CHAPTER 2
When one with honeyed words but evil mind
persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.
Campaign ads are the backbone of American democracy—if American democracy suffered a gigantic spinal injury.
--John Oliver
TEN TIPS FOR ETHICAL CAMPAIGN COMMUNICATIONS
Ethical campaigns are those that serve to create an informed electorate. It follows, then, that ethical campaign communications are those that are designed to inform voters about matters pertinent to their voting decision. It’s the campaign’s task to introduce the candidate and educate the voters about the candidate’s background, his or her positions on the issues, and how the candidate is different from the opponent. Even negative messaging about an opponent is ethical so long as the negative information is necessary for the voters to make an informed decision.
Accordingly, responsible communications are those that convey truthful information about you, about your opponent, and about the issues in the race. Ethical messaging also requires that the information being conveyed is fair and that it is relevant to the contest. Finally, in order to inform, you must let voters know where you stand. Ethical campaigns have substantive policy positions to back up soundbites made on the campaign trail.
Truthfulness
Deceptive messaging violates your duty to inform the voter about who you are, what you stand for, and how your positions differ from that of your opponent. Telling lies to your future constituents will also serve to reduce trust in you both as a candidate and as a public official once elected. Political lying also diminishes public trust in government in general.
Cornell Ethics Professor Dana Radcliff has identified why truth matters: He says, “From a moral point of view, what's wrong with deception is that it is a betrayal of trust. You cannot deceive someone unless they trust you, believing that you're being truthful with them. When you succeed in deceiving them, you exploit that trust, using that person for your own ends. In every domain of life, such betrayals weaken or destroy the trust relationships essential to our vital institutions, including (among others) marriage and family, business, education, and representative government.”24
Deceptive practices will harm your candidacy. In this day of fact checking organizations and internet research providing ready access to the truth, deceptive communications are quickly and loudly denounced. Ace Smith, a long time California political consultant said in a 2015 talk at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco that the chance of a campaign being outed as deceptive by social media and watch dog groups has resulted in more truthful campaigns.25 For the good of your campaign, you want to be counted in that number.
Should you get elected in spite of employing deceptive practices, your reputation will be damaged once your duplicity is revealed. If a large portion of the population thinks you are a liar, you will have a hard time convincing your constituents of the sincerity of your policy objectives. Likewise, your fellow office holders will be loath to trust you, hampering your ability to make progress. Finally, a political career based on a damaged reputation will undoubtedly be short lived.
In order to run an ethical campaign, you must be vigilant that all communications by you and those authorized by you are free of deception. Best practices require that your campaign fact check all assertions that will be made by you, and that you keep on file records of your research and all documentary evidence that backs up your assertions.
Often, however, with the advent of ever more powerful independent expenditure committees, a message going out to voters might not be initiated by your campaign, but rather by an outside group. What can you do in a situation where an outside group produces an unethical communication on your behalf?
Independent expenditure committees (known as I.E.s) are outside groups that support your candidacy and create campaign ads either supporting you or attacking your opponent. You do not have any control over the messaging by independent groups. In fact, it’s against the law for you to coordinate with them. What you can do is at the very outset of your campaign announce your commitment to truthful and substantive advertising. If an I.E. issues a communication that does not comport with your standards, it’s imperative that you immediately and publicly disavow the ad. Announce that you don’t approve of the message and that you disagree with the deceptive nature of its contents.
Fairness
Going into a campaign, most people have a moral understanding that it is wrong to outright lie. The problem is, most candidates don’t anticipate the ethical choices they will have to make about communications once the campaign is in full swing. Most campaign communications have at least a kernel of truth, but in the heat of the battle sometimes that kernel is wrapped in deception. Ethical candidates should be wary whenever they are asked to approve a communication that, while true on its face, creates an unfair inference. The following are examples of common tactics to watch out for:
Facts Out of Context: The most common way in which campaigns stretch the truth is to take true facts out of context. The prime example of this is citing an opponent’s roll call vote without the full history behind the vote. A legislator may have a record of voting a certain way on a certain policy. However at some point he or she may have cast a vote that in a vacuum looks contrary to that policy. This vote may have occurred because the legislator did not believe that the bill went far enough to achieve the policy. Or, a legislator may have to compromise his or her stance on a particular policy in order to pass a larger comprehensive bill on an essential funding matter. Regardless of the reason, the legislator’s opponent jumps on this isolated vote to proclaim that the legislator is against a prime policy of issue in the race. In all of these situations what the opponent claimed was true—the candidate did vote a certain way on a certain date—however the inference that the vote is reflective of the candidate’s record on the issue is deceptive.
Statements Out of Context: Votes are not the only thing taken out of context. Often you will see ads quoting the opponent in a negative fashion. While it may be true that the candidate did say the words, the context of the quote may not justify the inference that that the candidate is making about the opponent.
