YOUR AD HERE — REACH DISCERNING READERS OF SERIOUS JOURNALISM
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FACT CHECK✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
Ad Attacking Cooper Makes False Connection to Murder
Filed 1mo ago · Via FactCheck.org · The Buffoon Desk
THIS STORY IS SCORED
Investigations
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Shixart1985 · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
A Senate Leadership Fund ad backing Republican Michael Whatley features a grieving father implying Roy Cooper's pandemic-era prisoner release led to his daughter's murder. The accused killer, Alexander Dickey, was released from a South Carolina prison, not a North Carolina one, and Cooper had no role in his case.
Cooper actually resisted early pandemic release calls and only settled after a lawsuit and court injunction forced his hand, releasing 3,500 people — none of them Dickey. Dickey's shorter sentence traces instead to a South Carolina fingerprint-reporting failure that hid his prior burglary conviction from prosecutors.
The ad never states the false connection outright, just arranges the grief and the statistic side by side and lets viewers do the arithmetic. SLF PAC did not respond to a request for comment.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
There is a particular species of cowardice in an ad that refuses to say the thing it wants you to believe, arranging a father's worst day next to an unrelated number and trusting the audience to draw the line itself. It is the political equivalent of leaving a loaded implication on the table and walking out of the room. The silence from the people who paid for it is not an oversight; it is the business model working exactly as designed.
