Facts Facts Facts!

FactCheck.org Director Brooks Jackson.
Photo courtesy of FactCheck.org

FactCheck.org Director Brooks Jackson Speaks Out

The moment Vice President Dick Cheney mentioned FactCheck.org, during the Vice Presidential debate on October 5, everything changed. Even though he incorrectly gave out the name as "FactCheck.com," viewers managed to find the site, a project of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Political Policy Center. Almost instantly, FactCheck.org was bombarded by over 100 hits per second, says Brooks Jackson, director of the nonpartisan Anneberg Political Fact Check organization responsible for the site. In the week following the first presidential debate, on September 30, the site's daily average hit count--29,000--doubled. Cheney's remarks prompted a total of over 368,000 web users to flood the site in the hours following the debate. No one was more astonished by the site's sudden popularity than Jackson. FactCheck.org has since maintained phenomenal popularity among political analysts and the general public alike, proving that the site's success "may imply a greater need for fact-checking outside of corporate media," says Jackson.
Jackson attributes what he believes are the inadequacies of the mainstream media's fact-checking to journalists' limited amount of time, as well as the media's tendency to use what Jackson calls a "paint-by-numbers formula," which places the factually inaccurate comments made in campaign ads, political debates, or in interviews with political officials on the backburner. When the media does in fact comment on politicians' misinformation or disinformation, says Jackson, such fact-checks have traditionally been buried somewhere in the third or fourth paragraph of an article hidden in the middle of a paper. Jackson, a seasoned political journalist, helped create FactCheck.org with the hope of changing such journalistic practices.
Originally, he and the project's co-director, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, had imagined FactCheck.org would be "mostly a service to news organizations...small news organizations," who traditionally lack the human and financial resources for adequate fact-checking, says Jackson. Jackson, who has reported on national politics for 34 years, racking up bylines in the Associate Press and The Wall Street Journal, is accustomed to the high demands placed on reporters. Since the 1992 Presidential Election, when he began investigating questionable political statements and advertisements for CNN, Jackson has been at the forefront of political fact-checking.
As a result of his extensive history in political reporting, Jackson has thoroughly explored the responsibilities of both the press and public when it comes to fact-checking. In his article "False Ads: There Oughtta Be a Law! Or, Maybe Not," published on FactCheck.org, Jackson notes a "fact that may surprise you: candidates have a legal right to lie to voters just about as much as they want." It may sound shocking, reports Jackson, but "people have more consumer protection for soap or beer [advertisements] than for candidates running for office." According to Jackson, "consumers have been protected for decades from false ads for commerical products," while truth-in-advertising laws for political commercials do not exist. The Federal Communications Act (Title 47, Sec. 315) allows "any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station;" however, even if broadcasters believe an ad to be misleading or offensive, "that such licensee shall have no power of censorship over the material broadcast." He does not foresee a solution in the near future, considering that the protection of free speech, offered by the First Amendment, is "tricky," and censoring false political ads or accusations "hasn't been done affectively anywhere." However, Jackson does take comfort from the message that his investigations have sent to the media and the news-consuming public: "in a free and open society, responsibility rests on the voters and the news media to sort out what is true and what is not." As Jackson writes in the article cited above

Nobody said Democracy was supposed to be easy. It is of course the job of news organizations to assist; that's why the First Amendment guarantees a free press as well as free speech. We at FactCheck.org try hard to help. But on Election Day, it's up to [the voter].

Jackson believes that the overwhelmingly positive and prolific response to FactCheck.org is "a message for mainstream media." In Jackson's opinion, " a lot of people are looking for some kind of neutral source to sort out the bewildering claims candidates make," and that, he implies, is exactly what FactCheck.org has become.
In response to the worried hope, expressed by the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk, that "fact-checking does not die as fast as it was born," Jackson assures news consumers that FactCheck.org will continue indefinitely, thanks to continued funding by the Annenberg Political Policy Center. Following the 2004 Presidential Election, FactCheck.org will move on to "report on the major factual claims being made from Washington through the remainder of 2004, and into 2005 and beyond." One of the only changes to the site, hopes Jackson, will be a "Letter to the Editors Page," in order to offer FactCheck.org visitors a chance to publicly voice their opinions of the work being done on the site.
According to Jackson, the 2004 Presidential Election, where "vastly more money and an unusual volume of ads" proliferated, is distinctly different from other races in three ways: The increase in allotted personal donations to candidates (a raise from $1,000 to $2,000), which McCain-Feingold legislation changed; the use of the Internet as a fundraising device; and what Jackson wryly calls American's intense feeling that the "earth will collapse into a black hole if the other candidate is reelected." Thus, in a historically tense political climate, FactCheck.org has had its work cut out for it. As stated in an October 25 Washington Post editorial, FactCheck.org "may not have kept the political debate honest," but, at the very least, it was successful in helping to raise the collective political consciousness of an exceptionally polarized America.

