From WNYNYC in New York, this is NPR's on the media.

Brooke Gladstone is away.

I'm Bob Garfield.

With Congress still in recess, debate over health care reform has made its way to our television sets via the first spade of ads.

Many of those ads are from anti-health reform groups that rely on a device popular with the town hall protesters we've seen so much

of on cable news these past few weeks. Namely, scared the bejesus out of the elderly. Some ads

warned seniors, for example, that an overhaul of the health care system would result in them

losing access to services and even to their own physicians.

The government, not doctors, will decide if older patients are worth the cost.

Others go as far as to suggest that proposals currently before Congress will cut health care

for seniors while using taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions.

They won't pay for my surgery, but we're forced to pay for abortions.

They're frightening claims for sure, but are they factually correct?

Brooks Jackson is the director of factcheck.org.

He says that many of these ads are indeed riddled with misinformation, and he joins us

once again.

Hey, Brooks.

Welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Bob.

So what's the most egregious misstatement of fact, misinformation, propaganda, or lie that you've run across?

Well, I don't have a mendacity meter that would give me a scientifically accurate answer to that,

but we've sure seen a lot of howlers out there, and you mentioned a couple. The claim, for example,

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