Keeping an eye on political ads, lies

We've gotten a little spoiled here in first-in-the-nation Iowa. For weeks now, as Republican candidates have duked it out for their party's Presidential nomination, we've been safe to answer the phone, to turn on the television, without risking an assault by political ads.

That reprieve is about to end, of course, as the primary season winds down and the general election begins, and we transition from old-news caucus state to battleground state.

It can make a person nostalgic for the good old days when every candidate didn't seem to carry around his or her own set of facts - leaving us to sift through truths, half-truths and outright lies.

Thanks in no small part to the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, the 2012 race is shaping up to be as full of whoppers as the last - despite a bumper crop of fact checkers hired by partisan groups, by neutral non-profits and even here in the lamestream media.

Ads run by third parties have historically been more vicious and inaccurate than candidate-sponsored ads, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, told me earlier this week. This season has been no exception.

The Annenberg Center is home to FactCheck.org and now FlackCheck.org - websites that target inaccuracies in political ads and debates. I caught up with Jamieson when she was in Iowa City this week, a guest of the University of Iowa School of Journalism.

Isn't it hard to keep up, I asked her - after all, it takes a lot less time and energy to pull numbers out of the air than it does to vet all those claims.

Not as hard as you'd think, she said. It's not the number of inaccuracies that's the problem so much as the repetition.

When the same fishy fact pops up in a half-dozen ads, it starts to take on a life of its own.

Jamieson's group has identified a dirty dozen often-repeated deceptive claims in third-party ads since the beginning of this election season.

Fact checkers think they've had some impact - take Restore our Future's ad “Happy,” which claimed Newt Gingrich collected a $30,000-an-hour consulting paycheck from Freddie Mac. Fact checkers cried “foul” and the pro-Romney super PAC dropped that claim from subsequent ads. It's something.

Jamieson hopes that we can bring some reality back to political discourse by calling on candidates to stand by their claims and pressuring broadcast stations to turn down false third-party ads.

And as we brace ourselves for another deluge of political ads, it sure seems worth a try.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net