiently punish the liars.

You hit the nail on the head there. Voters who don't want to do their homework and like to be spoon-fed someone else's version of the truth are destroying this country.

[mishamish.livejournal.com]

I suspect that a candidate who submitted their ads to that kind of inspection would gain some ethical high ground.

I'm more apt to suspect that if one candidate did and another didn't, it would take all of an hour for the "fact checker" authority to be painted as political and completely written off by the opposing side.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Presumably the courts, in the end; same as in a libel case.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

So, five years after the election, the courts would decide that some ads shouldn't be allowed to air any longer.