SPOKANE, Wash. — In the heat of election season, there are many political commercials airing on KREM and other stations.
Some of you have asked us: How can KREM run political ads on our air that are false or misleading
That is a fair question and the answer has a few different layers.
First, political spots can be divided into two categories: Candidate ads and Ads from third parties. The law treats each type differently.
Candidate Ads
Spots that are sponsored by legally qualified candidates for political office, or their official campaign committees, have special legal protections.
The Communications Act, written way back in 1934, says stations cannot refuse these ads. It doesn’t matter if the ads are untrue or even defamatory. If it’s from a candidate, it has to air.
The only exceptions to this law are if the ad is legally obscene or if it somehow commits a federal felony.
Third-Party Ads
Ads that are run by third parties, such as Political Action Committees, are not protected by the same law.
This means stations can legally refuse to air them but they usually do not. One reason why? Those decisions are not made in the newsroom. They are made in the sales department, a completely separate entity. Even then, the sales department’s decisions are subject to approval of the big bosses at the station’s parent company.
Now if that sounds like a cop-out, fair enough. Here’s another reason why we still don’t really pull third-party ads: By pulling an ad, we would esentially be declaring that the whole thing is false.
But the truth, of course, does not really work that way. It is more complicated than that. That is why we prefer to fact check so we can give you the whole story.
Here are some of our most recent political ad fact checks:
