One of the United States’s biggest television companies has announced plans to broadcast a film days before the presidential election that portrays the Democratic candidate John Kerry as betraying his fellow soldiers in Vietnam.
The conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group will reportedly present the film as news on the 62 local channels it owns nationwide.
The film will replace normal primetime programmes supplied by the national networks and reach up to a quarter of the electorate, many in critical battleground states, about a week before the election on November 2.
In the film, Stolen Honour: Wounds That Never Heal, former United States prisoners of war claim that their North Vietnamese interrogators used anti-war statements by Kerry to undermine morale and persuade them to admit war crimes.
A press release for the film, made by a conservative journalist and ex-marine, Carlton Sherwood, accused Kerry of ”lies, false testimony and distortions” for his remarks to Congress in 1971, saying US troops had been responsible for atrocities.
The press release alleges that ”in mere moments in 1971, Kerry willingly gave the North Vietnamese what the brave prisoners of war had endured torture and solitary confinement to avoid saying”.
Terry McCauliffe, the Democratic party chairperson, said the film was ”garbage”, and announced his intention to mount a legal challenge.
Kerry has been dogged by such attacks for more than two months, mostly in the form of advertisements paid for by a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
The Swift Boat advertisements, questioning Kerry’s combat record and criticising his activism in the early 1970s, helped give George Bush a clear lead in the polls, which he has only lost in the past fortnight, after two lacklustre debate performances.
Chad Clanton, a Kerry campaign spokesperson, said: ”George Bush lost the first two debates according to every public poll, and now his allies are kicking into overdrive to distract from policy failures on Iraq and on the economy.”
”If they move forward with this, they will be obliterating every decent journalistic standard in the book.”
Sherwood’s company, Red White And Blue Productions, has denied receiving support from the Bush campaign to make the film. Funding, it said, ”was made possible by Pennsylvania veterans”. Sinclair executives did not return a call seeking comment on Monday.
They reportedly plan to define the programme as news, which under broadcasting law does not require equal time to be given for a response.
Democrats will file a legal complaint today with the federal election commission arguing the broadcast represents an illegal campaign contribution. Democratic senators have also said they will appeal to the federal communications commission (FCC), to investigate the transmission of what they describe as free political advertising.
The FCC is chaired by Michael Powell, the son of the secretary of state, Colin Powell.
Under US broadcasting rules, the film actually gives airtime to Kerry. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, who heads the Media Access Project watchdog, said: ”The way our equal time law works depends on what candidate is appearing on the air — so the equal time rule would run to Bush, not to Kerry. It does not provide Kerry a right to reply.”
”What this shows is the dangers of media concentration. These are the problems that arise when one company controls 62 channels.”
Mark Hyman, Sinclair’s vice-president for corporate relations, told the New York Times the company had invited Kerry to appear after the film to answer the charges. ”There are certainly serious allegations that are levelled; we would very much like to get his response,” Hyman said.
Clanton said that although the Kerry camp would rule nothing out, ”it’s hard to take an offer seriously from a group with such an obvious political agenda”.
The film puts the Kerry campaign in a difficult position. Democrats said the campaign was too slow to respond to the original Swift Boat attacks; yet it is aware that its complaints will only provide publicity for Stolen Honour.
Michael Moore, the director of the anti-Bush film Fahrenheit 9/11, wants to make it available on a pay-per-view basis on the eve of the election, but any audience is likely to be tiny compared to a film shown at primetime on 62 channels.
The row has drawn attention to the role of television news.
Fox News has established itself as a conservative network, while CBS has been under fire for broadcasting a documentary about Bush’s national guard record in September. – Guardian Unlimited Â