Who gets to decide that something is a lie?

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Precisely. You'd need to have some government agency in charge of enforcing truth in broadcasting. Consider what the Bush administration would have done with that kind of authority.

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There would be ZERO political advertising if that were implemented.

Which might not bad a bad thing...

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Perhaps just one of those floating icons in the corner clearly labeling it as fiction?

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You're over-engineering this.

How about television is not allowed to anything to do with politics. Let's start there and see how it goes.


(Dammit do NOT get me started!)

:)

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Hell yea... some things are "judgement" calls where they're playing with statistics but quite often they make statements that are blatantly false and at the very least these need to be removed.

Of course I also believe to run for an elected office you should have to pass an examination on both knowledge and ethics related to the office...then everyone who passes both with 80%+ is granted the exact same advertising and the like options... as in all get 8 commercials...

Cut down on the whole buying elections as it happens now.

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I'm of the opinion that the restraints on political speech we already have are unconstitutional. And I don't really want to re-open the first amendment and try to rewrite it; I don't think I'd like the result.

Yes, rich people who choose to use their money that way can have more impact on public policy than poor people. Many attempts to fix that end up preventing ordinary people from joining together to make their voices heard.

Put your effort into cleaning up lobbying, is my advice; that's a much more important way in which people with money get disproportionate power.

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Wouldn't help. "Many people believe Barack Obama is a muslim" is true. And then you go into the list of reasons why they believe that, and many of them are true too. You can easily leave people with the impression you want without resorting to lies.

And giving an agency the authority to preview and decide is pretty dangerous, as others have pointed out.

If you let the opposing team take it to court, there are time issues, since ads are mostly run pretty close to the election.

Then there's the pre-emptive challenge of your opponent's ad, which if you're lucky you get blocked for a while (court order) until the case can be decided, and even if they win you've disrupted their schedule and cost them money.

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MUSLIM? Oh. *I* thought they were saying he wears MUSLIN! - and I have to respond that I'm not an expert on clothing, and so couldn't say...

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On every TV I've ever owned, there's a little button somewhere that is intended to be used to turn the TV on and off. Exercise your right to USE that little button! Turn the thing OFF and I guarantee you won't be irritated by the ads any more. That's what *I* do! And my dogs LOVE me for it! ;-)

(It works for crappy programming too!) ;-D

And think of the electricity you'll save if you follow the suggestion on my blog and put all the "entertainment" appliances on a powerstrip and just turn the whole battery of stuff off - it all has that "instant-on" circuitry that just GOBBLES electricity even when you're not using it!

I sometimes wonder how much happier I'd be if I ignored politics and especially economics...

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I don't have TV. Well, I have a television set, but it's connected to my DVD player.

These ads don't bother me because they're cluttering MY airwaves--they bother me because people like my mother-in-law see them and swallow them hook, line, and sinker, and don't bother to take the extra time to double-check ANY candidates' claims.

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Yep. The one referenced here, that brings up gay marriage being taught in schools - a topic that does not appear in proposition 8, and churches losing their tax exemption, which has to do with churches doing political campaigning - nothing in the proposition forces churches to hold any particular stance toward gays but as discussed here, it does suggest that churches that do this sort of thing are not staying within activities that their designation as a church was designed for.

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Not any more. Welcome to the Republican age of de-regulation. (Started back in the Reagan years, I believe)

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We had a similar problem here - Stephen Harper kept talking about how Stephane Dion was going to raise taxes with his "Green Shift", but always omitted the bit about offsetting reductions in personal income tax to compensate. So that would be a lie by omission, which is almost as bad.

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