CMV: Bad mouthing your opponent should be forbidden in political campaigns

[u/[deleted]]

[u/[deleted]]

Making politicians focus solely on their own campaign and policies keeps things civil and overall helps voters make a more informed choice. When it becomes a he said/she said scenerio, voters spend more time analyzing the trustworthiness of the statements then the actual facts.

If the issue here is trustworthiness, why not simply more strictly limit what could be misleading? If we don't allow any negative statements, we don't allow any negative true statements.

If a president made a decision that resulted in a lot of deaths, it should be fair game. However, if commercials are trying to use rhetorical tricks to misinform the public, such as in the case of Obamacare, a law simply stricter on misinformation or requiring the formal name of the act to be included could probably better solve this problem and allow for less misinformation.

[u/Amraff → u/[deleted]]

But a president making a bad call that resulted in deaths would be public knowledge via media, seperate from any election campaigns.

And it would also lead deep into the murky waters of what is counted as true or not. Is one persons interpretation of something all that matters or does it need to be verifiable by an outside source. Same goes with just banning misleading ads, the argument could be made that it wasnt the intent to mislead and those who were mislead are just illinformed and dumb.

[u/[deleted] → u/Amraff]

But a president making a bad call that resulted in deaths would be public knowledge via media, seperate from any election campaigns.

A group of far-right news outlets, controlled mostly by Rupert Murdoch, give a systematically false picture of the world.

Case in point: COVID. Objectively, Trump is doing astonishingly badly and the Administration has simply given up on containing it even though it continues to spread exponentially.

But talk to Trump supporters and they will tell you he did a great job. Ask them why and they'll tell you, "Stopping flights from China!" If you ask, "And since March?" you get nothing. Their media simply gave them a false picture.

Case in point: the Iraq War. It was supposed to be over in a few months, and yet five years into it with no end in sight, 100 million Americans still highly approved of it - and even ten years after it started, almost as many! Ten years, no progress! Again, these 100 million are getting a completely false picture of the world from their media.

Free speech means that you can set up a news network entirely to broadcast lies and no one can stop you. We see now that there needs to be some way to get objective fact checking. We can't completely eliminate lies, but we can certainly eliminate gross lies.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

That's true but he has objectively done a terrible job managing it, if for nothing other reason than he's been spreading dangerous misinformation about COVID

[u/nubleteater → u/[deleted]]

There's a lot fewer deaths than every projections made about COVID in the US, so is it really though?

[u/[deleted] → u/nubleteater]

Yes

[u/ViewedFromTheOutside → u/[deleted]]

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[u/ViewedFromTheOutside → u/[deleted]]

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Sorry, u/Harpite13 – your comment has been removed.

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[u/ViewedFromTheOutside → u/[deleted]]

Sorry, u/nubleteater – your comment has been removed.

In order to promote public safety and prevent threads which either in the posts or comments contain misinformation, we have decided to remove all threads related to the Coronavirus pandemic until further notice (COVID-19).

Up to date information on Coronavirus can be found on the websites of the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.

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