By Kris Wernowsky
Times Leader
10/27/2006
Excerpt:
Democratic congressional candidate Chris Carney's campaign agreed to
alter one of its television commercials after the Times Leader
complained that quotes from an opinion column featured in the ad
misrepresented the newspaper.
The ad featured a pair of quotes from an Oct. 19 Times Leader
opinion piece written by columnist Casey Jones that referenced Don
Sherwood's extramarital affair. Carney is in a heated battle for the
10th Congressional District seat against the four-term Republican
incumbent.
The quotes read: "Sherwood owns what he did and there's no getting rid of it," and "A better man would have stepped down."
The commercial, called "Debbie," features a woman speaking about the
allegations that Sherwood choked his mistress, with the quotes
superimposed under the Times Leader logo and the date they ran in the
paper. The ad did not indicate that the quotes were taken from an
individual columnist's opinion piece. ...
... Al Tompkins, an ethics professor with the Poynter Institute for
professional journalists, said it's a common practice for political ad
producers to cherry-pick quotes from newspapers during the last few
weeks of an election cycle.