Deceptive Imagery: Visual imagery may also contribute to the deceptive nature of a communication. Even though the words are true, images are manipulated to falsely infer something negative about an opponent or something positive about the candidate. For example you may have seen unrelated pictures in an ad abutted together to falsely infer a relationship between the two. This is called deceptive framing. Using this tactic, political ads often wrongly infer guilt by association when a candidate’s picture is juxtaposed with the picture of someone presumably despised by the voters. The conclusion being prompted is that the opponent and the other pictured individual are ideologically aligned.
Photographic Alterations: Photo editing can be another way that political consultants might blatantly manipulate images in a deceptive manner. For example, the candidate’s image might be photo shopped into a picture with a highly respected person, thereby implying an endorsement when none has actually been given.
Visual Vilification: A regrettably favored tactic in a campaign is where a grossly unflattering photograph of an opponent is selected to underscore an attack and put the opponent in a bad light. You may ask why this is unethical. The answer is that a candidate’s appearance has nothing to do with the issues of the race. By using unflattering photographs the candidate is resorting to appealing to unconscious voter bias instead of informing the voters about the issues.
Native Political Advertising: “Native advertising” is defined by the Native Advertising Institute as, “paid advertising where the ad matches the form, feel and function of the content of the media on which it appears.”26 For example, a campaign might create a video that mimics the look of a television anchor delivering what appears to be a genuine news story. In other cases, campaigns have created “news” websites purporting to be an actual news outlet but with only sponsored content. The problem with these news-like videos, websites, and articles is that, unlike legitimate news stories, there is no independent investigation, no vetting of sources, no editors, and no unbiased reporting. By trying to pass these stories off as authentic news rather than political advertising, these campaigns are attempting to manufacture credibility. In other words, the pure intent of what is known as native political advertising is to deceive the voters about the origin of the piece.
This type of advertising is not illegal, so long as the videos or articles are marked as paid for by the specific political committee. But, as is often the case, the disclaimer is difficult to find. It is also a problem when the content, once read, gets shared over and over on social media as legitimate news. Just because something is legal, does not necessarily make it ethical. Attempting to deceive voters is always unethical regardless of the legality.
Relevance
Since ethical communications must serve to inform the electorate, it only follows that communications that are irrelevant to the issues facing the voters are inappropriate. We have all seen attack ads that talk about a candidate’s youthful indiscretions, private marital troubles, or problematic behavior on the part of a candidate’s family member or associate. The question of whether these types of attacks are relevant to the issues in the campaign is a tricky one. For example, we may not care if a politician is having an extramarital affair because it has arguably nothing to do with her capability to govern. However, if that same candidate is running on a family values platform, the issue of her fidelity might suddenly become relevant because the candidate is not being honest with the voters about her true stance on morality.
As another example, the fact that a known associate of a candidate has been indicted might be unethically used to imply that the candidate is guilty of wrong doing as well. Unless there is some direct, relevant connection between the associate’s wrongdoing, the candidate, and the issues in the race, the topic is irrelevant and therefore inappropriate.
The motivation behind these negative attacks is germane to whether the attacks are ethical. You as a candidate must ask yourself, Are the spots designed purely to appeal to voters' inherent bias or is the content in the ad pertinent to a legitimate interest in the race. L. Sandy Maisel in the essay Candidates: Promises and Persuasion advises candidates to ask themselves:
Maisel also proposes that candidates should consider the impact that negative attack ads have on democracy. Studies have shown that negative attacks not only have the intended effect of lowering trust in the target of the attack, but also have the consequence of lowering trust in the attacker. Maisel concludes, the overall result is increased public disapproval of politicians as a group and of the political process in general.28
Substance
There has been a troubling trend in recent years where candidates are being advised to provide as little information as possible regarding their policy solutions. The purported idea is to allow the candidate’s positions to evolve during the course of the campaign which is hampered if the positions are “engraved in stone.” The actual reason for being less than forthright about positions is to avoid creating a record of ideas with which the electorate can find fault. In other words, these candidates are being advised not to give their opponents ammunition they can use in an attack or a reason for voters to say no.
Failure to disclose positions, however, is the antithesis to the ideal of creating an informed electorate. Above all else, campaigns should be about the clash of ideas not a battle of personalities. The ethical campaign has written position statements presented in substance, not soundbites, on the campaign website. The ethical candidate responds in detail to interviewers and doesn’t dodge debate questions. Many ethical candidates engage with their voters in town hall campaign events, taking questions from the audience. They also create blog posts communicating directly to the voters about their ideas.
Develop your arguments and have the strength of your convictions. Voters may not agree with you on all of your positions, but on balance they can make an informed decision about how you will perform in office. You also avoid the adverse consequences of a shallow campaign—which is that voters refuse to vote for you because they don’t know where you truly stand on the issues.