Broadcast Attorney David Oxenford takes a swing at this one as Ted Cruz demands TV stations pull PAC ads he says distort his voting record on immigration issues. Cruz says it’s a violation of a station’s FCC obligations to operate in the public interest to continue to run the ads. Oxenford details what a station can and cannot do in his latest blog posting.
Oxenford says a lot of what a station can do depends on who’s sponsoring the attack ad. “If the ad is sponsored by the authorized campaign committee of another candidate, and features the voice or image of the sponsoring candidate, the station cannot do anything. A station cannot censor a candidate ad. Once it has agreed to sell time to a political candidate or his or her authorized campaign committee, the station must run the ad as delivered by the candidate without edit (with the very limited exception of being able to add a sponsorship identification if one is missing, or when running the ad would constitute a felony, e.g. running a spot that is legally obscene – not just indecent but obscene, meaning that it has no redeeming social significance).” Oxenford says because a station is required to run the ad, there is no liability for the content.
Third party ads, Oxenford says, are different. “Because only candidate ads are covered by the no censorship provision of the Act, ads by third party groups – PACs, labor unions, advocacy groups, political parties (with the limited exception of when the party ad is actually authorized by the candidate), etc. – can be censored based on their content. If stations don’t like the content, or think that the content violates someone else’s legal rights, the station can refuse to run the ad, or demand changes in its content. Because the station can censor a third-party ad, the station can be held liable for its content.”
Oxenford says once a station is put on notice of the potential falsity of the third-party ad, the station must investigate. “This is usually done by asking the sponsor for material to back up its claims.” He also says this is not something the FCC is going to spend time investigating. “The FCC is not going to get involved in the business of evaluating which political ads are true and which are false. Instead, these issues are most likely to be litigated, if at all, in the courtroom.”
Read David Oxenford’s full blog HERE
