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A Remedy for Negative Political Ads

By Paul Silver | Related entries in Elections

FactCheck.org analyzes political ads for accuracy:

This year, as in the 2004 campaign, a number of persons have asked us how candidates and other groups can get away with such deceitful advertising. The truth is that the law of libel is not a practical deterrent. There also is no federal “truth in political advertising” law on the books, nor is there likely to be such a law so long as the First Amendment stands. For a full discussion see “False Ads: There Oughtta Be A Law! Or – Maybe Not,” our Special Report from June 3, 2004. Our system of government leaves it to voters to sort out the truth from what they see and hear, with whatever help they can get from a free press.

Perhaps the solution lies in changing the geometry of the question. Instead of trying to regulate the content of ads, we use public funds (or funds from the Parties) to run a frequent public service message that corrects the inaccuracies of any recent ads – perhaps produced by the Factcheck.org folks. Since a candidate would not want to have the airwaves filled with objective criticism they would be inclined to stay as reasonable and civil as possible.


This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 and is filed under Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “A Remedy for Negative Political Ads”

  1. Deirdre Bannon Says:
    November 6th, 2006 at 6:24 pm

    Oooh – I like that idea. Nice….

  2. Justin Gardner Says:
    November 7th, 2006 at 12:47 am

    Yeah, I like this idea too. Independent watchdogs with no loyalties…intriguing…

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