Five southern Florida TV stations face political ad discrimination complaints at the...

Barack Obama helped kill Christians and Jews. The Media Bureau required Gannett’s WUSA to air the ads, which the company asked the bureau to overturn (CD Nov 8 p22). Terry’s lawyer filed complaints Monday against NBCUniversal’s WSCV(Telemundo) Ft. Lauderdale and WTVJ Miami(NBC), CBS-owned Miami stations WFOR(CBS) and WBFS(MyNetworkTV) and Raycom Media’s WFLX(Fox) West Palm Beach. The complaints alleged the stations wouldn’t run spots for Terry, and that some of the broadcasters responded that the refusal was because the candidate was on the ballot in Florida’s 20th District to be a U.S. representative, while in other states he was on the presidential ballot. If that same logic were applied to other candidates, those outlets would have had to deny ad buys from the Republican presidential campaign of Mitt Romney because his running mate for vice president, Rep. Paul Ryan, was also running for re-election in Wisconsin’s 1st District, the complaints said. Some of the Sunshine State broadcasters had cited Florida Statute 99.012(2), which bars someone from running for multiple offices simultaneously. The statute was meant to prevent someone from running for multiple positions on Florida’s ballot, Terry for Congress lawyer Patrick Purtill of the Gammon & Grange law firm wrote. “It is not Florida’s prerogative to limit access to its ballot based on a candidate’s ballot access in a foreign state.” Representatives of the stations’ owners had no comment. “Apparently buoyed by that success” at the bureau with the WUSA order, Terry filed the new complaints, broadcast lawyer Scott Flick wrote on the blog of the Pillsbury Winthrop law firm (http://xrl.us/bnyokm). “What makes these filings odd is that” the complaints weren’t filed with the commission until Election Day, and even if they had been filed Monday, “that would still be too late for the FCC to take any meaningful action before the election,” he wrote Thursday. “That means Terry has already begun the process of positioning himself for the next election, and is perhaps looking to establish friendly FCC precedent now that can be used against stations then.” The campaign’s pointing to Romney/Ryan ads “is not a particularly strong argument,” since the “'no censorship’ provision of the Communications Act means that Romney is free to present anyone else he wants in his ads without interference,” Flick wrote. “Since the FCC is not generally in the business of interpreting state election laws, the central question in these complaints is whether the FCC will defer to a licensee’s reasonable judgment as to who is a legally qualified candidate in the licensee’s own state."