In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of journalistic outlets that try to arbitrate the truthfulness of political statements. Perhaps the best established is the Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact. They do a tolerable job most of the time, but they still have come under attack from partisans on both the right and the left. This proves that there are some political statements that are hard to pin down as “true” or “mostly true” or “false” or “mostly false.” A lot of the time, we are forced to deal with what Stephen Colbert coined as “truthiness.”
This makes it difficult to precisely define when someone is telling a political lie. It’s like that old saying, “There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.” So, we wind up with judgments that something is kinda sorta true if you squint real hard and bend the evidence with all your might and basically drop normal standards for logical proof.
For some reason, in writing about this, I remember when Rush Limbaugh said that Sandra Fluke was having so much sex that she couldn’t afford contraception. How do you define that kind of accusation? On the logical level, it is a non sequitur because female contraception generally costs the same amount regardless of how much sex you have. It’s similar to pointing to the ice on your window and declaring that global warming is not occurring. It makes no sense.
But it’s different from arguing that a vote for the Affordable Care Act is a vote for taxpayer-funded abortion. We should be able to declare a statement like that to be true of false. And that is what then-Rep. Steven Driehaus of Cincinnati asked the state of Ohio to do when the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List ran ads against him in 2010 accusing him of supporting taxpayer-funded abortion.
As it turned out, Driehaus lost his reelection bid and dropped his complaint (although, he did later file a defamation suit), but the Susan B. Anthony List decided to defend themselves by arguing in court that an Ohio law banning lying in political advertising is unconstitutional.
…the Ohio False Statement Law that makes it illegal to “post, publish, circulate, distribute, or otherwise disseminate a false statement concerning a candidate, either knowing the same to be false or with reckless disregard for whether it was false or not, if the statement is designed to promote the election, nomination, or defeat of the candidate.”
The case is now going to the Supreme Court. The issue isn’t so much whether the Susan B. Anthony List lied but whether they have the constitutional right to lie. Except, they insist that they weren’t lying:
Susan B. Anthony List denies that the ads were false — but is challenging the overall constitutionality of the restrictions on false political speech. The group also successfully beat back defamation lawsuit filed by Driehaus in 2013.
“This lawsuit originated with the now ongoing problem of taxpayer funding of abortion in Obamacare. Driehaus was originally opposed to the Affordable Care Act because it did not contain specific language preventing the funding of abortion,” said SBA president Marjorie Dannenfelser in a Friday statement.
“That never changed and to this very day, Americans are still fighting the expansion of taxpayer funding of abortion brought about by the overhaul. After Driehaus and other naïve ‘pro-life’ Democrats caved, SBA List sought to inform constituents of their votes for taxpayer funding of abortion,” said Dannenfelser.
This is definitely “truthiness” at its worst. It’s just not true that the Affordable Care Act appropriates any money for abortion. To argue that it does requires a level of mental gymnastics that could win you an Olympic medal.
If we accept that the Affordable Care Act funds abortion, then we would also have to accept that it funds a manned Martian expedition, or any other false statement.
So, can Ohio ban lies in political advertising?
What’s a lie these days?
Nobody seems to know anymore.
Actually, in today’s media environment I think it has now been pretty well re-defined by them as, “Anything the other guy says.”
And don’t deign to try and change anyone’s mind with something as silly as “facts”.
About a decade ago the Washington (State) Supreme Court ruled, similarly, that a law prohibiting false campaign ads was an abridgement of free speech rights. And, so, you now have spectacles like a GMO labeling initiative this past election that went down – despite polling favorably most of the race – because big agribusiness spent $22 million to, basically, lie about the impact of the initiative. (Of the $22 million the anti-folks raised, exactly $550.00 came from in-state.) That was nearly $6 per voter for a statewide ballot measure. Tell a lie with that kind of budget behind it and you can get just about anything, or anyone, defeated.
Some lying, of course, is illegal, because it endangers the general welfare. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, file a false police report, lie under oath, etc. Putting some of these congenital liars in office would do more to endanger more lives than any of the above, but it’s a good measure of how trivialized our politics have become that courts can seriously entertain the idea that it’s fine to put sociopaths in office, because FREEEEDDUMMM~!!!!11!!
There is a lot self-serving drivel pretending to be post-modern philosophy around this issue.
