Here’s another example of the campaign press’s now-widely observed penchant for setting up false equivalencies between actions of the two campaigns — this one in today’s front-page Times story by Jim Rutenberg, “Scary Ads Take Campaign to a Grim New Level.”
Rutenberg offers a pair of examples of what he calls the two campaigns’ “pushing the limits” in their ads:
“As Election Day nears, they are increasingly provocative and hard-hitting no matter the subject, from Mr. Bush asserting in a commercial that Mr. Kerry is proposing a government takeover of health care (widely judged to be a gross exaggeration by nonpartisan analysts and journalists), to Mr. Kerry’s recent advertisement in which a female announcer says brightly, ‘There are many reasons to be hopeful about America’s future,’ before delivering the punch line, ‘and one of them is that Election Day is coming.’ “
What am I missing here? I haven’t seen either of these ads, so all I have to go on is Rutenberg’s descriptions. On the one hand, we have a Bush ad that makes a statement that is quite plainly a falsehood, and that even the reporter painfully notes is considered a “gross exaggeration.” On the other hand we have a Kerry ad that, uh, let’s see, says that Election Day is coming and we have a chance to vote against the other guy.
On the one hand a lie, on the other an innocuous observation that we may soon see a change in administration.
These are equivalent examples of “pushing the limits”?
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.