Partisanship aside, I found this summation of what has been going on during the 2004 campaign to be disturbing as well as disgusting:
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http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=6631134
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - No matter who wins Tuesday's election, the 2004 presidential campaign will go down in history for its record volume of distorted messages, misinformation and outright mendacity, analysts say.
The lavishly financed but deadlocked race between Republican President Bush and Democrat John Kerry has given rise to an unprecedented number of political television spots -- over half of which appear to contain serious distortions.
Analysts also say the candidates and their surrogates have stretched and twisted the political debate into a series of daily attacks that are often repeated by media outlets with little regard for their accuracy.
"Add it all up and you really do have to wear hip-waders. Never before in American history have we seen this level of propaganda and distortion," said Charles Lewis, director of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and a leading authority on dirty politics in America, said voters are being exposed to record levels of political distortion through the sheer number of TV ads.
More than 750,000 political TV spots dealing with the presidential race are expected to have aired by Election Day, nearly double the number that ran in 2000, according to the Wisconsin Advertising Project, a research group sponsored by the University of Wisconsin.
The percentage of TV ads with misleading messages is also up from a record 50 percent set in the 1996 presidential race, Jamieson said.
"It was higher than that during the primary season, largely because the Bush campaign was running 75 percent of its ads on the attack and virtually every attack ad had at least one serious distortion," she said.
Deceptive politics has surged this year, as Republicans and Democrats marshal huge financial resources to the tasks of shoring up political bases and appealing to undecided voters.
SEPT. 11 ALTERS CAMPAIGN
Total spending on the presidential race by the two campaigns, the two major parties and a host of advocacy groups is expected to top $1.2 billion, the Center for Responsive Politics estimates.
Presidential historian Joan Hoff said this year's election campaign has also been skewed by an aura of fear created by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"There's simply been a move to the right on the part of all the media, including PBS (Public Broadcasting System), since Sept. 11," said Hoff, who teaches history at Montana State University.
"Just as they were reporting weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they're taking these ads and reporting them without much analysis or factual comment," she said.
FactCheck.org, the campaign watchdog Web site run by Jamieson's Annenberg Center, has logged nearly 100 misleading ads and other acts of misrepresentation by the two campaigns or their candidates this year.
The list runs the gamut from a Bush-Cheney ad warning that Kerry would throw America to the wolves to a Kerry-Edwards claim that Bush would cut Social Security.
On the whole, analysts say Bush's use of distortion has been more audacious than Kerry's. But the Massachusetts senator has left much of the dirty work to outside advocacy groups whom Jamieson blames for one of the most serious attacks of the campaign.
"You've got to come back to the 527 ads that accused the president of lying to take us into war. It's probably the most serious charge you can make," she said, referring to the so-called "527" groups that work independently from the candidates.
"But I don't think you can warrant that inference from the available evidence," she said. "So I think that is a deceptive claim."
The Wisconsin project noted the 527 group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth generated national controversy over Kerry's war record with a relatively small airing of 739 aggressive spots. The media attention they received was so widespread that the Kerry campaign was forced to publicly defend his record.
Reuters
Oct 27 2004 1:03PM
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Many of us are holding our noses and voting "the lesser of two evils", including myself.
But this, THIS is what American Politics has degenerated to.
Are we really better off throwing our votes to one of these two parties instead of voting what we know is right and going with someone else or are we just being pragmatic?
