Tag Archives: Atlanta

Lying in political ads is legal. Really.

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Guest column by Noel Holston

Athens, Georgia — Throughout the day, and especially around evening news time, Atlanta’s commercial television stations are bombarding viewers in the greater metro area with paid political advertising. The primaries for Georgia governor, U.S. Senate and other races are just three weeks away.

One spot in particular jumps out. Former President Donald Trump, in a voice-over, endorses David Perdue for Georgia governor over incumbent Brian Kemp. Trump derides Kemp for refusing to find him the votes to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 and for failing to exercise his supposed authority to simply throw out the ballots.

This is, of course, a bald-faced lie — indeed, part of the “Big Lie” that is even now being investigated by a U.S. House select committee.

Mainstream media ads also amplify The Big Lie.

Even as a grand jury convenes in Atlanta to determine whether Trump criminally interfered in the election when he phoned Kemp and pressured him to alter election results.

Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, both Republicans who themselves had voted for Trump, simply declined to exercise powers that didn’t have. They refused to ignore recounts and facts. They refused to cheat.

But still the ad runs and runs, with Trump kvetching about what was “stolen” from him and his supporters.

How can this be? How can these TV stations keep showing attack ads that make claims that their own news anchors, both local guys and their respective network counterparts, routinely mention only with the modifiers “false” or “baseless”? Is there no “truth in advertising” requirement?

Short answer: No.

At least not where political advertising is concerned.

I emailed my concern about this a couple of days ago to WXIA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Atlanta that I most often watch for news. What can I say? I have a crush on Andrea Mitchell.

A WXIA representative got back to me this afternoon. Here’s the reply. I’m guessing you did not know this:

“The Federal Communications Commission’s political broadcast rules actually prohibit television stations from refusing or altering political advertising from any legally qualified candidate,” WXIA’s spokesperson said.

“More specifically, the FCC says that a person who has publicly announced his or her intention to run for nomination or office, is qualified to run under the appropriate federal, state or local laws to run and has met all of the other necessary qualifications to run for and hold the office they are seeking, is permitted to purchase political advertising time within 45 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general or special election in which that person is a candidate.

“Additionally, television stations cannot censor or alter the content of political ads being run in any way. The ads must be run in their original form — even if their content differs from the ordinary program content that the station would regularly air.

“A station is also prohibited from rejecting a political ad from a candidate, despite its content. As a result, broadcast stations are not responsible for the content of those particular political ads, even if the content may be demonstrably false or defamatory in nature.” (bold italics mine)

So, even if Trump accused Brian Kemp of sheep shagging or Kemp said Trump and Perdue are having an affair, the Atlanta stations would be obligated to televise their ads uncut. And so, in similar situations, would all other federally licensed commercial TV stations in other parts of the country, including yours.

And we worry what Elon Musk is going to do with Twitter.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his insights and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.

Mass Murder and Illegals: Another Week Just Like Every Other Week

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The only remarkable thing about two of the USA’s most long-running and unresolvable “crises” colliding in the same moment is that it is no surprise at all. Incidents of yet another psycho buying an assault rifle one day and killing a dozen people the next and the chaos of migrants piling up at the southern border are as routine features of American life as traffic jams and beer commercials.

In large part this explains why I at least no longer have any outrage to give. I hope you’re different, but I can’t work up the energy any longer to fume and rant to … who? … demanding “they” do something. Based on how the system works today, I know and I suspect you know, nothing of any lasting significance will be done with either crisis.

This isn’t to say the Biden Administration will not make a good faith effort and try. But both guns and migration require resolutions to issues beyond what elected American officials are capable of dealing with.

On the matter of guns, we all know the basic statistics. There are more guns in circulation than there are people in the United States. Citizens of the U.S. own 47% of the world’s privately-owned firearms. Our death-by-gun-violence is double the next worst country, which lately is … Yemen. The highest percentage of household gun ownership is in rural areas and small towns, and in the Midwest and South. The lowest is in large metropolitan areas of the East and West coasts. Whites own more than twice as many guns as non-whites. Older white men, Republicans and self-described conservatives are most likely to own a gun. And the majority say they own a gun, not for “sport” and hunting as we so often hear, but for “protection.”

To help you with the math on that one, based on the 2010 census, 6.7 million Americans owned something in the range of 140 million guns. And that was 10 years ago. Before the pandemic set off another wild buying spree among the same crowd … for reasons of … protection … against?

And — always my favorite statistic — 3% of these self-protecting gun aficionados own, wait for it … half … of the guns in circulation.

Killing the filibuster might … might … allow a bill on universal background checks to pass. That might at least stop flat-out lunatic time bombs like the guys in Atlanta and Boulder from walking out of a gun shop any morning they wanted and start shooting up massage parlors and grocery stores that afternoon. Even Joe Manchin of hard-protectin’ West Virginny is on record saying he supports gun control to that minimum extent. But at the first whisper that background checks are coming, gun sales will spike again. All the aging white guys in rural America convinced that (usually dark-skinned) killers are lining up to bust through their bedroom windows, will add another half dozen “ARs” to their arsenal.

My personal solution to gun “enthusiasts” has long been … ridicule. I’m not a licensed psychologist, nor do I play one on TV, but in my humble experience over lo these many years kicking around rural ‘Murica and wrangling with gun “lovers” on social media, 99% of self-describing “gun rights” advocates come with the distinctive odor of sexual insecurity and inadequacy.

Self defense and the need to “protect my family” doesn’t quite explain why gun ownership, much less multiple gun ownership, is for many if not most of older, white, male, rural, conservative Americans the #1 issue in any political discussion. And why their reaction to any … any … attempt to regulate gun and ammo sales is like they’ve learned Hillary Clinton is coming with a chain saw for their junk.

Me, I’d launch a PSA campaign. (I defer to Mr. Loveland on how best to coordinate this.) Thousands of TV ads, with actual psychologists, celebrities and indisputable statistics laying out the roots of the tortured fantasies of dominance and heroism these “enthusiasts” are forcing us all to labor under. Create an entertaining zeitgeist that turns buffoonish Oath Keeper/Proud Boy machismo into a cultural punch line. It’s often said such people are arming up for a culture war. Well, give it to them, in a way that bullets don’t matter.

In other words, treat fools as the fools they are.

Immigration, often the #2 “crisis” for the same crowd and a regular excuse for adding to their arsenals, requires a response both to climate change and the epic corruption of Banana Republics. The current wave has roots in not one but two hurricanes in a month destroying homes and crops last fall, a crisis that compounded the usual drug-driven gang violence of places like Honduras and Guatemala.

Since I doubt Libertarians like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are ever going to re-think America’s “war on drugs”, the only viable solution to convincing all these people to stay at home is to pour ungodly amounts of U.S. money into rebuilding homes, infrastructure and farmlands … without losing most of it into the pockets of tin pot dictators and the drug gangs — most armed with cheap American guns — that often keep them in office.

Keeping assault rifles out of the hands of psychos exdecising their precious Second Amendment rights may be the easier of the two.