Today In Silly False Equivalence

Missourinet's Bob Priddy has a new grumpy blog post today, "'Yanking' spots."  In it, Priddy describes the steps taken by Missourinet to deal with a demonstrably false radio ad from the 501(c)6 Americans for Job Security organization attacking Robin Carnahan. It's a pretty interesting and helpful explanation of how Missourinet dealt with the ad, and it's great that he published the tale.  But for reasons I cannot comprehend, the real subject of Priddy's ire is a Carnahan campaign press release that used the word "yanks" to describe Missourinet's removal and replacement of the ad. 

Why is the verb to yank inappropriate in Priddy's mind? He doesn't actually explain. The only thing we can infer from his post is that to yank suggests a hasty response when his company actually aired the false ad a little longer than necessary.  The outrage!

Priddy closes his blog post with the following:

Our company placed the call to AJS Thursday evening. The revised, corrected, commercial arrived during the weekend and replaced the offending one on Monday. However the offending commercial had continued to run on our newscasts until the revision was put into the system Monday..The folks at the other end of the building made that decision.

Those of us in the newsroom didn’t even know all of this was going on until we got the news release from the Carnahan campaign .

So the commercials WERE misleading. So was the news release indicating that we YANKED them.

And just think: this kind of stuff is likely to continue for two more months.

Life is a whole lot nicer when all we have to write about is a wandering goat in Mexico.

Talk about some false equivalence. 

To summarize this scandal: Virginia-based Organization spends undisclosed sum lying about a Missouri candidate in paid advertisement.  Candidate responds the following week by correctly noting that the ad was pulled and replaced, but chooses a verb that Reporter believes suggests a speedier response by Reporter's Company to the false ad than actually occurred.  Reporter writes blog post complaining that Candidate employed a verb to describe Company's actions that gave Company too much credit for doing the right thing. Reporter offers up demonstrably false ad and verb choice as examples of the horrible things conservatives and progressives are doing to make Reporter miserable, all the while destroying our fragile democracy. 

Our liberal media strikes again.