The Arkansas Senate race between Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor and Republican Rep. Tom Cotton began for us in June 2013 — just six months into the new Congress — with an article that carried the headline “It’s Groundhog Day for Fact-Checkers.” It hasn’t gotten much better for fact-checkers since then.
FlackCheck.org, our sister website for political literacy, looks at two recent political campaign ads that mislead viewers using common patterns of deception.
An ad from Rep. Bill Cassidy attacks his Democratic opponent, Sen. Mary Landrieu, for not “fully funding veterans benefits,” even though he voted for the House version of a bipartisan budget bill that included those very same cuts.
Competing ads from the leading candidates in the Louisiana Senate race play politics with the immigration issue and leave misleading impressions about the candidates’ positions.
An ad from Sen. Mark Pryor inaccurately claims that Rep. Tom Cotton “voted to cut funding for the border protection.”
In discussing his decision to send the National Guard to the Mexico border, Texas Gov. Rick Perry repeatedly has misused data on “criminal aliens” arrested in Texas.
An ad from Republican Rep. Tom Cotton cherry-picks a quote and several votes to distort Sen. Mark Pryor’s position on border security.
Q: Did the Obama administration advertise in January to transport 65,000 foreign children apprehended at the border? Did it expect a surge of illegal immigration?
A: Yes. There’s been a sharp increase in unaccompanied children from Central America since FY 2012, and the U.S. projected a bigger increase this year.
In the Georgia Republican Senate runoff, Rep. Jack Kingston is falsely claiming that his opponent, David Perdue, “sat on a board promoting amnesty for illegal immigrants.”
Rick Santorum said that the United States is “accepting more legal immigrants than we ever have.” Actually, the number of people being granted lawful permanent resident status has decreased consecutively for two fiscal years.