Op-Ed: Misleading political TV ads are filling up California’s ‘news deserts’
The California airwaves have become a wasteland of disinformation in recent months, courtesy of political TV ads, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Times notes that in the state, political ads are now on the air roughly three times as often as they were four years ago; and now, a third of the ads are negative in nature.
“This is a sea change in the political advertising landscape,” the Times reports. Not only do campaign ads now appear on a regular basis, but they are far more “negative and misleading,” meaning they are not simply factual but rather misleading, according to the newspaper.
What’s left?
For one, most voters rarely see any ads (if they’re any at all), which means they are seeing less and less of the type of ads the media says are so prevalent, according to the Times.
In just the last week, voters in the city of Los Angeles discovered why the state of California is ranked No. 10 in the USA Today report of worst places to live, according to the report.
The fact is that Los Angeles has the highest percentage of elderly or disabled people in the nation. And to make matters worse for the city’s citizens, according to the Times, many people do not have the proper or legal access to health care, making them vulnerable to illnesses like diabetes and heart disease.
Meanwhile, residents of Los Angeles see more frequent ads from corporations and their political donors, according to the Times.
Not only did Los Angeles see ads that were misleading, the Times said that “more than half” of the ads the paper reviewed were “stoking voter fears through fear mongering attacks on political rivals and promoting a political agenda.”
The ads included ones that suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was proposing a government-run health care system and that President Donald Trump would impose a national immigration ban.
The Times concluded with the following:
“In the end, the ad won’t change the outcome of the election. But as the Los Angeles Times says