The 2024 presidential campaign has had more than its share of drama, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what went down in 1968.

That was the election where President Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail, and rioting happened in the streets of Chicago outside a Democratic National Convention that was notable for its anger and division. In the fall, Republican Richard Nixon staged what once seemed like an improbable comeback, defeating Democrat Hubert Humphrey in the popular vote by seven-tenths of a percent after being politically left for dead earlier in the decade.

The 1968 Nixon campaign also deployed a raft of television advertising. Looking back, The Washington Post described how Nixon’s campaign’s ads “were relentlessly stimulating and relatively disengaged from facts and figures, proving definitively that a presidential candidate could succeed on TV by showing viewers not what to think but how to feel.”

Compared to the fragmented media environment we inhabit today, the world of 1968 is an entirely different epoch. The audience that once watched three major television networks, a public television outlet and an independent station now has been dispersed over hundreds of channels, streaming outlets and websites. Campaigns still sink millions of dollars into advertising that appears on television and online, but they are now joined by political action committees bursting with cash coming from unions, corporations and wealthy individuals who can advocate for causes and candidates with little or no restraint. The overwhelming majority of these ads, which are pervasive in a swing state like Pennsylvania, play fast and loose with the facts and, like the ads from days of old, are not designed to engage the rational parts of the brain.

And this is the case regardless of party or ideological orientation.

Of course, for a lot of viewers, a lot of these ads will be so much visual and aural wallpaper and will be studiously ignored. But anyone who seriously sits down and absorbs what they are saying would be well advised to do some fact-checking on the claims that are being made. The same goes for things that turn up in social media feeds.

And though the “media” is a favorite whipping boy for the left and right alike, news outlets that are perhaps now thought of as old-school are still some of the best places to turn to separate reality from fantasy. That would include print outlets like newsweeklies and, yes, newspapers. They have trained journalists on their staff whose job it is to get to the bottom of things and ask questions. The information in these outlets is vetted.

Between now and November you’re likely going to see lots and lots of political ads. The best advice, as always, is that the buyer should beware.