WASHINGTON - For the past two election cycles, news organizations have devoted increasing resources to fact-checking political claims. The past week vividly demonstrated the limits of that effort.
Two campaign ads - one from each side, both misleading in several respects - occupied much of the week's political discussion.
An ad by Mitt Romney's campaign charged that a decision by President Obama would "gut" welfare reform. An ad by the "super PAC" supporting Obama linked Romney to the cancer death of a woman whose husband lost his health insurance after Romney's firm bought the steel mill where he worked.
Both ads were labeled as untrue by fact-checking groups. At week's end, both campaigns appeared unabashed.
Many Democrats, in fact, have reveled in the evidence that their side could be as "tough" as the Republicans, who in past campaigns were perceived by Democrats as being more willing to stretch the truth to make a political point.
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"We're in a new phase: Fact-checking alone is not enough. The campaigns seem able to override it," said New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who has studied how journalists attempt to referee campaigns.
Indeed, with the ad about the cancer death, the Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA Action, appeared to have gone the fact-checkers one better - exploiting attention to the ad's veracity to get free air time for a spot that has not appeared anywhere as a paid commercial.
The ad has been replayed extensively on television news segments that have debated it and has been viewed more than half a million times on YouTube. The largest number of views have come from five states - California and four election battlegrounds, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, according to Priorities.
The Democratic super PAC has raised considerably less money than its Republican counterpart, making the free publicity particularly valuable.
Asked whether the prospect of controversy leading to free publicity was part of the calculation, Paul Begala, senior adviser to Priorities, did not hesitate.
"Absolutely," he said. "We're provocateurs."
"It's a new wrinkle on an old technique," said Tom Rosenstiel of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, who noted that in the 1964 race, Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign used a similar ploy to gain extensive coverage of an ad that juxtaposed a little girl pulling daisy petals with the countdown to an atom-bomb explosion. That ad, designed to suggest that Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater, was a warmonger, only aired once as a commercial.
Then as now, "the underlying goal is to make your opponent deny something he didn't want to have to bring up," Rosenstiel said.
Meantime, the Romney campaign's ad, which has aired extensively in swing states, claims that Obama has "quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements" put into place in 1996 under President Bill Clinton. "Under Obama's plan, you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check."
Romney has echoed those claims in speeches this week.
In fact, the administration announced July 12 that it would consider requests from states that want to experiment with ways to find "more effective mechanisms for helping families succeed in employment."
Five states, including Utah and Nevada, both with Republican governors, had asked for that flexibility.
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