USA: Political lies forced on electorate

Truth in Advertising? Not for Political Ads - TIME

"Mendacity in commercial advertising can also carry a steep financial price. In 2007, the FTC fined four diet-pill manufacturers $25 million for making false claims about their products.

Candidates are not held to the same commercial standard, and the reason is simple: their statements and advertisements are considered "political speech," which falls under the protection of the First Amendment. The noble idea undergirding what otherwise seems like a political loophole is the belief that voters have a right to uncensored information on which to base their decisions. Too often, however, the result is a system in which the most distorted information comes from the campaigns themselves. And as this year's presidential race is showing, that presents an opportunity for a candidate willing to go beyond simple distortions and exaggerations by making repeated and unapologetic use of objectively false statements.

But it's not just that candidates are allowed to launch unfounded attacks against their opponents or make false claims about their own records. Broadcasters are actually obligated to run their ads, even those known to be false. Under the Federal Communications Act, a station can have a blanket policy of refusing all ads from all candidates. But they cannot single out and decline to air a particular commercial whose content they know to be a lie.

In one of the earliest famous cases dealing with the issue, the NAACP objected to a 1972 political ad from a U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia named J.B. Stoner who was running on the National States Rights Party ticket. Stoner called himself a "white racist," and his ad said the "main reason why niggers want integration is because niggers want our white women." The Federal Communications Commission forced stations in Atlanta to accept the ad, citing freedom-of-speech protections."