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6 facts about political ads in Iowa
Here’s a few things you might not know about political advertisements.
Robin Opsahl, Des Moines Register
With this week’s elections and the barrage of political ads voters are seeing, their lack of political advertising literacy has urgency. In fact, it is estimated that ad spending for the 2022 midterms will exceed a record $9.7 billion.
In an environment where it is difficult to discern false from true information, our research team of advertising scholars from the University of Tennessee’s Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations and the University of Illinois found that U.S. voters do not have enough understanding of politics, current events, issues or advertising practices and regulations to be able to determine the validity of political information.
The problem isn’t just among the less educated. Even highly educated, politically active adults do not understand the legal environment of political advertising based on its First Amendment classification as political speech that allows for some messages to be misleading.
In the research, we found what surprises people the most to learn is that the guardrails in place to ensure truthful, non-misleading advertising for products and services do not apply to political ads. The reason for this is found in how the Supreme Court has differentiated between political and commercial speech.
How the Supreme Court sees political speech and commercial speech
The court has historically determined that a free flow of political information is essential for the functioning of a democracy. Also, history has shown that in other countries, those in power can easily silence political information, especially information in opposition to them.
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Given that it is easy for those in power to quell political speech, the court has given its greatest protections to political speech in the U.S. That is, government cannot make content-based decisions to allow or disallow political speech, so the free flow of that speech can be protected. Political ads are one form of political speech. What the court has said can happen, though, are time, place and manner restrictions. For example, laws that require funding disclosure don’t compromise the content of the speech but merely provide citizens more information regarding the source of the message.
This means there are more regulations to ensure that an ad for a hamburger is truthful than for an ad for a presidential candidate. While many candidates and strategists attempt to use political advertising ethically, the lack of these guardrails gives room for some to create misleading or outright false messages. For voters who also lack basic political knowledge, it becomes difficult to discern which message is true and which is not.
This does not mean that a …….