The New Media

You have a problem. You don't want to spend the money to do a real ad buy for an attack ad this political season. So what do you do? You make a really dishonest one, show if a few times in a few token markets, and hope the media picks up on it and shows it for free every five minutes. It's been working pretty well for John McCain this week.

The number of times Senator John McCain’s new advertisement attacking Senator Barack Obama for canceling a visit with wounded troops in Germany last week has been shown fully or partly on local, national and cable newscasts: well into the hundreds.

The number of times that spot actually, truly ran as a paid commercial: roughly a dozen.

Result for Mr. McCain: a public relations coup that allowed him to show his toughest campaign advertisement of the year — one widely panned as misleading — to millions of people, largely free, through television news media hungry for political news with arresting visual imagery.

That's right, the news media will rampantly run campaign commercials in their entirety if they meet the base standard of pretty colors and being political. Thankfully for at least the bare minimum of journalistic standards, this particular commercial has run often with the talking heads pointing out how dishonest it is. But it frequently runs with just chatter about "What will Obama do" and "Does this hurt Obama".

Which brings us to the larger problem of the news media: the death of objective truth. Used to be that when you told a lie you were corrected and if the mistake was willful, called a liar. Now, you just make misstatements. That's if they even want to call you on it. Most times you can say whatever you want and it will be presented as equal to the truth as long as it is a discussion within the political realm. "Some say the moon is made of rock and orbits the earth, while others say it's made of green cheese and earth orbit it. Both sides of the debate up next." Balance is defined as giving equal weight to what two people say no matter how inaccurate one or both of them is. If a Democrat says something truthful and a Republican counters with a lie (or vice versa), then both must be given equal weight because taking one 'side' might be seen as 'partisan'. That's why campaigns dredge up dishonest ads with the hope of getting free media coverage. They know the discussion will rarely be about the truth of the ad, only what the ad means to the horserace.