including our neighbors in maine and massachusetts. new hampshire's law is less clear though. so in 2006, a republican majority legislature including bob clegg passed a bill that would clearly establish a castle doctrine in this state. ayotte and members of law enforcement opposed the bill and democratic governor john lynch vetoed it, thus preventing it from becoming law. the second claim from clegg involves a series of arrests five years ago. >> she even stopped our local police from arresting illegals when they broke the law. >> so is it true or false? this one is false. in 2005, a new ipswich police chief made national headlines when he arrested illegal immigrants and charged them with trespassing in the country. a district court judge threw out the charge and ruled that it was unconstitutional for local police to enforce federal law. ayotte didn't appeal the ruling and she issued a statement saying law officials should not make future arrests for criminal

trespassing based solely on the defendant's immigration status. but if we're getting into semantics in a highly produced 30-second ad, every word counts, ayotte didn't actually stop anyone from making arrests if they wanted to continue making arrests. it should be noted that that new ipswich police chief is now supporting ayotte and issued a statement saying that he disagreed with the ad. checking out the truth for wmur political scoop, i'm james bindle. >> so maybe that line on your bio is right. maybe most of it is false. thank you all for doing that. gosh, a whole bunch of follow-up questions. and one of the things i'd like greg, you might want to address, is what about the viewership? what about the impact on the viewer? are -- is your audience receptive to these? >> do they get a reaction out of it?

>> what does it do to your ratings? >> i'll get to the ratings in a second. a lot of what we do, people don't react to. i mean, i do stories every single day and i don't get a single e-mail about it. a couple of stories a week, i'll do something and then i'll get people, you know, logging on to wesh.com to go to my e-mail address or because they communicated with me before, they'll send me an e-mail and say i agreed with that or i didn't whatever the story is. when we do truth tests we get three dozen is a good round number as a typical response. if it's a democrat leaning organization or a democrat attacking a republican and we find most of the claims to be false, then obviously, you know, i get e-mails from half of those people that say, oh, you must be a democrat. and then consequently, if conservative groups and republican candidates attack falsely, democrat opponents and

we find those claims to be false then somebody calls up and says, you must be a republican. so of course, all these people have to do is go to the supervisor of elections and find out which party affiliation i am. but the fact of the matter is it gets reaction. people are very well tuned into what is being thrown into their tv sets in their living rooms. they want to see how we treat it. and they usually react to it. now, usually we do not do any overnight promotion for a truth test although it does typically take us a day as pat was saying, it typically takes us a day to do the writing. we don't do a lot of overnight promotion of a truth test. we have done that a couple times. i'll tell you about that. from the noon program on, we promote at 6:15, which is our time slot for a truth test, we have a truth test coming up.

when we looked at in the months of september and october of 2010, on the nights that we aired a dozen truth tests in our 6:00 news, on those nights, our rating was up 6% and our share was up 5%. on one particular night in which we aired a -- an ad by then congressional -- he was a congressman allan grayson he did an ad called stairway to nowhere in which he accused the guy who beat him, dan webster, of authorizing a spiral staircase in the house speaker's office when he was the house speaker in florida. it was a stairway to nowhere. we found -- we obtained a photo from the guy who's in charge of photos in the house in tallahassee of the staircase that's actually in a closet. we promoted that overnight and it got a plug in the "orlando sentinel."

on that particular night, we did a 7.0 rating, about a 32% jump in our newscast. >> there is reaction. pat, we were talking about this earlier. you guys do such a good job and a thorough job in vetting these things out. clearly, as not that it surprises any of us, so much of it is false. does what you do, does it ever have an impact on the sales side in terms of the station saying, we're not going to do it, we're not going to run it? >> two answers to that. number one, i'm discouraged to say that i don't know it has an impact at all on the politicians although our -- the reaction from the public is very similar to orlando and i imagine in new hampshire, as well. there is a fiery reaction generally when we do these and the ratings go up. but i have never known us to

pull an ad nor, to my knowledge, has a candidate changed an ad based on what we do. there has been a change in behavior over the last 20 years, and that is that the candidates now in advance provide us with all of the source material for their advertisement. and that's the biggest change that i see. and we can go and fact check all of those now. but that's the biggest change. the short answer is no. >> james, we talked before about the challenges to doing this, even large stations certainly smaller stations with smaller staffs, maybe single staffs, doing this can be even more challenging. walk us through that. i mean, what -- how do you deal with the pressure to get this kind of thing done and get the workload accomplished?

