Erroneous claims can be found in recent television ads dealing with environmental controversies, thereby misleading the uninformed.
Ideally, corrective disclaimers should follow, not with the intent of prejudging the ultimate message of the ad, but to assure accuracy for viewers as they form their response. Disclaimers should not come into play over competing claims that appear to be legitimate grounds for dispute.
If only the electronic media could join to employ a disclaimer squad to counter false information in paid advertisements (such a squad would be unnecessary if there was a policy that factually inaccurate ads would not be accepted until the copy was corrected).
Would advertisers who shelled out good money to communicate their viewpoint tolerate having their ads modified or followed by publicly broadcast corrections of the content? Probably not unless they had no better place to convey their message. Then again, maybe the willingness to stand corrected is not so farfetched if advertisers are truly confident of the persuasiveness of their overall message.
In any event, should the media, whose professional reputation supposedly rests on public trust, be a willing accomplice to the communication of erroneous information? Does the need for advertising revenue justify looking the other way, given that the prospect of media issuing disclaimers would undoubtedly lose some prospective clients?
The following are examples of some recent environmental ads that needed remediation.
To help justify its retention of captive killer whales to perform in its shows, Sea World showered the airwaves with an ad claiming the animals lived as long in captivity as in the wild. Even if true, it begged the question of quality of life. In the wild, these marine mammals roam free over vast expanses of ocean. In captivity, they are confined to holding pens that amount to watery prison cells. But back to Sea World's claim. According to amusement park's own data, the average life span of female killer whales in captivity is 29 years and males 17 years. The public should know that the Park's claim of equivalency is repudiated by the more reliable National Oceanographic and Aeronautic Administration's (NOAA) statistics in which a 30 to 50 year life span is attributed to males in the wild and 50 to 100 years to females. NOAA's numbers have more credibility because of the absence of a conflict of interest.
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) electronically challenged the Obama Administration's proposal to strengthen the existing ozone standard. In its ad, NAM asked how communities could be expected to comply with a stricter rule when some of our major pristine national parks supposedly could not meet the existing standard because of natural ozone pollution. To suggest that natural ozone pollution is the sole culprit in the parks is blatantly untrue. National Park Service monitors have detected significant human-generated ozone as well as natural pollution in every major wilderness park. The absence of industry in the parks' vicinity has not benefitted air quality since wind currents carry pollutants thousands of miles from their source. Bring on a disclaimer.
Nor is the environmental community's advertising exempt. Ads that identify global warming as the direct cause of severe weather events stand to be corrected. Science as yet cannot make a definitive causal linkage. What has been determined is that global warming increases the intensity of the events.
Bottom line: life is complicated enough without the media further muddling the picture by knowingly publicizing factual distortions.