Barely a day has gone by without Newt Gingrich complaining about the inaccuracy of ads run against him by a superPAC supporting Mitt Romney.
So now that an anti-Mitt Romney film purchased by a superPAC supporting Gingrich has been criticized for numerous inaccuracies, Gingrich has asked that the film's creators and the funders paying for ads using film snippets edit out the falsehoods or take the ads and film down entirely.
Campaigning in Orlando, Fla. Friday, Gingrich referred to a Washington Post fact-check by Glenn Kessler that rattled off a number of misrepresentations in the film titled "King of Bain/When Mitt Romney Came to Town." The film purports to tell the story of Romney when he was CEO of Bain Capital, the private-equity firm.
Scott Powers of the The Los Angeles Times reported Gingrich saying:
" 'I am calling on this super PAC – I cannot coordinate with them and I cannot communicate directly, but I can speak out as a citizen as I'm talking to you — I call on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film,' he said."
Kessler of the Post gave the anti-Romney film four Pinocchios, his top rating for low behavior, for prodigious divergence from the truth. Kessler wrote:
"Romney may have opened the door to this kind of attack with his suspect job-creation claims, but that is no excuse for this highly misleading portrayal of Romney's years at Bain Capital."
Since Gingrich had used Kessler as an arbiter of the inaccuracies in the pro-Romney's superPAC against him, he appeared to have little alternative than to ask that the pro-Gingrich superPAC "Winning Our Future" do the decent thing.
More from the LA Times:
" 'I've said all along that these super PACs ought to have some sense of responsibility. The ad for example that Gov. Romney is running in Florida right now about me was given four 'Pinocchios' by the Washington Post, which means it was wrong at least four times in 30 seconds, which is not easy. I challenged the governor to speak up. He frankly has been timid and irresponsible.' "
Other fact checkers have also found problems with the "King of Bain" film. PolitiFact.com found the film's accuracy "mixed" though most of the allegations it checked out were either "false" or "mostly false."
Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reported that the movie used out-of-context material and selective editing that resulted in distorting reality.
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