>> when it's discussed we should be doing a fact check, we basically try to get it as quickly as possible from when it begins to air. then it's well how quickly can we get it done. there are hard deadlines eventually but while i'm doing my other duties, you know, a day or two to actually make this happen. then obviously as part of the team, which is very helpful. the lag time is when you are talking to campaigns. all right? or talking to the third parties to try to figure out where they're coming from. actually, when you have the material they use, you can then evaluate it and make your other phone calls. the biggest lag time for me is frankly getting campaigns or getting the sponsors of those ads to give me their source material. i mean, sometimes it's on their ads. in terms of resources, it's something that the station really wants to put in. i should say this because we're here, but you know, i know my

station and i know myself we stand on the shoulders of what brooks jackson have done and upenn, and i thank them so much because it's legitimized it and makes it easier to do and you folks it makes it easier to do in terms of to see the importance to the station. so in terms of resources, it's just a matter of going through your checklist and trying to find just a couple one or two facts that could easily be fact checked like that. >> pat, you were referring to some of what you do as quick strike material. three or four-hour productions. >> it's difficult for us to gather everybody for two days. that's the cost factor again. we used to, when we first began doing this, we had a graphic artist dedicated to this. we don't have that anymore. we used to have a producer on the days we did realty check dedicated to helping research so there would be two of us and then i wouldn't have to be on the air that day.

that has gone away. so this is generally, i'm the one who does the research and we have one person who does final cut editing on this. that makes a big difference. slight something that's slightly different that we do is that when it is a commercial, we have found it's sometimes helpful to let it run for a few days so that people know what we're talking about, and then we do it three, four, five days later and get a bigger reaction. we tried it both ways. similarly, i'll be covering a tax committee hearing in the afternoon and i might be at a political event at night. and then i do radio during the day, political radio and so there's so many different things that we have to do that we have to actually dedicate the time which is what my management again thankfully is doing during this coming election. >> let me -- if i can add to that, we do that also at wesh. we want the ad to run for a few days. when we first started doing

truth tests, once we started getting into it, we were like wow, as soon as that ad gets on the air, we're going to have the truth test done by 6:00. it started airing at 11:00 a.m., and after awhile, we were thinking people are not getting a chance to digest what the content of the ad is. these ads are typically hard to follow anyway. if we don't give it a chance to breathe, like a good bottle of wine, they're not going to be able to soak in what we're telling them is true or not true about it. so typically we like to try to let it run for a few days and then we go after it and start researching it. >> questions from the audience? harry, we'll start with you. >> let me get this straight. so you find that the ad is false but the station continues to air it after you find out it's false? >> go ahead. >> i would love to answer that because that is the most difficult question that i have. and we heard from a questioner

the center for responsive politics over here. that was a great question because that is the number one question i get. we don't find an entire ad false. we find one thing might be. there might be something that's half false, half true and you've got to the decide what that is. but yeah, that is for me journalistically and ethically what i wonder about all the time. now, my news director and the people who run our station might feel differently that there is a reasonable, this is within the realm of political debate, within the boundaries of reasonableness and truthiness that it goes ahead and it runs. and yet, this is something that i think about every time i do one of these. and they're not all false. but parts of them are. >> i'll ask quickly either of you two guys ever see one taken off the air after what you do? >> after what we've done?

we actually, i want to say, i think this was in the 2006 cycle, we actually found a couple of ads that had some material in them that caused the -- because these were from the candidate, they weren't from a third party group and the candidate agreed with our assessment and they made a slight change and reissued the ad within a couple of days. that hasn't happened since that time. so you're talking about ancient history now, six years ago. have we removed an ad since the 2010 cycle that's come from a third party? i can't remember one. >> we actually spend a lot of time, something i'm not involved in, but they spend a lot of time before they even go on the air. i know there are a few examples where it did not appear on the air the first time so they were never pulled back. >> interesting. other questions? yes, sir. >> just to follow up on that, i mean, i guess my reading of the social science research is that

your best chance to actually change somebody's mind who is affected by these ads is when they've immediately heard it, and if you do leave it going for a few days, the chance -- the cognitive -- the chance of you having any effect on the viewers is relatively low. so i guess i'm just in terms of what you're trying to do in terms of educating people, it seems like a challenging strategy. >> what pat and i were saying, a lot of these buys have an ad or similar ads. don't forget, we get one version of an ad in week one of may. we may get the second which is in the third week of may which is just a slightly twisted version of ad number one. ad number one, a, b. so we want people to be able to see it for a few days so they can get an idea of what it is attempting to say or they will have no understanding of what we're trying to tell them, even in those twos truth tests i

