Cleaning Up Political Campaigns
Sunday, April 27th, 1997In other words, well over 90% of the electorate never hear the candidate accuse his or her opponent of anything, never hear the candidate sling mud, never hear the candidate trot out misleading statistics or distortions of their opponents’ records, because 90% of the electorate never hear the candidate at all. What they hear is what the media reports about what the candidates said, and what the media has accepted for airing as paid advertising.
Improving campaign ethics, then, is in large part as simple as getting the editors and ad managers for the local media to adopt their own ‘code of fair campaign practices’, the primary and fundamental rule of which would be:
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Refuse to report (or pass through, in the form of advertising) what candidates and their supporters say about their opponents’ records, characters, positions, or politics unless and until they disclose the specific source(s) of their allegations.