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There's a dark side of the election season that's probably showing up in your e-mail inbox: smear campaigns about the presidential candidates.
For example, some spurious mailings say Barack Obama is a closet Muslim, others claim John McCain has a serious health ailment, and it gets worse than that. The people who get those e-mails sometimes call news outlets like KSL, wondering why we aren't confirming these big stories.
This goes beyond negative campaigning. These are vicious, widespread electronic whisper campaigns. This year, there's a lot of it going on in the presidential campaign, and some people are eating it up.
Even if you haven't officially gotten onto a mass e-mail list, you may have get something forwarded to you. It is information that swirls on the fringes, sometimes titled "The truth about ..." Some evoke fear about Obama's background and his motives. A few of them question McCain's health or raise questions about his first marriage.
None of it is part of the official campaigns, and most people simply dismiss them.
"There needs to be facts. I mean, anyone can say something, just make something up, but if there isn't any facts behind it, it doesn't make sense," Zach Teichert said.
Byron Martin said, "If you hear something like that from a source, it needs to be checked out."
But lots of people do pay attention, and unlike a photograph, which is oftentimes easy to tell if it's a fake or doctored up, words demand more attention.
An important difference is that e-mails claiming to have "uncovered" something or to be exposing a "hidden truth" don't attribute that information. In fact, the actual origin of these e-mails is sometimes not known.
Word-of-mouth campaigns aren't new, but in 2008, the Internet is speeding up how fast it spreads. "Anybody can publish, anybody can e-mail. I mean, everybody really is a TV station, and everyone has access to it and can circulate it or pass it along. Whether it is true or not, it does not matter," said political consultant Tom Love.
The reality is that even if a piece of information itself is dismissed, the nasty e-mail still leaves an impression, and a powerful one at that.
"I haven't so much really believed it, but it has caused me to doubt a little bit," Shayne Evans said.
Many people still wonder if Obama is Muslim, even linked to terrorists. That's in spite of Obama's repeated denials and a lack of credible sources to back those claims up.
For McCain, questions about his health prompted him to open his medical records to reporters. Still, his enemies are advancing conspiracy theories about missing medical records.
In fact, the smear campaigns got bad enough that there are Web sites designed to take a closer look. Barack Obama has one of his own; Snopes is another one. You can access both of them and FactCheck.org by clicking the related links to the right of the story.
E-mail: rpiatt@ksl.com
