Free speech II
One thing fueling conservative suspicion on the Missouri Truth Squad was that at more or less the same time last week, the Obama campaign was threatening stations in Pennsylvania and Ohio that ran an ad from the National Rifle Association that said Mr. Obama would be "the most anti-gun president in American history" and detailed his statements on a number of gun-related issues.
The letter from general counsel Robert F. Bauer warns stations that "for the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement."
"You have a duty 'to protect the public from false, misleading or deceptive advertising.' Licensee Responsibility With Respect to the Broadcast of False, Misleading or Deceptive Advertising, 74 F.C.C.2d 623 (1961). Failure to prevent the airing of 'false and misleading advertising' may be 'probative of an underlying abdication of licensee responsibility' Cosmopolitan Broad. Corp v. FCC, 581 F.2d 917, 927 (D.C. Cir. 1978)," the letter from Mr. Bauer reads.
In a post denouncing Mr. Bauer as "Fascist Jerk of the Day," lawyer Jeff Bishop, who blogs as XRLQ at Damnum Absque Injuria notes that the legal decisions are badly miscited.
"The FCC piece in question is not about political advertisements, which enjoy the broadest protection under the First Amendment, but about commercial advertisements, which have only limited protection today - and had none at all in 1961. For a political campaign to argue that any station has a 'duty' to 'protect' its viewers from advertisements that portray their candidate in a negative light is nothing short of frivolous," the lawyer wrote.
Also, in an exhaustively detailed post at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Kopel of the Independence Institute said FactCheck.org "flubs" its criticisms of the NRA ad, cited in the Obama letter. Mr. Kopel says FactCheck's claims are "overstated," consist mostly of "the mere recitation of vague platitudes by Obama claiming that he supports the Second Amendment," while that the ad details "various positions which Obama has taken over the years," almost all of them unrepudiated. |
