An Eye for an Eye...

The last American presidential campaign is sometimes called “the nastier campaign in American history.” Let me remind you about what was going on. First, Democrat Obama was standing against Republican McCain and they were both hitting it of. The problems started when McCain campaign started releasing harsh and apparently false attack ads against Obama, often using a strong emotional appeal based on a shameless lie. After a few of such kind, Obama hit back in a very similar way, even though he hardly ever got as nasty as McCain standard was (Newsweek). The point is, after some time, their political advertising turned into attacks by empty statements based on nothing factual or truthful. Consequently, their campaign was rather filled with insults than useful material and that situation was far from being helpful to voters in making their choice.


Specifically, in one attack ad McCain accused Obama of suggesting sexual education for kindergartens. In another, he claimed that Obama missed an important event dedicated to honoring wounded soldiers in Germany, and that he did so even though nothing prevented him to go there. On another time, McCain twisted Obama`s proposals about taxes and finally he almost accused him of wanting to destroy Americans and putting himself above the country (Newsweek). Of course, all such ideas were out of line and way out of truth. In fact, one could say it would be easy for Obama to prove McCain wrong, but the point is – the damage was done already. McCain succeeded in setting doubts about Obamas actions. As a reaction, Obama released few ads of the same style against McCain and succeeded in the same way. Nevertheless, nether one side of the doubts were based on facts and caused a serious harm on reputation of both candidates for no reason. Similarly, they caused atmosphere during the time of election that was rather inappropriate and very unnecessary and as the most important point – even thought they might not harm anyone, they did help anything ether. After all, the point of political advertising is not supposed to be about throwing of dirt at each other for nothing; instead, it is supposed to be about presenting each point of view better to potential voters and to get each message to the wider public (Berger, 86). However, last American presidential election time was definitely not the case.


Anyway, in McCain`s example it probably could be proven that his accusations were false and therefore, if the USA generally accepted restriction law for political advertising, McCain could possibly be pursued by the court for release of untruthful negative ads. Sadly, he could still claim he thought it was true in most of the cases (Jackson). Therefore, again, even here legal restriction of political speech would be helpless.

            For more information: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=5807555&page=1

http://www.newsweek.com/2008/08/17/the-smear-gap.html

Reference:

Berger, Arthur Asa. “Political advertising”. Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual  Communication. Rowman and Littlefield, 2011, ed.4.

<http://www.aef.com/pdf/BERGER~Ch6.pdf>

Jackson, Brooks. “False Ads: There Oughta Be A Law! – Or Maybe Not”.

FactCheck.org. June 3, 2004. May 10, 2007.

<http://www.factcheck.org/2004/06/false-ads-there-oughta-be-a-law-or-maybe-not/>

Newsweek. “The Smear Gap”.

<http://www.newsweek.com/2008/08/17/the-smear-gap.html>