Political Consumers

by digby

Anonymous Liberal pinch hitting over at Glenn Greenwald’s place has posted an interesting piece about truth in advertising. He points out that the laws are much more explicit and demanding of honesty in selling consumer goods than it is in politics.

If a company makes a claim which is even slightly misleading, it will quickly find itself up to its eyeballs in litigation, whether in the form of government enforcement actions, lawsuits by competitors, or consumer class actions (often all three). There are also any number of tort and quasi-contractual claims that aggrieved consumers can bring against the individuals and companies who deceived them.

As a result, companies take great care to ensure that their statements are truthful, and consumers can be reasonably confident that advertisers are not lying to them.

The same is not at all true in the realm of politics, where candidates and interest groups can pretty much say whatever they want and voters are generally left to fend for themselves. Lies and misleading claims are commonplace, if not the norm. The perverse result is that most Americans are far better informed (or at least far less misinformed) when they step into the mall than when they step into the voting booth.

Anonymous Liberal points out that all the consumer laws on the books are predicated on studies that show most people don’t have the ability to sort through a bunch of competing information and figure out what is true (or what works) and what doesn’t. We have found that citizens appreciate some rules and some guidance. He also notes that states tried to inject some truth in advertising laws into the political arena but ran afoul of the first amendment and have pretty much given up the effort, which he agrees is probably the right thing. After all, when it comes to political speech you have to have a very hands-off government policy, for obvious reasons.

But the system is supposed to have a mechanism for dealing with this — the press. It’s protected by the same amendment that protects the politicians and operates on an equal constitutional basis. If jouranlists were doing their job correctly they would function as the political consumer watchdogs and enforcers of truth in advertising.

The thing is, they think they are. They nitpick something ridiculous, like Al Gore’s joke that his grandmother sang him a certain lullabye while allowing a huge majority of the country to believe that there was a connection between Saddam and 9/11 — something which those of us who were paying close attention knew was untrue, by virtue of the administration’s cleverly misleading statements.

Anonymous Liberal notes:

I remember, for example, that in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, the media made a habit of noting that most Americans supported the invasion. Rarely, however, did anyone mention the fact that nearly 70% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 or the fact that the Bush administration had been going out of its way to foster that misperception.

That’s exactly right. And it wasn’t as if Bush was being particularly subtle about it:

Times have changed in America. Times have changed after September the 11th. It used to be we thought oceans would protect us. A lot of us growing up said, we don’t have to really worry about some of the conflicts overseas. We may be involved, we may not be involved, because we’re protected, we’re isolated from the harsh realities of some of the killings that were taking place on different continents, so we could pick and choose. We don’t have any choice in this new war, see. We learned that the enemy has taken the battlefield to our very own country. My most important job is to protect America. My most important job is to do everything we possibly can to protect innocent life from a group of killers.

That’s why I’ve started and stimulated a discussion on Iraq. I wanted the American people to know that there’s a new reality which we face, a reality that oceans no longer protect us. The reality that this person in Iraq has killed his own people with weapons of mass destruction, a reality that he has invaded countries. The reality that he has stiffed the United Nations for 11 years. Sixteen different resolutions have been passed calling on this man to disarm. Sixteen times he’s ignored world mandates. These are the realities we face and we must deal with it.

Clever and stupid all at the same time. It was clear to those who were paying close attention that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and that this was cunning rhetoric designed to give exactly the opposite impression. And yet the Bush administration repeatedly made speeches and statements like that above and suffered virtually no blowback in the media. In his press conferences, the white house press corps failed to properly follow up or make it clear that Bush was being clever when he made these connections and instead laughed and fawned as if they were at a movie star’s press junket.

It was their job to sort that rhetoric out, right as it happened, no matter how unpleasant it might have been. The failure to correct that misimpression (along with dozens of others) led many millions of Americans to support the invasion of Iraq who otherwise might not have. Had the press done its job, acted as the public’s “political consumer” advocate, and put pressure on the administration to explain its claims, the war would likely have happened anyway — they were determined to do it come hell or high water — but Bush would not have won re-election. They made it possible for someone who had lied blatantly to the people in some cases, misled them in others and started a war based upon what turned out to be a completely false premise to hang on long enough to win another term before people belatedly realized they had been taken to the cleaners. That’s quite an achievement. (I’m still waiting for the ethics panel on that subject to be convened — I wonder how that’s coming?)

Anonymous Liberal says he has some ideas as to how to incentivize honesty in politics and I’ll be looking forward to reading it. In the meantime, it’s important that we keep the pressure on the press to do the job that democracy requires it to do. They are getting very stroppy about it, but that’s too bad. When you screw up on this scale you are going to have to take some heat.

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