Trump campaign spot criticized as being racist
NBC, Fox, Facebook stop running ad that linked migrant caravan to crime
An ad created by President Donald Trump’s campaign committee tying together Democrats, a notorious murderer and a caravan of asylum-seeking migrants in Mexico embroiled NBC in controversy overnight, prompting the network to backpedal and pull it from the air.
Critics had denounced the ad as false and inflammatory, and CNN had refused to broadcast a longer version, calling it racist. But NBC put it up during the ratings giant “Sunday Night Football.”
“After further review, we recognize the insensitive nature of the ad and have decided to cease airing it across our properties as soon as possible,” NBC Universal said in a statement.
Even Fox News, which has made the caravan a staple of its midterm elections coverage, announced that it had decided on Sunday to stop running it, and Facebook removed the ad, which had been targeted at users in key electoral battlegrounds, like Florida and Arizona.
Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters on Monday before boarding Air Force One, said he was unaware of the controversy.
“You’re telling me something I don’t know about,” he said. “We have a lot of ads and they certainly are effective, based on the numbers that we’re seeing.”
Mr. Trump also dismissed the complaints over the ad.
“A lot of things are offensive,” he said. “Your questions are offensive a lot of time, so, you know.”
The 30-second ad that aired on NBC was paid for by Donald J. Trump for President and stirred fear about a migrant caravan of asylum-seekers slowly making its way through Mexico that is still hundreds of miles from the United States border.
It tied Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was convicted of murdering two Sacramento sheriff’s deputies in 2014, to the thousands of migrants who are fleeing Central America, even though Bracamontes is not known to have any association with the caravan.
“Dangerous illegal criminals like cop-killer Luis Bracamontes don’t care about our laws,” the ad said.
It was a shorter version of an ad that the president shared on Twitter last week, which falsely claimed that Democrats let Bracamontes “into our country” and “let him stay.”
In fact, he had been deported during the Clinton and Bush administrations, but repeatedly made his way back. That longer version of the ad, which Mr. Trump featured as a pinned tweet atop his Twitter page, has been viewed more than 6.4 million times.
CNN dedicated substantial editorial coverage to the longer ad, sometimes showing clips as anchors and chyrons declared it “racist.”
The shorter version did not include the false claim about Democrats, but it still drew a direct connection from immigrants to crime, a tactic the president has repeatedly used. (Many studies have shown that immigrants do not drive an increase in crime.)
Before the ad aired during a marquee matchup between the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers, NBCUniversal’s standards and practices department reviewed it and concluded that it was in keeping with the network’s guidelines, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The ad aired once on NBC, during “Sunday Night Football,” and three times on MSNBC, a spokesman for NBCUniversal said.