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CALIFORNIA — When the political advertisements cease, campaign solicitations stop filling mailboxes and the spin stops, Brooks Jackson will be able to breathe easy and maybe take a long-awaited fishing trip.

The excruciatingly long presidential campaign has inundated Jackson and his colleagues at Factcheck.org, which has uncovered mistruths in hundreds of political advertisements, from the race for the White House to dozens of lesser contests.

Come Tuesday, the eight-person staff will follow Election Day proceedings and slurp oysters at Jackson's waterfront home in St. Mary's County, far removed from the hustle and bustle that has consumed their downtown Washington office for the past 18 months.

"I can't wait for this to be over. I'm going fishing for a week starting Nov. 5," he said, pausing momentarily to add, "if the boat will still start."

Political junkies know Jackson from his more than three decades as a mainstream reporter at the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal and CNN, where he spearheaded the fact-check style of journalism during the 1992 presidential campaign.

In 2003, he became the first director of the nonpartisan Annenberg Political Fact Check, an outpost of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Public Policy. The job enabled him to work from his picturesque St. Mary's County home two days a week and continue scrutinizing political campaigns for deceptive ads.

"The way I look at it, I'm just applying old-fashioned journalistic principles to the copy that the candidates turn in in the form of their ads and their speeches," he said. "And, I figure if I'd fire a reporter for trying to get something like that by the desk, then I'm justified in criticizing a candidate for saying something like that."

One might expect Jackson, 66, to be one of the most hated men in politics, given the number of candidates he has called on the carpet for stretching the truth or outright fabrication. But, he said most campaign operatives respect the outfit's mission and know their propaganda often toes the line of fact and fiction.

"I was afraid that if I get into this, I'm going to be spending half my time dealing with screaming press secretaries and pissed-off, red-faced candidates, and it's just going to be a huge pain in the neck," Jackson recalled thinking when he was asked to undertake the fact-check project at CNN. "One of the really surprising things was how little push-back we got from anybody. These guys knew they'd been pushing the limits and stepping out of bounds for years, and I think they were just kind of surprised that the media let them get away with it."

But Factcheck.org is not without its detractors.

The National Rifle Association is sparring with the site over ads the group is running that allegedly misrepresent U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's stance on gun control. The NRA ads claim that Obama plans to prohibit use of firearms for home defense, outlaw possession and manufacture of handguns, close 90 percent of gun shops and ban hunting ammunition, none of which are true, according to Factcheck.

The NRA responded that Factcheck is neither impartial nor independent and is linked to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Jackson's group rejected the accusation.

The future of fact-checking

In some ways, Jackson hopes his job becomes obsolete.

"My sermon for a long time has been that we should not exist," he said. "Mainstream news organizations should be doing this and doing it aggressively, and they should have been doing it for a long time."

Several outfits similar to Factcheck.org, such as Politifact and the Washington Post's Fact Checker, are helping to expose deceptive campaign ads.

The so-called "truth squads" have increased accountability on the campaign trail, said Shawn J. Parry Giles, director of the Center for Political Communication & Civic Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"I think what it does is put the campaigns on notice that they do need to stay within the bounds of what would be factual information," she said. "It is an important addition to the political process, because you have nonpartisan individuals evaluating the accuracy of the messages that are being articulated."

However, some campaigns don't care whether what they say is true or not, Jackson said. "All they care about is damaging the guy that they're attacking."

Still, he believes the Fourth Estate plays a vital role in holding political candidates responsible for their actions and words.

"I think the press has got to go from being a gatekeeper, which is a function that obviously has been made obsolete by modern technology, to becoming more of a referee or an umpire or a judge in helping citizens sort out all this stuff that they've heard before," Jackson said.

"They don't pick up the morning newspaper anymore wondering what the candidates said. They heard what the candidates said last night and yesterday afternoon, and they heard what two or three different paid yak-meisters said about it. Now they want to know who's right [and] who's got the facts behind them."

So, which presidential campaign has been more dishonest?

Jackson ducks that question, saying there's no way to objectively perform such an analysis without assigning a value or weight for how untruthful each ad is.

"It would look like we were endorsing a candidate," he said. "We're trying as hard as we can to be strictly nonpartisan, and we just don't want anybody to get the wrong idea."

One of the most disingenuous ads of the current cycle, according to Jackson, is a hit piece against U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), in which a liberal pro-veterans group claims she voted against supplying lifesaving body armor for troops.

Votevets.org paid for a similar ad in the 2006 campaign against four GOP incumbents, including Virginia's George Allen, who was defeated by Democrat Jim Webb. They are quibbling over the accuracy of the ads with Factcheck, which argues that the bill in question never specified what equipment the money would be used for.

All told, researchers at Factcheck.org watch hundreds, if not thousands, of ads and log hours of speeches and debates in a single election cycle to separate fact from fiction. The staff has grown to eight from just three in 2004 to accommodate the massive workload in the current campaign.

A fuzzy future

Jackson and his wife, Beverly, have owned a home in St. Mary's for nine years and now consider it their primary residence. He works three days a week in Washington and stays in the city, but the slower pace of life suits his rural northeast Indiana upbringing.

The couple was drawn to the area after attending the renowned Governor's Cup Yacht Race at St. Mary's College back in 1978. When they bought a home in the county after Jackson left CNN, he asked college officials about teaching a class on media and society.

The college was on board with one condition: Jackson had to raise enough money to pay his salary. While doing that, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a distinguished author of political communications and Annenberg School for Communications professor, persuaded him to launch a fact-check project through the Pennsylvania center.

At the time, Jackson was well known for his work on CNN dissecting political propaganda during the 1992 campaign between then-President George H.W. Bush and William J. Clinton. He admitted to initially being apprehensive about having to slap words such as false "in big red letters across the face of the president of the United States."

Now, criticizing high-ranking elected officials comes naturally to the father of two grown children.

Although the workload will slow considerably after the election, Jackson expects 2009 to be a busy year, regardless of who wins the White House, with major issue-based campaigns over climate change and health care dominating the political discourse. There also might be a Supreme Court nomination that will draw ads, he said.

"The spin never stops in Washington," he quipped.