CNN has informed a pro-Trump group that it will not run an ad on its network because the ad falsely claims that Joe Biden will raise taxes on the middle class.
The ad, from America First Action (AFA), the largest outside group to support Donald Trump, also falsely asserts that Nancy Pelosi is a socialist, according to CNN
Despite the ad’s having been approved and running on several major networks, Warner Media, which owns CNN, issued an email to AFA stating that the ad “does not meet its commercial clearance standards.”
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“The ad asserts that Biden will raise taxes on the middle class,” the email continues. “That claim is not adequately substantiated and has been judged false by independent fact-checkers. The advertisement also mischaracterizes Nancy Pelosi as a socialist.” (RELATED: AP fact check: Biden did not eulogize former KKK ‘grand wizard’ (wait for the punchline))
But are the claims in the ad actually false? Let’s play “fact checker” ourselves and assess CNN’s critique, beginning with the issue of whether Biden will raise taxes on the middle class. Although Biden’s main pitch throughout the campaign has been that “he won’t ask a single person making under $400,000 per year to pay a penny more in taxes,” which is all well and good, he has at the same time threatened to eliminate Donald Trump’s tax cut. In the video that follows, he admits that “the first thing that I would do as president is eliminate the president’s tax cut.”
But eliminating a tax cut is by its nature raising taxes. That Biden’s plan will raise taxes on over 80% of Americans has been affirmed by the Tax Policy Center, a wing of the center-left Brookings Institute.
And that doesn’t even begin to take into account for the burden that would be imposed on all taxpayers by Biden’s proposal to bring back Obamacare’s individual mandate and his support for a carbon tax.
As for falsely portraying Pelosi as a “socialist,” the charge evidently arises out of a still image in the ad of Biden standing next to the Speaker of the House. But there is a third person in that picture who is a self-avowed socialist, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. At the very least, CNN is splitting hairs in its fact check.
All in all, the critique of the ad coming from a network whose commentators regularly describe Donald Trump as a “fascist” is pretty rich.
Cross posted with modification at the Mental Recession
