Aborted Fetus Campaign Ads Hit the Airwaves in Iowa

Anti-abortion activist Randall Terry.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Randall_Terry_at_Equality_March.jpg">Ben Schumin</a>/Wikimedia Commons

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If you’re a resident of Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Missouri, or Minnesota, you’re on notice. Starting this week, Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who is currently challenging President Obama in the Democratic presidential primary, will begin airing graphic campaign ads featuring what purport to be aborted fetuses, during local news broadcasts.

As I reported last month, the ad buy is part of Terry’s nationwide strategy to take advantage of an FCC loophole barring censorship of campaign ads. Although networks and their local affiliates have the authority—and a legal imperative, in some cases—to block “indecent” material from the airwaves, there’s an exception when it comes to political spots, so long as they’re within 45 days of a primary or caucus.

Per a release:

The ad has multiple graphic images of babies murdered by abortion, and makes the argument that to vote for Obama knowing that Obama supports the murder of babies is a betrayal of the Catholic Faith.

The ad will run on every TV station in Iowa and the five state regions that surrounds Iowa (Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Missouri, and Minnesota). The ad will run on at least one news broadcast per station.

Last year, following a successful trial run in a Washington, D.C. congressional race (for the non-voting “delegate” position), Terry announced plans to field single-issue congressional candidates in the nation’s 25 biggest media markets, for the sole purpose of running graphic anti-abortion spots that would otherwise never make it onto the airwaves. Terry’s already recruited candidates in Cincinnati, the Twin Cities, and St. Louis—and he himself is taking on Obama.

It sort of puts that controversy over Herman Cain’s smoking ad in perspective.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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