How this watchdog got tough on TV ads

Correction appended

The television advertisement from August's Tennessee primaries began like so many others flooding the airwaves in the election cycle leading up to today's vote.

Sitting at his desk in shirtsleeves, Republican Senate candidate Bob Corker smiled warmly at the camera and informed viewers that he approved the following message.

Black-and-white, less-than-flattering pictures of Corker's opponents then popped onto the screen accompanied by dramatic music, and a woman gravely intoned that "the nonpartisan FactCheck.org called [opponent Ed] Bryant's attack ads 'false.'"

If Brooks Jackson, director of Annenberg Political Fact Check, reveled in the allusion to the Web site he oversees, it was only for a brief moment. After all, he had work to do.

Jackson, a veteran journalist, posted an article on FactCheck.org stating that while the site had indeed labeled as false one of Bryant's claims about Corker not paying his taxes, the Corker commercial did not tell the full story. FactCheck had also deemed one of Corker's previous assertions - which charged that his Republican opponents had voted to raise their own House pay - "grossly misleading."

"Candidates are not trying to educate you, they are trying to persuade you," Jackson said. "They are not running a public policy seminar; they are running what amounts in some cases to pure propaganda."

"People say they don't pay attention to ads and feel like real sophisticates," Jackson added. "But it's pounded at you so much by sheer repetition that . an awful lot of people end up believing false information."

In the heat of its inaugural midterm election campaigns, the nonpartisan, nonprofit FactCheck - a project of Penn's Annenberg Public Policy Center - seems to be growing in fame and popularity. Labeling itself as a "consumer advocate" for voters, FactCheck strives to curb deception and confusion in U.S. politics by exposing and explaining disingenuous or untrue information in everything from TV ads to press releases.

Last month, a FactCheck article clarifying the way in which certain Republican lawmakers voted on military funding helped discredit an ad attacking Jim Gerlach, the Republican congressman representing Pennsylvania's 6th district. ABC's Philadelphia affiliate soon yanked the commercial off the air.

Around the same time, a FactCheck article contending that Sen. Jim Talent (R-Miss.) had, in a number of TV spots, erroneously attributed negative quotes about opponent Claire McCaskill to The Kansas City Star, prompted the newspaper to demand that Talent either pull the ads or correct them.

The Washington, D.C.-based FactCheck first went live in December 2003, when Communication professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson teamed up with Jackson to investigate the accuracy of political statements made during the 2004 presidential race. Its popularity skyrocketed after the 2004 vice-presidential debates, when Dick Cheney defended his effectiveness as CEO of Halliburton by instructing John Edwards to go to what he called "FactCheck.com."

While the fervor surrounding the site has quieted down since the contentious presidential campaign, FactCheck currently boasts 65,000 e-mail subscribers and about 20,000 unique visitors per day, and it continues to play a role in major political events. During the confirmation period for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts last August, FactCheck's assertion that a commercial sponsored by the abortion-rights group NARAL contained false information was instrumental in NARAL's decision to cancel the ad.

Over the summer, FactCheck was chosen as one of TIME.com's "25 sites we can't live without," rubbing elbows with Internet titans such as Ebay, ESPN and Google.

The site has even spawned a FactCheck initiative at Channel 4 News in London, which was unveiled during that country's general election last year.

"We were greatly inspired by Brooks and what he was doing at Penn," Channel 4 FactCheck Editor Jon Bernstein said. Politicians "were incredulous that we actually wanted them to provide us with the source data upon which they made their claims."

John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University and a specialist in political advertising, said that while FactCheck is respected and consulted in the political arena, opinion on its merits isn't uniform.

"Some people think it's a good thing because it's checking the facts, but there are other people who think these efforts bring more attention to bad ads," Geer said. "My quibble with it is that often, the negative ads are the ones with the facts in them. Positive ads are often so vague that there's nothing to check - if you say you support freedom, a fact check is not necessary."

According to Penn Political Science professor Diana Mutz, much of FactCheck's power lies in its ability to influence media coverage surrounding false claims, rather than in its impact on individual voters exploring the site.

"The kind of people who go to the trouble to seek information online are probably already highly politically involved and astute, so they are not going to be easily swayed by ads," she said.

Chris Patusky, executive director of the Fels Institute of Government, said that one example of FactCheck's influence on the political process is the fact that candidates use information from the site to prove the veracity of their own claims or to challenge their opponents' assertions.

He added that the site has the potential to act as a kind of "prophylactic against falsity" in politics, so long as FactCheck upholds its reputation as a trustworthy resource.

"Candidates are less likely to use false information in the election campaign if they know someone is checking up on them," Patusky said.

Virginia Davis, a spokeswoman for Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), said that she has perused FactCheck.org and provided the site with information from the campaign on a number of occasions. While Davis said that it is beneficial having "third party entities" analyzing the political process, she added, without going into specifics, that the Santorum campaign has "taken issue" with certain claims made by FactCheck in the past.

"The bottom line for our campaign is that we make every effort to make sure that our ads are based on fact," she said.

Jackson, however, said that FactCheck's mission is not to influence political campaigns or alter the attitudes of politicians, but rather to help voters make sense of the "false, misleading bunk" that they hear during political races.

"We want to hold politicians accountable, but we're not trying to change their behavior," he said. "We're not so naive as to think that people running for office are going to stop twisting and distorting information, or taking it out of context, just because we are here.

"My goal is to not be a third person in the campaign. It is not the Republicans, the Democrats and FactCheck.org."

According to Jackson, FactCheck does not keep statistics on the number of false or misleading statements made by particular candidates, as there is no objective way to interpret the data. The same is true for measuring whether the current campaigns are nastier or more dishonest than previous races. He did say that factors such as political polarization or tight election matches tend to raise emotional levels and increase the likelihood of misleading statements being made.

Jackson said that the motivations behind creating deceptive political advertising are difficult to assess, since one would have to get into the mind of a politician or political strategist to do it.

"A lot of this is that they don't care or give a damn, sometimes it's sheer recklessness, and a lot of times it's calculating and deliberate," he said. "My personal speculation is that in many cases [politicians] have convinced themselves that the things they are saying are true."

"Part of it is also because of the nature of a 30-second ad," Jackson added. "You have to cut through people selling lemonade, liquor, cars, and people are numb to advertising in general. You want to make statements that are as arresting, as bold and as memorable as possible, and sometimes it turns out that the truth doesn't do it for" the people creating the ads.

FactCheck conducts its research in part by subscribing to a service that tracks ads from the country's 101 biggest television markets. Its small staff then scrutinizes these television spots and pores over political documents and campaign Web pages, searching for any claims that look suspicious or that fall into a pattern of already-documented deception. While Jackson said that FactCheck aspires to be as objective as possible in its work, he added that the site sometimes gets accused of bias, frequently by the political party or candidate that has been discredited by a particular article on the Web site.

While the site has garnered unforeseen recognition, Jackson looks forward to the time when FactCheck won't be one of the only shows in town.

"This is the job of a free press," Jackson said. "But today many broadcasters are more interested in covering a missing blonde than in false television ads."

Correction: A graphic that originally accompanied this story said that gaming interests had legally made substantial contributions to New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez. It was actually Menendez' opponent, Thomas Kean Jr., who received the funds.

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