July 03, 2011 09:39 PM UTC

Willing Talk Radio Stooges "Pull" Tipton Ad?

• 8 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

An interesting case-in-point–on increasingly partisan commercial media, or an ad making false claims illegal under Colorado election law? You decide as the AP reports via Real Clear Politics on the “fate” of last week’s House Majority PAC radio spots against freshman Rep. Scott Tipton:

Tipton’s lawyer, John Zakhem of Denver, said the ad is flawed because it claims Tipton “hired his nephew’s company to work for his congressional office.”

He said he wrote cease-and-desist letters to seven stations because of the “irresponsible and flat-out dishonest” ad.

Tipton’s aides have said there is nothing improper about using a firm for constituent service that contracts with his nephew’s company…

The ads came from House Majority PAC, a Democratic political committee. A spokesman said the ads were scheduled to be taken down June 30 and disputed whether Zakhem’s letters made any difference.

“We stand fully behind our ad,” PAC spokesman Ryan Rudominer said.

We’ve discussed several times the background story here of Rep. Tipton’s family members–both his nephew Steve Patterson, owner of Colorado-based telecommunications prover Broadnet, and Tipton’s daughter Elizabeth Tipton, Broadnet “government relations specialist” who lives with the congressman in Washington, DC–and Tipton’s use of Broadnet services (middled by a vendor) paid for by his office. To briefly recap, Rep. Tipton apologized to the House Ethics Committee for improper representations made by his daughter while soliciting business for Broadnet. Reportedly, this was a scandal brewing in DC for some time, which makes it very possible that Tipton went to the Ethics Committee to head off an incipient investigation.

The committee hasn’t yet responded on that matter with any further needed action, but the incident raised other questions about Tipton’s use of Broadnet’s family-owned services–the best we can reckon based on interpretations of House rules is that no, family members are explicitly not supposed to receive money from a member of Congress’ budget, but contractor relationships like that between Tipton’s office and Broadnet are not as clearly defined in the rules. It’s unlikely that the voting public will care much for this distinction, since it’s kind of lame–which is why we warned from the outset that the scandal would result in nasty anti-Tipton political ads.

And sure enough, this is where notorious GOP attorney John Zakhem’s case against House Majority PAC’s radio spot rests–Tipton didn’t “hire” his daughter and nephew’s company, they were just contractors who indirectly benefited. Now, the PAC says that the radio spots in question were ending anyway, and mentioned something to the Denver newspaper’s blog about how the stations who pulled the ad “feature Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.” So maybe you’ve got your answer on what really happened right there: a political decision obligingly made by a couple of conservative talk radio stations? If so, we would advise fewer buys on these stations going forward for anyone not ideologically on the same page. It would appear that they have a funny way of thanking you for spending advertising dollars with them.

Either that, or the bar for “false statement” bullying in Colorado politics just got absurdly low. Feel free to parse the meaning of “hired,” but that’s a Truth Test debate at most in this case. Keeping in mind the well-reported facts about this scandal, we have to say we’ve seen a slew of arguably “false claims” on the air in Colorado lately. And this doesn’t even rank.