Cory Gardner Ad Pulled By Denver TV Station For Falsehoods, Replaced With Corrected Version

A Denver TV station has stopped running an attack ad from Colorado congressional candidate Cory Gardner because it says the 30-second spot is "so blatantly wrong."

"We get these disputes all the time, and they're usually really gray and we can't do anything," station manager Peter Maroney said. "In this case, it was prima facie that there was a screw-up, it seemed so blatantly wrong to me and so black and white, that we went back to the agency that books advertising for Gardner and asked for a response from them."

The ad in question attacks Gardner's opponent, Democratic Congresswoman Betsy Markey for--among other things--voting in favor of the 2010 budget, which the narrator refers to as "the most fiscally irresponsible budget in history."

The problem? Markey didn't vote in favor of the 2010 budget. The ad apparently confuses Betsy Markey with the other Markey in Congress, Ed of Massachusetts.

Markey made the ad an issue at Tuesday night's debate, asking Gardner whether "he deliberately lie[d], or was that a mistake?"

In a statement Wednesday, the Markey campaign said "Gardner should be ashamed of himself and should apologize to the people of the Fourth Congressional District for lying to them."

The Gardner campaign accuses Markey of trying to use the ad as a distraction. The campaign has produced a replacement ad that corrects the error, which KDVR will run instead of the original.

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