Political ads

I just watched a great program called Up Front with Robert Mak. The program reviewed several political ads making a rotation over the last few weeks, and gave information about whether the claims made in the ads were plausable.

The one that interested me most was one from George Nethercutt. He has been showing an ad of one of our current senators, Patty Murray, giving a speech at a school. In the ad, he shows a short clip of her explaining that Osama bin Laden has built roads, schools, hospitals, etc. and has made people's lives better. I was immediately suspicious about the context from which the clip came. Patty Murray is a wonderful senator and I knew that she couldn't possibly be making a statement that she liked Osama bin Laden. I had a feeling that it must have come from a larger analysis of why people follow bin Laden, which is something we desperately need to do to understand how to combat the problem at the source.

In the program, they asked Nethercutt whether he had taken her content out of context, and he said that he had watched the whole tape of her appearance at the school and did not take that clip out of context. Thankfully, Up Front showed over a minute of Patty Murray's speech from that day and I found out that my intuition was right. The statements that Nethercutt shows in the ad is just a short section from which Murray was talking about how to deal with situations such as the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The full context of what she was saying about bin Laden specifically, was why people follow him. She pointed out that he has done certain things to make their lives better, and in areas that are so poor, a little bit goes a long way. She compared the cost of the war in those areas to the cost of building infrastructure there - both of which are very expensive tasks, but one of which would help to win the people (by giving them things that they desperately need) and that wouldn't cost lives. She admits that it's not a simple question to answer, but asks the students to think about alternatives and consequences to our current path.

I'm glad that Up Front showed a larger clip of her talk because I think it's important to know what these politicians are trying to pull over on us. All of the ads they showed had some questionable facts or statements to them, so it's just a good reminder to ignore the spin and look at the people and what they do when you're making a decision.