Storm of Ads Continues to Hit Swing-States As Campaigns Are Re-Focused

Only three weeks are left until election day, and President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry's campaigns, as well as their supporters, are feeling the pressure. According to an Associated Press article, "Campaign Ad War Focused on 14 States,", featured on Salon.com, both Bush's campaign and Kerry's campaign have narrowed the TV ad playing field to include solely swing-states. As the AP article highlights, the Democratic Party has altogether stopped advertising in Missouri, where polls indicate strong support for Bush, and in North Carolina, where a history of conservatism has overshadowed the fact that the state's own Senator is running as Kerry's Vice President. Likewise, Bush's camp has reduced the number of ads it is showing in Washington State, which went to Democrat Al Gore in the 2002 Presidential Election, to next to nothing. Thus, fourteen swing-states, including Florida, Ohio, New Mexico and Nevada, remain targets for campaign ads from both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as the interest groups that support them.
While both Bush and Kerry's campaigns are narrowing their focuses on just over a dozen swing-states, the groups' target audiences remain unique. As Taegan Goddard notes in an October 12 posting on his liberal leaning blog, Political Wire, Kerry's camp is hoping to reach undecided, middle-class viewers, while Bush's supporters are looking to its "party's faithful" conservatives. According to writer Nick Anderson of the LA Times in his October 12 article, Bush has spent far greater amounts of money on TV ads for national cable channels, whereas Kerry has funded more TV ads for local networks in swing-states. Anderson explains

national cable ads helped Bush project a uniform message throughout the 50 states and influence news coverage nationwide. But the state-specific ads...helped Kerry connect with TV viewers who had been bombarded by political commercials in places such as Philadelphia and Miami.

Now that battle-lines have been drawn and millions of dollars from the Democratic and Republican parties are being poured into national and local networks, questions concerning the affect and influence of political ads are being raised. The Wisconsin Advertising Project, a program set up by the University of Wisconsin to track and analyze the effect that political advertisements have on voting behavior, is attempting to shed some light on these difficult questions. In a press release from October 12, WiscAds reveals in its findings that candidates produce far more positive TV ads than their supporting groups, and that Democrats have covered a greater variety of issues in their TV ads.
While the Wisconsin Advertising Project has yet to release research specifically concerning the influence of TV campaign ads on viewers, panels and interviews that have been completed on Ohioans in the last month show that ads have no sizeable affects on individuals' votes. Research carried out by USA Today that was featured on Cincinnati's local channel 5 news station, an affiliate of ABC, showed that one in fifteen ads may have affect the ideological preference of a viewer. An October 11 Washington Post article, "Toledo Tube War: 14,273 Ads and Counting," highlights similar findings. In his article, writer Paul Farhi looks to Toledo, Ohio-"the most advertised-to market of any in the big battleground states." According to Farhi, despite the fact that campaign advertisements have offered an 8 million dollar boost to Toledo's economy, Ohioans are predominently irritated and turned off by the bombardment of ads that fills both cable and local TV stations. As of yet, the only visible benefit of Bush and Kerry's campaign ads seems to be the boost it may give to swing-state economies.

Fact Checkers to the Rescue

FactCheck.org has received significant press coverage over the last two weeks. The site, which is funded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, aims to sift through political advertisements, analyzing the accuracy of their claims. The site has proven to be so reliable that Senator John Kerry's homepage has it linked; even Vice President Dick Cheney advised viewers of the 2004 Vice Presidential debates to check up on his own relations with Halliburton via the site (which he misidentified as factcheck.com, the site of one of the most notable democratic philantrhopists active in this election, George Soros). FactCheck.org has quickly become one of the most reliable media sources, when it comes to checking the validity of political advertisements.

