> Personally, I think photographs, video, and sound in
> campaign advertisements should be left unaltered by law, but
> I'd be happy if there was a clearly drawn line. I'd be
> curious as to where people think that line should be.
I do take your point - as I said, I don't really see the harm in what was going on here, but I just think it's poor form for there to be any sort of alteration going on in respect of this kind of advert. It does go against the nature of what the candidates are trying to project - honesty. But I think we have to accept that all sorts of trivial alterations are inevitable - a favourable crop here, a simplifying edit there. Arbitrary rules certainly won't achieve much, since they're so easily circumvented.
Perhaps there might be some merit to a test in such matters - ie if an alteration of any form means the end product has a different core nature from the source material, then it should be illegal. Although subjective, the test could work in practice if some non-partisan arbitration panel were to be the sole judge in such matters. So, for example, the image in the original post would probably escape such a ruling, whereas the cut-and-paste attack ads misquoting John Kerry almost certainly wouldn't. It might work.
Having said that, any modification of source materials past the strictly mundane still doesn't sit easily with me in something as important as an election.
<P ID="signature"></P><P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">Edited by thegodofhellfire on 10/30/04 04:59 PM.</FONT></P>