The South Bend Tribune is reporting that the Republican National Committee is trying to strong-arm media outlets into not airing a commercial from Moveon.Org. The article, entitled SouthBendTribune.com: RNC asks stations to kill ‘false TV ad’ reports that the RNC accuses MoveOn.org of submitting advertisements that “maliciously” make reference to Bush’s Social Security cuts of up to 46%. The last two paragraphs of the RNC’s article said:
As an FCC licensee, you have a responsibility to exercise independent editorial judgment to oversee and protect the integrity of the American marketplace of ideas, and to avoid broadcasting deliberate misrepresentations of the facts. Such obligations must be taken seriously and I urge you to decline to broadcast this advertisement.
“This letter places you on notice that the information contained in the above-cited advertisement is false and misleading. Your station should act responsibly and refrain from airing this advertisement.
Also, according to the article:
Jim Behling, general manager for WNDU-TV, said he is neither afraid nor cowed by getting a letter from a lawyer at the RNC, but may pull the spot if he determines that it is inaccurate. The ad contract calls for the spot to end its run on Sunday, according to Behling.
“It’s about what’s fair,” said Behling, adding, “If we made the wrong decision based on insufficient information, then we have to correct ourselves.”
Behling said he has reviewed documentation supplied by MoveOn.org in support of the ad, and said the 46 percent figure seems to apply to people who will retire in 2075, and therefore haven’t yet been born.
He said he plans to ask MoveOn.org if the 46 percent “applies to anybody living today” and, if not, may decide to pull the spot.
You know, this would be fine if stations such as WNDU were able to question the numbers Bush puts forth in his State of the Union speech and elsewhere. To take an example mentioned in the Washington Post:
To conclude that Social Security is careening toward a crisis in 2042, President Bush is relying on projections that an aging society will drag down economic growth. Yet his proposal to establish personal accounts is counting on strong investment gains in financial markets that would be coping with the same demographic head wind.
So, the end result, if this double standard is applied, is that Bush gets his cooked Social Security numbers out and MoveOn.org doesn’t get theirs out. Now, I don’t know whose numbers are right and whose are wrong. But, I do remember that the Bush administration told me that Iraq would cost $1.7 billion to reconstruct. That number was horribly, horribly wrong. And, as the President says, “Fool me once, shame on . . . me. I won’t get fooled again.”
With respect to Moveon.Org’s numbers, the article reports:
According to supporting documents supplied to the stations by MoveOn.org, the plan which serves as the model for the president’s proposal would cut benefits because it changes the basis on which benefits would be calculated from wage levels to consumer price levels.
Based on Social Security Administration data, a worker born in 1977 who earned average wages and retired in 2042 would see benefits 26 percent lower than under the current benefit structure, $14,432 a year instead of $19,423 in 2004 dollars. An individual who retired in 2075 would receive monthly benefits 46 percent lower than under the current structure, the documents said.
Tom Matzzie, Washington, D.C., director of MoveOn.org, said in a statement issued Friday that the information referred to in the spot is based on an analysis performed by the chief actuary at the Social Security Administration, and said his organization stands by the ad.
I hope none of our Indiana media outlets caves to the RNC’s bullyboy tactics. Weary as we may become of it, the remedy to political speech is more political speech. Let the RNC take out opposing ads that dissect any numbers from MoveOn.org with which they may disagree or feel are misleading and lay out the case for why their numbers are more honest.
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