TV Initiative Ads Hype Their Own Brand of Truth

Californians are being hit by a barrage of advertising from the tobacco and insurance industries featuring colorful predictions about terrible things that will allegedly come to pass if initiatives should be approved that are contrary to those industries’ interests.

In the last two weeks alone:

- Tobacco industry commercials have claimed that Proposition 99, to raise cigarette taxes, “will create major crime in California.” If it goes into effect, cigarette smuggling into the state will reach such proportions that law enforcement authorities will be distracted from their normal duties, viewers are warned. An announcer intones, “99 will make crime pay.”

- Insurance industry commercials have asserted that passage of Proposition 100, backed by the California Trial Lawyers Assn., and Proposition 103, supported by Ralph Nader--both calling for broad insurance rate rollbacks--would actually raise auto insurance rates in 54 of the state’s 58 counties.

- Other commercials from the insurers contend that Proposition 103 would put the state government into the insurance business. They add that such a system would be so highly bureaucratic that Californians changing their address would have to go into a government office for “evaluations” for reasons not explained.

- Another insurance industry commercial, backing Proposition 106, to slash attorneys’ contingency fees, depicts a scene in a law school classroom where the hard-bitten professor suggests to his students that “a great lawyer” will charge his clients outrageous fees.

Opponents in all these initiative battles have been protesting vehemently to all who would listen, complaining to state authorities, issuing critical press releases and sending letters to television and radio stations, asking that they drop the ads as inaccurate.

But in only one case, the tobacco industry commercial, did they force so much as a small change in the presentation. Those commercials were altered slightly when the California Peace Officers Assn., incensed at their content, abruptly abandoned its support of the anti-99 campaign.

In any case, a spokesman for the tobacco industry’s campaign committee said Thursday, the commercial has now stopped running. Planning to spend at least $10 million to defeat increased cigarette taxes, the anti-99 forces will go on to new commercials.

Prophesies of Doom

But it is already apparent that this year, as in the past, one of the most favored tactics of embattled interests determined to beat potentially popular ballot measures is to seize upon something allegedly unsavory that the measure might conceivably do, and then build it up to disastrous proportions.

Scott Carpenter, a spokesman for the insurance industry’s campaign, for instance, said Thursday that the suggestion of “evaluations” for people changing addresses under a state insurance system was “a dramatization of what could happen.”

Carpenter said that the specter of a hidebound bureaucracy controlling insurance would be “a reasonable, not a remote, possibility” out of which “evaluations” would follow. In fact, the Nader-backed initiative could result in a state insurance company only if most of the state’s property and casualty insurers abandoned their $24-billion-a-year California business and left the state.

The insurers’ have made plans to spend $43 million, a record amount, to pass two of their own initiatives, Proposition 104 for no-fault auto insurance and Proposition 106, and defeat 100 and 103. As big political spenders have done before, these strategists can be expected to drive their point home dramatically rather than be subtle in the expensive 30- and 60-second commercials.

But in some past campaigns, hyperbolic advertising hasn’t worked.

An example was two years ago when the trial lawyers vainly tried to defeat Proposition 51, the insurers’ “deep-pockets” initiative to restrict legal liability. The lawyers allowed a political consultant to sell them on the idea of focusing the television campaign on the suggestion that such a move would let toxic polluters get off scot-free.

Much Skepticism

When the insurers won big, one of their consultants, Jack McDowell, suggested that the trouble with the trial lawyers’ advertising was that it lacked “plausibility.” In other words, he said, the voters had found it essentially unbelievable.

The leadership of the California Trial Lawyers Assn. agreed with McDowell, abandoning their old consultants, the Berman and D’Agostino consulting firm, and hiring McDowell’s firm of Woodward and McDowell away from the insurers for the present insurance initiative fight.

So far, the trial lawyers’ campaign, as directed by Woodward and McDowell, has been more reserved in its advertising, although its recent statement in one commercial that the insurers are guilty of price-fixing is an apparent exaggeration. There is a lawsuit by a number of state attorneys general accusing the industry of price-fixing, but it has not been proven.

Traditionally, most state and federal regulatory authorities, as well as the courts, have been extremely reluctant, on free speech grounds, to intervene to stop even the most controversial advertising.

Last week, for example, state Insurance Commissioner Roxani Gillespie said that despite statutes making it unlawful for insurers to disseminate “untrue, deceptive or misleading” information, she considered all advertising in the current initiative campaigns to be political in nature and she has decided not to interfere.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission has also said it does not consider itself an agency charged with censoring advertising in the present campaign.

Relying on First Amendment

A recent insurers’ letter to television and radio stations, defending their advertising campaign, cited a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision as stating, “Under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries, but on the competition of other ideas.”

But a few television stations have in recent weeks been rejecting at least some commercials on grounds that they are untruthful.

For instance, on Thursday, KABC-TV general sales manager John Riedl said his station had recently rejected a $150,000 order from the tobacco industry campaign to run its commercial saying that Proposition 99 “will cause major crime.”

“We asked them for proof the statement was true,” Riedl said. “They told us it was probably true. We said they would have to change ‘will’ to ‘probably.’ They would not alter the language and we would not run it.”

So far, however, this year such moves have been rare. If there is an ultimate check on hyperbolic advertising, it will probably have to be public skepticism as exhibited at the polls.