Let's not allow politicians and their allies to get away with misleading the voters in this election

With one month left before the election, it's time for all news media to help voters sort through the blizzard of misleading and sometimes outright false television and radio commercials, which seem to be heavier than ever this year. UPDATE: The Washington Post says so.

This task has long been done by major newspapers, but they do less of it these days. A few TV stations do it, but their reports come and go quickly and are not prominently placed or well promoted. It's time, long past time, for smaller newspapers to join the fray. Many if not most of their readers don't read metropolitan papers, and weekly papers carry little news about statewide races, so their readers are more dependent on TV, which inundates them with ads but offers little substantive coverage or analysis.


It is possible to serve readers, listeners and viewers without spending a lot of time researching the issues, because two reliable, national organizations are doing a good job of it and are reliable sources of information for anyone to cite. Check out FactCheck.org and Politifact.com. Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and is run by Brooks Jackson, a former reporter for CNN and The Wall Street Journal. Politicfact, which won a Pulitzer Prize last year, is a service of the St. Petersburg Times but like FactCheck looks at ads in many states. And even if those ads aren't in your state, they are probably making some of the misleading claims being made in your state. (Image from Politifact)

FactCheck's latest posting looks at ads being run in several states by American Crossroads, the group founded by former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove. The ads "attack Democrats running for Senate seats in Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, Nevada, Missouri and New Hampshire," Viveca Novak writes. "The ads contain a number of misleading and false claims," including one in Ohio that says the economic stimulus didn't create jobs. It did fail to keep unemployment below 8 percent, as President Obama said it would. Politifact analyzes not just ads, but politicians' statements, and its latest post, by Angie Drobnic Holan, says Obama exaggerated his record on his campaign promises in a "friendly interview" with Rolling Stone.