GOP has learned that, to win, the message is the medium

I agree with Jeff Jacoby’s critique of state Representative Colleen Garry’s proposal to impose a legal ban on falsehoods uttered in political ads (“Truth and lies? Let the people decide,’’ Opinion, Oct. 1). Such a law is unadministrable and antithetical to our free-speech values.

Nevertheless, is it any wonder we’ve come to the point of floating legislation like this? Laws arise when norms fail. While truth and politics have always lived — ahem — in tension, over the past year the norm that our public officials, or candidates for these jobs, should generally tell the truth has gone out the window.

Democrats find this phenomenon especially troubling. The GOP, acting principally through its standard-bearer in the Oval Office, but also through foreign intelligence operatives and purportedly “fair and balanced’’ news outlets, has all but abandoned the truth in favor of more politically useful storytelling. This isn’t so much a case of one side’s relative immorality. It’s just that the right has read the state of our media more keenly than the left, and it has found — correctly, sadly — that the political cost of chucking the truth is worth taking on, given the far greater benefit of smothering the landscape with repeated, self-serving lies.

The Democrats could answer in kind, but what good does that do for our politics? Ultimately, it’s on us, as citizens, to hold political participants accountable for their misstatements. To be sure, the Internet requires us to confront a question that has frazzled lawyers, literary critics, and philosophers for centuries: What is truth? But when we come to politics, the stakes are high. As engaged citizens, couldn’t we all at least come to agreement on answers to the much easier question: What is an outright lie?

Brad Abruzzi

Belmont

It’s an issue of campaign reform, not free speech

In “Truth and lies? Let the people decide,’’ Jeff Jacoby misses a critical point. In arguing that if state Representative Colleen Garry “doesn’t like what others say about her,’’ she should “answer her critics,’’ he neglects the fact that it takes money to do that. In our current political climate, those with the most money can invent whichever truth suits them, and those who are short the funds are stuck.

This is not a free-speech issue; it is about campaign reform. And it’s time we had some of that in Massachusetts and nationally. Garry’s bill sounds like a great start to me.

Lisa Rucinski

Newton