NBC ran a Trump ad CNN said was too racist to show

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published 5 November 2018

President Trump's final television ad of this campaign season has been widely condemned for its inaccuracy, fear-mongering, and bigotry. It was rejected for air time by CNN but ran on NBC Sunday evening.

CNN explained the decision to refuse the ad on Twitter Saturday, noting the network "has made it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is racist" and so refused "to be paid to take a version" to the public. (Why Trump would wish to run his ad on a network for which he regularly professes deep animosity is another question.)

The next day, however, a shortened version of the spot aired during NBC's Sunday Night Football. The edited clip did not include a false claim about the circumstances under which Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant sentenced to death this February for killing two police officers, was permitted to stay in the United States. However, it retained a false claim that a higher population of immigrants leads to higher crime rates.

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NBC did not respond to a New York Times request for comment.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.