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E-conomy / Paul Andrews
Web site tells truth in ads for president

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In the acrimonious presidential campaign, however, an Internet presence has emerged as a beacon of truth-sorting. I'm talking about Factcheck.org and its bird-dogging of presidential-campaign television commercials.

Nonpartisan, nonprofit and endowment-funded, Factcheck.org is sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. It has been reviewing presidential-campaign ads for accuracy since December. Perhaps not surprisingly, it hasn't found a completely truthful commercial yet, from either the George Bush or the John Kerry campaigns (in some cases, ads that contain accurate information are nonetheless misleading, Factcheck.org has found).

Something about political campaigns encourages distortion, Brooks Jackson, Annenberg's political fact-check director, said in a phone interview. Coordinators don't view campaigns as a chance to extol their candidate's principles and platforms — as voters might wish — but rather as "blood sport," Jackson said. "They're in it to win."

In a perfect world, Factcheck's detailed breakdown of presidential ads would follow each campaign spot on television. Or at least be given some representation on the medium dispensing the misinformation. For a variety of reasons, people aren't holding their breath over that possibility.

So Factcheck.org has turned to the next best alternative: the Internet. It posts all its critiques on its Web site and offers automated e-mail bulletins to, at last count, more than 19,000 subscribers.

Word is spreading. Jackson has appeared twice on Bill Moyers' "NOW" show on PBS. Factcheck.org's work also has been featured on NBC, NPR and in several print articles.

Jackson, a journalist with more than 32 years of experience in print and TV, acknowledges being surprised by the response. The site was envisioned as an aid to the media, particularly political reporters "who don't have the time and resources to do what we do," said Jackson, who originated the "ad-watch" concept during the 1992 presidential campaign while reporting for CNN.

But the Internet has expanded Factcheck's sphere into mainstream America.

Part of the site's appeal may derive from the public's inability to find this kind of truth-telling elsewhere in the media.

When media run stories mentioning ads, Jackson said, little attention is given to correcting falsehoods. Even broadcast and print outlets that run "ad watches" focus more on describing content and strategy than on dissecting accuracy.
 
"They'll run it on page 17, and the truth part is relegated to a subordinate paragraph," Jackson noted.

If the news media were doing their job, Jackson said, "there wouldn't be this vast vacuum we're rushing to fill." Correcting inaccuracies ought to be "woven into" the routine reporting process, he said.

As disturbing as it might sound, Jackson says nothing prohibits lying in political ads. But that may be for the better, however. If such laws existed, Jackson noted, they would undoubtedly be politicized.

Would progressives who might favor banning lies "want John Ashcroft prosecuting the Kerry campaign over political ads?" Jackson asked rhetorically.

I asked Jackson if Factcheck.org had found one side's ads to be more egregiously fallacious than the other's. That's not what its mission is about, he said.

If it were to determine that one side was lying more, "that might color how we evaluate its ads from that point forward," Jackson noted.

The ultimate irony may be that it is flourishing in that petri dish of deception, the Internet. It's one site you can count on to be fair, objective and — most of all — accurate. Its slogan, a quote from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, says it all: "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."

Paul Andrews is a freelance technology writer and co-author of "Gates." He can be reached at pandrews@seattletimes.com