In Ohio, a Spotlight on Super PAC Ads
There was no escaping the blizzard of negative television and radio advertising assaulting the eyes and ears of Buckeyes in the run-up to Super Tuesday.
Consider this: the super PACs supporting front-runners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, as well as Newt Gingrich, dumped some $4 million into pre-primary (and predominantly negative) advertising in Ohio, far out-spending the campaigns themselves (including $1.2 million from the Romney camp and $500,000 from Santorum’s campaign).
This spending spree is no surprise, really, considering that Ohio was the crown jewel of Super Tuesday’s ten state primaries. Not to mention that no Republican—say it with me!—has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio.
It’s also no surprise, in today’s world of down-and-dirty politics, that amidst this ad deluge Ohioans have been subjected to some deceptive claims. What might actually be surprising is that while TV stations are generally obligated to accept ads from candidates for public office, they can refuse to air misleading ads from Super PACs and other third-party groups.
Enter “Stand By Your Ad,” an effort—recently launched by FlackCheck.org, a sister site to Annenberg Public Policy Center’s well-known FactCheck.org—to push back against deceptive third-party ads.
The “Stand By” campaign has been issuing regular reminders on its website that TV stations “can and should refuse misleading super PAC ads,” and can insist on changes to those ads, and exhorting viewers in local markets to urge their stations to exercise those rights. Two of the posts—first on February 14, and again last Friday—singled out ads that aired in Ohio.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg center, noted via email that Flackcheck.org isn’t making independent judgments, instead relying on previous work by fact-checking sites. Those sites’ rulings, of course, can be open to debate. For example, the March 2 “Stand By” post targeted a pro-Romney ad that attacked Santorum for voting to restore the voting rights of convicted felons. Factcheck.org had previously called the ad “misleading” because it includes an image of a man in prison garb, while the measure Santorum backed would have restored voting rights only after convicts completed probation and parole. There’s room for disagreement about whether that’s deceptive enough to warrant rejecting the ad.
But other ads include claims that are more clearly false. One such ad, titled “Obama,” was part of a $257,000 Ohio ad buy by the pro-Santorum super PAC, the Red White and Blue Fund. The ad, which according to the fund ran on most major stations in Dayton, compares Romney and Gingrich to President Obama. At one point, it asserts that “just like Obama, Romney left Massachusetts $1 billion in debt”—a claim PolitiFact has checked and called false. In Ohio, NBC4 reporter Ted Hart fact-checked the ad on-air last week for Columbus-area viewers, coming to the same conclusion. (A similar ad, “Vital Decisions,” ran on many other Ohio stations. That version leaves out the “$1 billion debt” claim.)