UPDATE: More details from Fox 31. Apparently Gardner's campaign has pulled the ad from every station on which it had been running:
Apparently, the ad mistook the vote of Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey, who did vote yes on the budget, for that of Markey, the first-term Democrat who is fighting hard to defend her seat in Colorado's predominantly Republican fourth congressional district.
"We get these disputes all the time, and they're usually really gray and we can't do anything," [Fox 31 Station Manager Peter] Maroney said. "In this case, it was prima facie that there was a screw-up, it seemed so blatantly wrong to me and so black and white, that we went back to the agency that books advertising for Gardner and asked for a response from them."...
...The ad was quickly becoming a flash point in this high-profile race since it began airing on Tuesday.
In a debate Tuesday night, Markey asked Gardner directly if the mistake was an oversight or intentional and called on him to take the ad down. He never responded during the hour-long forum held in Loveland.
The new, corrected ad is now running in place of the original on all TV stations in the state that had been airing it.
We don't know what "prima facie" means, but it sounds bad.
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According to a press release from Rep. Betsy Markey's campaign:
KDVR Fox 31 today became the first television network in the United States to refuse to air a candidate's campaign commercial because the ad is patently false.
Representative Cory Gardner's latest attack ad criticizes Colorado's Betsy Markey for a vote taken by U.S. Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
Watch the ad here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"We applaud Fox 31 for standing up to Rep. Gardner's bald-faced lies," said Markey (Betsy)'s campaign spokesman Ben Marter. "The people of Colorado are seeing a lot of awful negative campaign commercials this year, but through all the misleading clutter, Fox 31 decided that Rep. Gardner's latest lies are too egregious to broadcast. Rep. Gardner should be ashamed of himself and should apologize to the people of the Fourth Congressional District for lying to them."
This is more bad press for Republican challenger Cory Gardner one day after it was revealed that Gardner's negative TV ad incorrectly accused Betsy Markey of votes that were actually taken by Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey.
We're mystified why Gardner's campaign doesn't just admit the error and make a quick editing change to the ad, rather than face the bad press that comes with being the first campaign in the country to see its television ad pulled -- and from a Fox TV affiliate, no less (while Fox 31 isn't really connected to the national Fox News, the average voter reading about this probably doesn't know that).
It's bad enough for Gardner's campaign to make another stupid mistake with the initial ad, but it's inexcusable to compound the error by not just doing a simple re-edit. Media coverage from this is going to continue to hurt, because it potentially makes voters question all of Gardner's negative talking points against Markey (Betsy, that is).
Full press release after the jump. Note the "bald-faced lie" quote from Markey spokesperson Ben Marter, an obvious side joke poking fun at a Gardner press release from last week. |
