One of the biggest television companies in the US has announced plans to air a film days before the presidential election that portrays the Democratic candidate Senator John Kerry as betraying his fellow soldiers in Vietnam.
The conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group will reportedly present the film as news on the 62 local channels it owns nationwide.
The film will replace normal primetime programs supplied by the national networks and reach up to a quarter of the electorate, many in critical battleground states, about a week before the election on Nov. 2.
In the film, Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, former US prisoners of war claim that their North Vietnamese interrogators used anti-war statements by Kerry to undermine morale and persuade them to admit war crimes.
A press release for the film, made by a conservative journalist and ex-marine, Carlton Sherwood, accused Kerry of "lies, false testimony and distortions" for his remarks to Congress in 1971, saying US troops had been responsible for atrocities.
The press release alleges that "in mere moments in 1971, Kerry willingly gave the North Vietnamese what the brave POWs had endured torture and solitary confinement to avoid saying."
Kerry has been dogged by such attacks for more than two months, mostly in the form of advertisements paid for by a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
The Swift Boat advertisements, questioning Kerry's combat record and criticizing his activism in the early 1970s, helped give US President George W. Bush a clear lead in the polls which he has only lost in the past two weeks, after two lackluster debate performances.
Chad Clanton, a spokesperson for the Kerry campaign, said: "George Bush lost the first two debates according to every public poll, and now his allies are kicking into overdrive to distract from policy failures on Iraq and on the economy."
"If they move forward with this, they will be obliterating every decent journalistic standard in the book," Clanton said.
Sherwood's company, Red White And Blue Productions, has denied receiving support from the Bush campaign to make the film. Funding, it said, "was made possible by Pennsylvania veterans."
Sinclair executives did not return a call seeking comment on Monday.
They reportedly plan to define the program as news, which under broadcasting law does not require equal time to be given for a response.
Democrats have said they plan to appeal the film to the Federal Communications Commission to try to block what they describe as free political advertising. The attempt is not expected by analysts to succeed.
The commission is chaired by Michael Powell, the son of the US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
RSS