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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder - Marc Ambinder is the White House correspondent for National Journal and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. More

Marc Ambinder is the White House correspondent for National Journal. He previously served as the politics editor, and is now a contributing editor, for The Atlantic, where he curated the influential Politics channel on TheAtlantic.com and contributed to the magazine. He was also a chief political consultant to CBS News. Earlier, at NJ's Hotline, Ambinder was the founding editor of "Hotline On Call," a pathbreaking political news blog. He also worked as a producer and reporter for the ABC News Political Unit and was one of the founders of ABC's "The Note." Born in New York City, raised in Central Florida, Ambinder is a 2001 graduate of Harvard and lives in Washington, D.C.

RNC Uses Legal Threat To Rebut New DNC Ad

By Marc Ambinder
Apr 28 2008, 2:07 PM ET Comment

The Republican National Committee wants CNN and MSNBC to stop airing the DNC's new national television advertisement, calling it "false and defamatory" and illegally coordinated.

"This is a complaint about the facts that are being misrepresented in the ad, and this being a deliberate falsehood, that we are saying, stations have an obligation to protect the public from airing a deliberate falsehood," said Sean Cairncross, an RNC lawyer.

The RNC provided no evidence to support their change that the communication was illegally coordinated, aside for a few newspaper articles pointing out that some Democrats work for both a candidate and the committee, like pollster Cornell Belcher. DNC chairman Howard Dean said this morning that neither campaign saw or heard the ad before the put it out.

The RNC is ginning up the threat of legal action to give weight to their criticism of the ad's content. Cairncross would not say whether the party will sue CNN or MSNBC, the two cable networks airing the ad, if they refuse to kill it.

The RNC's content charge is not black and white. The DNC wrote the ad carefully. Nowhere does the narrator or any chyron state that McCain is fine with the Iraqi war persisting for 100 years. The visuals -- explosions, bloodied troops -- take care of that association.



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Marc Ambinder
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