showed you, they were three minutes long, about three times as long as a story i typically put on the air. so we're trying to give them a lot of explanation but it doesn't do any good if they don't understand what they've been looking at. >> also, tell me if i'm right or if i'm wrong, but it's my understanding that our viewers, voters, must see something many times before they do grok it, before they do understand it. is it 16 times that a commercial runs before someone actually believes it or does not believe it? that's not a reason that we do it, but we just feel intuitively and journalistically to do it without people having seen it and we have hundreds of thousands of viewers who may not have seen it, that it doesn't make sense in context with what we're doing, but i take your point, which is a good one. >> those viewers are watching in different day parts. you've got to give them an

opportunity to see it, maybe run it midday but somebody that watches it the in evening may not have had a chance to see it. >> sometimes it will run after i do my reality check. >> that's the one thing we try to be careful of, make sure it doesn't run the commercial break before we do the truth test. >> yes, sir, in the back. >> matt hindman. i want to follow up on that point. partly because i think that the social science research on this is, in fact, i think, even more discouraging. i think that much of the research over the past four or five years suggests for precisely the reasons you're suggesting that repeating false claims tends to reinforce them. they're very difficult to actually to debunk. so one of the things that concerns me with some of these -- with some of these fact check segments, and i understand this is a really tough catch 22, is it strikes me that many of these segments are likely to

reinforce the claims that ostensibly you're trying to debunk. so for example, if i was a campaign manager running against bill nelson, i would be thrilled with that fact checking segment. partly because of the images, because it presents nelson as weak. and partly because it simply repeats the claim over and over again. so what we see again and again with field experiments is that when you repeat a false claim about a candidate and then say, this claim isn't true, you go back to people later and ask them, well, what do you know about bill nelson and they'll repeat the false statement even if they've seen the debunking segment. so this is -- and so there are specific tactics we can do to somewhat lessen that, but and, of course, we do want to provide accountability, but at the same time, i think this is -- i think in some of these specific segments, what you're really

doing is doing additional damage to candidates that have been unfairly attacked. >> i'll answer that simply by explaining to you that if you want, afterwards i can get your e-mail address and i can forward you this e-mail response from the campaign manager for bill nelson who took and a web link to our video of that truth test and he forwarded it to all major media around the country. so they -- now, i will tell you if we came out and said every claim in that ad was true, i wouldn't have gotten a contact from that guy. but as the previous panel, and i believe the panel before that pointed out if i was listening correctly, the candidates when they are slammed and we pick out distortions, they're quick to embrace us. you know, if their opponent gets four pinocchios from the "washington post," you know, they're quick to stand up and

say see, look at that, they've been lying about me all along. when you find four pinocchios against the candidate they say i think we have to check our research on that. >> danny young, the university of delaware and flakjack.org. i actually, i agree with what you're saying, matt, but i do think that the instances that you showed, greg, where it shows a very small clip and then goes right in to the fact check and it's set behind him. it's clearly creating like an emotional distance from it. i do think it really has to do with the production values. i was going to say that i think that that perhaps adapted the best of what we saw to use a format that created that psychological distance for the viewer. i agree with what you're saying but i think those examples are actually pretty good examples. >> there's the reality here which is, you know, we can do our fact check at 6:15 or we can

do it at 5:05 and, you know, most people don't watch that newscast because they always watch the 11:00 and they didn't catch it then and we didn't replay it. that ad's going to be run a heck of a lot more times than we do that segment. we're already swimming upstream. that is a reality. >> and what is our goal? is it to make the politicians ads down, or is it to tell people what happened and in my view, this is what's true and this is what's false? what is our ethical responsibility? to me, it's to inform our viewers and therefore, inform the voters. and i don't have the broad goal of changing michele bachmann's behavior. i just don't. >> for ratings. >> for ratings, yeah. >> that was a joke. >> and a good one. and a very good one, yeah. >> you know, as we get deeper and deeper into any campaign season and this one will certainly not be any exception,