Presidential Camaigns and 527s Pick Up the Pace

In the upcoming months, one can be assured that both President Bush's campaign and Senator Kerry's campaign, along with big-budget 527s, will be increasing both the production and the prevelence of political TV ads. As the November election draws closer, the presidential campaings and 527s are narrowing their focus on swing-states such as Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvannia. While their vote may be worth more than others,The Campaign Desk, the Columbia Journalism Review's analysis of 2004 campaign coverage, proves that swing-state citizens are in fact in need of your pity. In her article, "It Could Be Worse - You Could Live in a State Where Your Vote Mattered," Susan Stranahan highlights the fact that "over 530,000 campaign ads have aired on TV thus far in the 2004 election." The numbers are predicted to increase rapidly over the course of the pre-election months; the vast majority of ads produced are being created for local news stations in cities like Columbus and Philadalphia. While citizens of swing-states are guaranteed to get their fill of misleading statistics and exaggerated claims, inevitably, they will also become increasingly familiar with the issues that the presidential candidates and the 527s that support them will be talking about.

Sorting Through the 527s

The MoveOn.org Voter Fund and the Progress for America Voter Fund are quickly becoming household names. Frequently referred to as 527's by the politically savvy, issue advocacy groups such as these have, as of October 2004, produced over half a million political advertisements for the 2004 election. The 527's, organizations that have branched out from respective Political Action Committee's, hold great influence within the current presidential race. As a result of legislation added to the Internal Revenue Code (527 being the particular section added) in 1974, 527 groups, as long as they are registered with the IRS as political organizations, are exempt from both federal income tax and gift tax.

In creating section 527, Congress reasoned that campaigns, party committees, and PACs should not pay taxes on funds contributed to such political entities and used for political purposes.

Therefore, both PAC's and 527's enjoy tax breaks as long as they are registered. It is in their relationship, or lack thereof, with the Federal Election Commission that 527's enjoy financial freedoms far beyond the PAC's with which they are associated. 527's do not have to register with the Federal Election Committee, as PAC's must; so the donations that 527's receive are not limited in any way. While individual contributions to PAC's are restricted to $2,000, for example, such contributions to 527's are unlimited.
The MoveOn.org Voter Fund was formed in 1998 to protest the possible impeachment of President Clinton; it is a branch of the MoveOn PAC. One of the first Democratic 527 groups, MoveOn.org and other ideologically aligned groups, such as Real Voices, have enjoyed astonishing success over the past six years. Their progress did not go unnoticed by Republicans. The Progress for America Voter Fund, which formed just this year, took its cue from groups such as MoveOn. It formed in May, after Republicans failed to convince the Federal Election Committee that the many Democratic 527 groups in existence should face the same regulations as PACs and campaigns. So, unable to lick the Democrats, Republicans, in particular Progress for America, have decided to join 'em.
In recent months, 527's have been noticeably more active, as they are preparing for November's election with more TV ads each week. Though presidential candidates are not permitted to endorse 527s, groups like the MoveOn.org Voter Fund and the Progress for America Voter Fund are highly influential. 527's have spent millions of dollars in order to get their respective messages across, and their visibility will no doubt continue to increase as 2004 election draws near.

Advertisement Faulty But Lucrative for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

John Kerry testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.
photo

Weeks after their first TV advertisement aired in August 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are still making headlines.

In his September 21 feature article for the span style="font-style:italic;">Village Voice, writer Nicholas Turse condemns one particular SBVT ad, which accuses Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry of falsely testifying against fellow Vietnam soldiers during a 1971 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. The ad claims Kerry lied to the Senate and, thus, betrayed his fellow soldiers. In his testimony to the Senate, Kerry accuses American soldiers of committing atrocities such as rape, mutilation, and other forms of torture while in Vietnam.
In his article, Turse employs recently released by the National Archives as his primary source in defending Kerry's testimony as truthful. Turse cites specific incidents--a military intelligence interrogator's raping of a 13 year old Vietnamese girl in 1967, six Green Berets' use of electric torture on the genitals of Vietnemese men and women in 1968--where American Soldiers were in fact charged with committing war atrocities, in order to validate Kerry's statements. In his article, Turse effectively rebuts the ad's numerous false implications.

In his September 11 article in The New York Times reporters Glen Justice and Eric Lichtblau calculate the influence of the SBVT on the election in terms of the donations that the organization has received following the airing of this particular ad. Despite the provably false allegations of the SBVT ad in question, the SBVT claims it has raised over $6.7 million in the weeks following the advertisement's airing.
Reporters Justice and Lichtblau quote a Dr. Gelman, who identifies himself as "conservative politically...[though] not a big fan" of Bush, admits he is attracted to the aggressivity of the SBVT advertisements. Gelman says that, while he is not entirely committed to the Bush campaign, "when someone comes out against [Kerry], I get riled up and give another contribution [to Bush]."

Despite the exposure of the SBVT advertisements as intentionally mileading in some aspects and provably false in others, the groups has undeniably been successful in generating donations to the Bush campaign.