FEC requires campaign advertising to be run by candidates without any relevance to truth and factual advertising. This is damaging to voters’ ability to soundly evaluate candidates in a timely and thoughtful manner. An uninformed or misinformed electorate is a threat to the Republic.
For example, some commercials claimed a candidate “proposed” and “voted” on issues that they never did because that candidate never had held elected office. Citations at the bottom of the cited think tanks.
Upon first glance, it would appear this commercial would be censorship. However, there already are prohibitions on certain advertising by certain industries now and in the past.
Campaigns can still occur through the internet, mail, text abilities. All of these media allow the viewer to review the material in ways not possible through television advertising.
This may be detrimental to some third party candidates who allow current FEC rules to run their ads without prohibition on content to spread their message.
Yet again, television advertising is much more expensive than other media.
Overall, this policy:
- allows for more thoughtful consideration of candidates
- allows for checks and verifications (many commercials today cannot be found online)
- fact checking enables better speech to be created if correction is required