In response to an ad attacking Daniel Cameron for hiring persons from the Bevin administration into his attorney general’s office, the Cameron campaign has written to five television stations demanding they take down the ad for being demonstrably false. The letter goes on to note that continuing to air the ad could put the stations in legal jeopardy.
So far, the stations have refused the request.
The ad is from a group called “Defending Bluegrass Values” – a PAC formed by the Democratic Governors Association that is supporting current governor Andy Beshear in this year’s gubernatorial race. The ad attacks Cameron for hiring persons who worked in the previous administration of Matt Bevin and who allegedly helped with Bevin’s pardons, some of which were heavily criticized at the time.
The issue the Cameron campaign has with the ad is the juxtaposition in the ad of the narrator saying Cameron “used taxpayer money to hire Bevin’s top aides instead, surrounding himself with the same people who helped push Bevin's pardons” – followed by audio from a television news story saying “one a child rapist, the other who killed his parents.” Obviously, the news story is referring to persons pardoned by Bevin, and not to the persons hired by Cameron, but it’s the juxtaposition of those two narrative segments that the Cameron campaign is objecting to.
The “Defending Bluegrass Values” PAC has defended the ad, calling the letter from Cameron’s lawyer a “desperate stunt to try to avoid accountability.”
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For a much more in-depth examination of the ad and the issues, read Joe Sonka’s story in the Courier-Journal.
