Versions of the ad below run endlessly on television and radio.
I can’t seem to escape them.
I even heard one of the ads at the break when Rush Limbaugh was interviewing Ted Cruz as to why Cruz was against the Gang of 8 bill.
It’s all a charade. You are being manipulated by a group that has nothing to do with conservatism, Americans for a Conservative Direction. The conservative part is window dressing, via Business Insider, Mark Zuckerberg’s Sneaky Trick To Get Conservatives To Back Immigration Reform:
It’s been less than two weeks since Mark Zuckerberg launched his new immigration lobbying group, but the Facebook CEO seems to have already gotten the hang of the political game.Politico’s Alexander Burns reports that Zuckerberg’s new organization, FWD.us, is launching its first wave of television ads this week, under the auspices of a new subsidiary, Americans for a Conservative Direction, formed specifically to woo conservatives.According to Burns, Zuckerberg has also brought on a fancy board of advisors to run Fwd.us’ conservative wing, including former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, and longtime Bush aide Sally Bradshaw, Dan Senor, and Joel Kaplan.
From the liberal FactCheck.org, Zuckerberg-backed Group Spins Immigration:
A group with ties to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hijacks the credibility of news organizations in a misleading ad that supports a bipartisan immigration overhaul bill. The ad, featuring Sen. Marco Rubio, attributes several quotes to media outlets, but the quotes come from opinion pieces written by backers of the immigration bill.Rubio is shown talking about the bipartisan bill, which he and seven other senators — the so-called “Gang of Eight” — introduced on April 16. Periodically, quotes attributed to news organizations are shown on screen. Several quotes that support a conservative position are attributed to the Washington Post — “border security on steroids,” “bold” and “very conservative” — but those come from a conservative columnist’s opinion pieces, not, as the ad implies, the newspaper’s editorial board or straight news stories.The group behind the ad, Americans for a Conservative Direction, is part of Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, a nonprofit group formed to back policies important to the technology sector, which the website identifies as “comprehensive immigration reform and education reform.”
This is a symptom of how the Gang of 8 bill is being portrayed as something it is not.
Here’s the Cruz interview mentioned above:
(added) FactCheck.org also points out the ads use misleading attributions of quotes:
It’s true that some conservatives do support the legislation — it was introduced by four Republicans and four Democrats, after all, and the Republicans backing Americans for a Conservative Direction clearly are behind it. But the ad uses an old tactic to mislead voters: passing off the words of opinion writers as if they were used by reporters or news organizations.Several quotes shown on screen in the ad, and attributed to the Washington Post, were used in online columns by Jennifer Rubin, whose pieces run under the title “Right Turn,” with the tagline: “Jennifer Rubin’s take from a conservative perspective.” It’s not the newspaper that made these statements about the immigration bill, but a columnist who is in favor of it. In a January 13 piece, Rubin called Rubio’s initial outline of an immigration plan, which he had explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, “bold,” saying, “Now the challenge is to turn a bold proposal into action and legislation.” The ad simply shows on screen: ” ‘bold’ Washington Post, 1/13/2013.”Similarly, the ad attributes the words “border security on steroids” to an April 16 Washington Post story. That was the headline on another Rubin piece — “Gang of 8 delivers border security on steroids” — in which she said, “The amount of detail on resources, metrics and timetables on border security is rather staggering. Unless the Dems plan to defy the law I don’t see how this isn’t a tremendous boost for the item that immigration reform opponents have been complaining about, a lack of border security.”The words “very conservative,” which the ad also attributes to an April 16 Post article, are in another Rubin column, which says, “In essence, if you accept that you have to start somewhere and we have no capability to uproot 11 million people, this is a very conservative-friendly plan.”The Post‘s editorial board does support the bill, but it did not use the words shown in the ad to describe the legislation. The paper’s editorial backing the immigration overhaul called it “sweeping,” “common sense” and “a milestone of pragmatism.” That’s not the same as saying it’s “very conservative” or “border security on steroids.”
Total misdirection.
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