Fact-Checking Group Launches Web Video Campaign To Discourage Flood of Deceptive SuperPAC Ads
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, February 21 2012
A fact-checking web site run by the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday launched an ambitious new attempt to stem the expected flood of deceptive television advertising placed by third-party political groups on broadcast networks by providing the public with a new tool with which to contact station managers who would be accepting those ads.
The effort, dubbed "Stand By Your Ad," uses web video to highlight television ads appearing on broadcast television and radio that Penn's Annenberg Public Policy Center deems are factually incorrect and misleading, as shown above.
Staff at the center, under the project name and web site Flackcheck.org, have compiled the contact information of local television station managers so that people can easily e-mail those managers to ask them not to run the advertising.
Advertising from third-party groups is expected to outrun ads from political candidates themselves during the 2012 campaign cycle. The Sunlight Foundation reported Tuesday that those independent expenditures have already added up during this cycle to $52 million, 90 percent of which has gone toward supporting or opposing presidential candidates.
Flackcheck.org's example above comes from last October when Ohio voters were asked to approve a measure that would have enabled local governments and school districts to weaken unions' collective bargaining abilities and make changes to public employees' contracts and benefits. Public employee unions opposed the measure, and Republicans supported it. But the issue last October concerning this television ad was that an independent group called Building a Better Ohio used Cincinnati resident Marlene Quinn's quote about firefighters out of context in order to campaign for the measure.
Quinn complained in a public statement and thirty local public television stations pulled the controversial ad.
But as The Huffington Post hinted at at the time, the tussle between groups about the ads isn't that clear-cut. The broadcast televisions stations face certain public interest obligations since they use the public's airwaves to broadcast their programming and television ads. As Flackcheck.org notes, television stations are not obligated to run inaccurate and grossly misleading political advertising, but the outside groups can also argue in the short term to keep their ads on air by making claims about censorship.
As the HuffPost reported last October, the TV stations WEWS in Cleveland justified its decision to keep running the ad by Building a Better Ohio by stating: "We don't want to be seen as limiting or censoring public debate on a matter of significant political importance in Ohio."
This post has been updated to reflect that the effort focuses on third party political content, and not television advertising in general.