Politics

Steve Lavin on campaign complaints about TV ads by opponents

WBAY-TV General Manager Steve Lavin discusses how the broadcaster and its parent company Gray Television handle complaints from political campaigns about election advertising by other candidates.

By Zac Schultz | Here & Now

October 1, 2024 • Northeast Region

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Steve Lavin:
It's pretty easy the way we handle it. And really what happens is, I'll get a letter, right, as the general manager, I'll get a letter and they'll demand that we take the spot down. I take that letter, I send it to our gentleman who handles the political for our entire company in Washington, D.C. He'll turn around and send that letter to the other side, demand documentation on how they came up with whatever they said. They send the documentation to him, we send it to the other side campaign. Usually what happens if it's a problem, they've already taken the spot down and changed it out, or the documentation is sufficient for them to understand why they put that in there. What I'll never do is I'll never pull an ad myself, because number one, I would rather the other side, if there's falsehoods in an ad, the other side has every bit of right to actually answer those by buying more ads. Right? And the other thing too is that I'm not going to be the arbiter of what's the truth, because I might enter my own bias into that, and I think it's just fair that somebody else decides that.



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