Facts behind an ad

Groups supporting Question 1, Death with Dignity, yesterday argued that an advertisement their opponents have been showing on television is false and misleading. The ad shows, first, an Oregon doctor talking about the problems with the measure in his state and then portrays a teen-age girl going to a mailbox in Maine and taking out what might be pills to end a person’s life. The message is that Question 1 is too dangerous, but is the ad accurate?

The Maine Code of Election Ethics, created by the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy, has candidates agreeing to the following: “Factual claims made by my campaign will be supported by publicly available documents provided by my campaign office.” The code of ethics is signed by office-seekers, not groups for or against referendums, but there is no reason the same standards should not apply to them. Similarly, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, proposes that campaigns document on their Web sites any ads they show.

It would be even better if television broadcasters took their public obligations more seriously and provided more free airtime so that campaigns would not need to emphasize their ads as heavily. But Dean Jamieson’s idea is useful because it gives the public immediate access to background information on what tend to be the most strongly worded, most widely available claims a candidate or issues group will make during a campaign. If the public expects that it can turn to a Web site to see the text of an ad along with footnotes for every point made, the claims in the ad will either be more powerful for having been backed up with facts or, if suspect to begin with, either tempered or perhaps not made at all. Whichever the result, the public benefits.

Question 1’s opponents can be expected today to defend their ad, but had they already supplied a site that explained where the ad’s charges came from, there would be no need to now. Documenting claims in advance adds little or no cost to campaigns but could measurably improve their quality and the overall quality of the political contest.