station liability for candidate advertising

  • Federal Government

    Questions about the Truth of Political Ads, What’s a Broadcaster to Do When a Candidate Complains About an Attack Ad? – The No Censorship Rule for Candidate Ads

    Every election season there is the same refrain from candidates who are attacked in political ads run on broadcast stations – that ad is unfair and the broadcaster who is running it should take it off the air. Sometime, that request is sent by a lawyer with threats to bring legal actions if the broadcaster does not stop airing the ad. What is a broadcaster to do when it gets one of these requests to pull a political ad from the air? While we have written about this issue many times before (see, for instance, our refreshers on the rules with respect to candidate ads, here, and non-candidate, third-party attack ads, here), questions still come up all the time. Thus, broadcasters need to know the rules so that they don’t pull an ad that they are not allowed to censor under the FCC’s rules, and that they don’t run one for which they could in fact have liability.
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