Over the weekend, CT’s television stations received requests from US Senate candidate Chris Murphy’s campaign to pull an ad aired by his Democratic primary opponent, Susan Bysiewicz. Bysiewicz’s campaign acknowledged that the ad included factual errors, but she has refused to edit or pull the ad, and the stations’ General Managers cite reasons they can’t do it themselves:
From the Hartford Courant’s Daniela Altimari:
“The federal law including statutes and [Federal Communications Commission] regulations prohibit the station [from editing] any ads sponsored by legally qualified federal candidates,” said David Doebler, General Manager of NBC Connecticut. “As the law states, we have to run their ad [and] cannot edit the ad and because that’s the law, we do it by the book.”