and the newscasts are just filled wall to wall with political ads, the station is filled with political ads for that matter. viewers just get to the point, because having done this for a lot of years, i mean i've heard all the complaints, they say i just tune it all out. i don't pay any attention to any of it. and you don't know what to believe and what not. >> how do you keep viewers engaged on the editorial side with an interest in these kinds of things? especially as we get deep into the season? >> first of all, i don't believe it. i don't believe that -- that's not my experience over the years. i think they get more engaged, more angry. more animated, more agitated on either side and so, i go into this without that expectation that they're burned out. however, my mantra is simplify

and focus. simplify and focus. i grab what i think is the most sa sailant fact that may or may not be true and i focus on that and try to make it more visually interesting. >> last thing i'd say, just this last week, we had a great example of where we were teasing the audience a bit with mitt romney came to the state for the third time in a month. his bridge to nowhere, this little stone bridge. he was going to make a mockery out of it. stimulus funds being used, but the reality is that it was part of the state's ten-year highway transportation plan. so 28 people who endorsed mitt romney before the primary had voted for the same project he was ridiculing and if there's a tease like that, our audience is very engaged with that.

>> final thoughts, a few minutes left. >> i think in giving my opinion on this last question, for people who may be disengaged with the process now, you know, we save a lot of this material on our website. some things they said about the chamber of commerce and winning our future and somebody else's and whatever these other super pacs are and children and puppets. even if we don't do something about that group or an ad they may put on in august. >> i think this is an extremely valuable tool for journalists

and i hope this goes more local. i strongly believe that most of our viewers get much if not most of their information locally. there is a national campaign, but played out in different stays and different ways. so for television stations around the country, i think this is the future, this is what people should be doing. >> and it's a huge responsibility. again, i'm newer to tv, but before i go on the air always reminds me walmart shoppers, your audience is walmart shoppers and you hear your words repeated back to yourself. there was that pew study done that asked where do you get your news about elections, 36% said they get it from local television news. about 12% from newspapers and it went down from there. it's very significant and something more and more stations

should be doing. >> gentlemen, thank you very much. a great hour. a great three hours today. thank you so much. >> thank you. we know this year, we're going to have an unprecedented level of third party advertising. we know it will dwarf candidate advertising and expenditure and we know that third party advertising has been more deceptive. we know stations have a right to reject third party ads and they can if they choose and webb that local television stations are at the front lines of determining whether or not material that is aired on their broadcast stations is context yulized by news and ad watching effectively. we've tried to show you exemplary stations and groups doing a really good job dealing with this very difficult issue.

we documented it in a study, that the four highest groups had spent more than half of their dollars airing ads that had at least one clear cut deception in them. we're going to update that study and release it at a panel at the national press club and that's going to be focused on the 501c groups. their session, it's shadow money, stealth, wealth and political non-profits. we are trying to -- to talk about the ways in which third party money moves deception through advertising to affect the electorate and that's the reason for this concept. i urge you to go to our website and take a look a t the video. i'd also like to make a series of appeals. those of you who would like to e-mail your stations to check the accuracy of ads before they

air them and encourage them to ad watch online and on air. come to factcheck.org. you can e-mail the stations. takes about a minute. please use the same structure when the stations are doing a great job to tell them thank you and to express your appreciation for the hard work and money involved in doing this very difficult work. i think when station managers receive thanks, there's more powerful l than receiving our urging. as a result, we're creating a positive result for them that says viewers appreciate this kind of work. i think that ratings are expressing part of that appreciation. >> we also would like to encourage you to go to the fact check website to take a look at patterns of deception because we think this is a way to determine if you're a viewer or weather you need to go to the ad watching sites in order to see whether or not the facts involved in the issues that you care about might be distorted in

this ad. final finally, i would like the thank the panelists and moderators and would like to invite all of you to lunch.

there's an extra day of book tv this weekend. he may be best remembered for his dual with alexander hamilton. saturday night at 8:30 and the former director for asian affairs on the impossible state, north korea. >> dialogue with the north koreans on human rights, it's kind of ridiculous. you can tell them you need to improve your human rights situation and their response, we've had this conversation at

the official level, well, you and the united states have human rights problems, too. that is not a comparable discussion. >> that's saturday night at 10:00. also this weekend, marcus luttrell details operation red wing. sunday night at 10:00 eastern. three days of book tv this weekend on cspan 2. coming up, first, a senate relations hearing on ivory poaching in iowa, then a look at issues in the 2012 campaign and david cameron on the g8 and nato summits. starting this weekend, cspan's "washington journal" begins its spotlight on colinists. sunday, colbert king of "the washington post." monday, matt lewis of the daily