On Monday, Sept. 15, the McCain campaign began running ads, nearly every hour, on Santa Fe, New Mexico radio station KBAC (98.1 FM) .
So Ira Gordon, operations manager for Hutton Broadcasting (which runs KBAC along with several other local stations) began running an editorial directly after the ads. The focus of the editorial?
Don't believe political advertising.
I'm kind of loving Ira Gordon right now.
His editorial begins by noting that the station has to run political ads regardless of their truthfulness (under federal law). Gordon then goes on to say:
"This election is not about race, gender, age, terrorist fist bumps, cookie recipes, Muslin attire, church pastors, flip flops, lipstick or pigs." Rather, he notes, the election is about "high gasoline prices, a sinking economy, the war in Iraq, the lack of support for our military vets, global climate change and pollution, corporate greed, the 1 percent getting richer and the poor being ignored."
Better off than you were eight years ago, Gordon says, then you can only be one person: the CEO of Halliburton.
Gordon tells me that he also ran an editorial in 2004 when the Bush campaign ran ads on KBAC.
"My feeling was political advertising in the long run is full of shit,* so without mentioning Democrats, Republicans or the candidates' names, I wanted to alert our listeners to the fact that they shouldn't believe political advertising. They should delve into the issues decide who represents them the best," he says.
While Gordon says his editorial in '04 prompted daily arguments with Republican listeners, so far he's had no complaints about his current opinion piece.
On the other hand, Gordon acknowledges KBAC's GOP-listener base is probably rather small.
"I get kind of a perverse enjoyment out of the fact that Bush and McCain are wasting their money by advertising on KBAC, which obviously they're not going to sway many of our listeners over to our side.
* I should mention that Gordon asked me to rephrase "full of shit" to something more appropriate, but I couldn't think of anything more appropriate.
** If you can't hear the editorial here, you can access it at swingstateofmind.com