IMO the Ohio issue is not about truth or falsehood so much as it is about the legal notion of fraud, which can find culpability based on half-truths arranged in a pattern that is itself evidence of intention to deceive.
The Susan B. Anthony Foundation was clearly paid to defraud the public about the record of Rep. Driehaus. And it is clear that they succeeded.
The Constitutional right to free speech (Congress shall make no law…) provides neither a right to lie not a right to a megaphone. Ohio should be able to ban lies in advertising, political or otherwise, when they have the consequences of fraud.
Of course, a Supreme Court that considers corporations more people than human beings and money more speech that what one says or writes most likely won’t be bothered with arguing that the First Amendment is absolute protection for lies.
How far we’ve come in thirty years since the press’s acceptance of the Reagan GOP’s adoption of “spin” as legitimate political speech and Luntz’s cute legislative titles — PATRIOT Act, No Child Left Behind…–became common practice for both parties.
And the concern-troll pundits wonder why folks don’t trust politicians anymore and what happened to our values.
My biggest issue with places like PolitiFact is that their very existence implies that the rest of the journalistic media is not focused on fact checking. Otherwise, why would you need an organization specifically dedicated to it?
OK yeah, it’s probably true that most journalists are not interested in fact checking any more. That seems to be a huge problem.
Also, PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year award is just screwy. It doesn’t go to the biggest whopper of the year. It goes to the lie that had the biggest impact, in their judgment. Which would seem to just give publicity to the lie. Obama’s “you can keep your health care” statement was only judged a half lie, but somehow it became the Lie of the Year above any number of “Pants on Fire” statements. What kind of screwed up system is that?
I’m not an attorney but I believe it’s generally accepted that the First Amendment doesn’t protect fraud. Especially if the fraud is meant to swing an election, I think the people have a right to resent it.
I’m not sure why you need a separate law for it, though. At any rate, there may be room for some hairsplitting in this particular case, but these people are basically arguing that the First Amendment protects outright fraud. It’s absurd.
The failure to identify a lie correctly is a matter of judgment not definition. It’s not too hard to distinguish various situations and where the current topic fits and then apply the set of rules that applies.
Chocolate is better than vanilla.
You can have different taste and say, ‘No, vanilla tastes better than chocolate to me.’
There’s no ‘truthful’ resolution to the conflict in taste.
‘I think society is better off if rich people have most of the money and make the rules for everyone else because they deserve it, God favors them, and that provides incentives to the rest of the population to work harder to become rich – so they will have the money and can make the rules. Total national income can be maximized under this type of society.’
There’s nothing that can be easily proved or disproved in that. That’s not my opinion, but as even Krugman points out, there’s no obvious correlation between income equality and overall economic performance.
The only things one can say about some one else’s opinion is whether it is well informed (there are no stats to support that) or not and what might be the motivation for holding that opinion (of course he wants to raise taxes, he’s poor).
It’s midnight.
The national unemployment rate is 6.7%
Greece is a country in Europe.
Fact checkers should only do 2 things – identify the category correctly (taste, opinion, fact) and the context (no accounting for taste, disclose motivation, state the factual conflict).
Where the fact checkers are failing is not even getting the categorization right, which means they have no chance to be credible.
What you have written here is the best thing I have seen anywhere in reference to fact-checking. This belongs on a front page somewhere.
when a conservative’s lips are moving.
cronkite’s greatest regret: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQA7P4ourIQ
Well to the extent that a person receives a federal subsidy for health insurance and that insurance covers abortion and the person actually has an abortion, a federally subsidized abortion has occurred. That’s OK with me. But to categorize a vote for the ACA as a vote for taxpayer funded abortion, while literally true, is certainly straining at gnats while swallowing camels. It’s like characterizing a vote for the Defense budget as a vote in support of keeping Gitmo open or target practice in Puerto Rico or any other small line item in that budget.
No.
I see. Then abortion is effectively banned for the indigent.
“a non sequitur because female contraception generally costs the same amount regardless of how much sex you have”
Why would anyone take this referenced statement by Limbaugh as any kind if a statement of fact at all. It just isn’t. It is a contemptible, vicious, misogynistic comment, and does not even deserve being dealt with as a statement of fact. It is a characterization, not even invective, just foul language.
its called socialism 🙂
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