Op-ed: A tale of half-truths

Every election year, voters have to wade through dirty tricks, fear mongering, rumor spreading or other tools from the bucket of political skullduggery to arrive at the truth.

It is not fun, and it diverts both voters and candidates from the real issues we care about. The campaign that is the target has to take the time to respond and explain, or to find some way to inform voters that what they may be hearing, seeing or experiencing is misinformation or a dirty trick of some kind. Voters are left trying to find out what is true and what is not.

I experienced dirty tricks when I was the state Democratic Party chair. In 2002, the New Hampshire Republican Party paid a contractor to jam Democratic get-out-the-vote phone lines. I also saw how insidious a disinformation campaign can be when, in 2000, postcards supporting Republican state senate candidates were sent out by a political action committee claiming to represent Democrats. In reality, the state GOP had organized and paid for the postcards.         

Since then, the efforts to mislead and/or interfere with elections have become more sophisticated, as when in January an operative for the Dean Phillips presidential campaign used artificial intelligence and phone spoofing to make misleading calls to likely Biden voters, telling them not to vote in the presidential primary.

But technological advances have not supplanted the old tactics of using half-truths and misinformation to smear candidates. Those tactics can be just as insidious and damaging as more sophisticated modern technology.

A case in point is the recent attack on Second Congressional District candidate Colin Van Ostern. In the fall of 2019, Van Ostern went to work for a venture capital company known as Alumni Ventures.  Prior to his arrival there, regulators began looking into compliance issues with the company over misleading fee calculations and fee disclosures. These issues arose starting in June, 2016, three years before Van Ostern went to work for the company, and were resolved in February 2020, shortly after his arrival. At the conclusion of the investigation, in 2022, the company was fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and issued refunds to investors.

After resolving these issues, the company has apparently thrived; according to its website it has over 10,000 individual accredited investors and a portfolio of 1300 companies. 

What was Van Ostern’s role in all of this? Nothing. According to a statement from Alumni Ventures’ chief compliance officer, Van Ostern joined Alumni Ventures years after the issues arose, and “had no involvement with either issues except to help the company correct them years after the fact.”  

Even though he had no involvement with Alumni’s disclosure and fee problems, which predated his employment, an online site, NH Journal, has tried to make Van Ostern’s tenure an issue. It published a story which said, in part, “Colin Van Ostern wants voters to forget the time his financial firm was paid millions for misleading its investors.”  

Actually, Van Ostern never hid the fact that he was an executive with Alumni Ventures; his campaign website says he worked there, as well as with other companies such as Stonyfield Yogurt and Southern New Hampshire University. `

NH Journal is known to have a right-wing slant; it therefore was no surprise that it used the headline, “Van Ostern Firm Fined, Sanctioned For Misleading Investors.” It was an ironic headline, given that the headline itself misled readers in inferring that Van Ostern was somehow involved. That inference was picked up by Republicans who tweeted the story out on Twitter, using the story to attack Van Ostern. Also ironically, one of the Republicans reposting the article was Chuck McGee, the former executive director of the state Republican Party, who was responsible for organizing that 2002 phone jamming episode.       

In short, here was a classic case of using a half-truth — Van Ostern’s employment at Alumni Ventures — to smear him with an inference that he personally had done something wrong, when he had not.

As this 2024 campaign season continues, we can expect more half-truths and more misinformation. It is up to us as voters to ask questions and to demand facts, and not to rely on headlines or biased internet sources. It is the only way to cut through the fog of mistruths and distortions.