An attack ad linking North Carolina Republican senate candidate Thom Tillis to the 2012 shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin has earned four Pinocchios from the Washington Post’s official “Fact Checker.”
This is the worst grade that any claim examined by the “Fact Checker” can earn.
The attack ad, which was bought and paid for by the Senate Majority PAC — a group run by former aides to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. — begins: “Tillis won’t fight for us,” adding later that he has “made it harder for communities of color to vote,” the commercial added.
“Tillis even led the effort to pass the type of ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws that caused the shooting death of Trayvon Martin,” the commercial states.
Unfortunately for the Reid-linked ad, and as noted elsewhere by the Washington Examiner and other publications, the ad’s claims simply are not true.
“It is telling that Senate Majority PAC does not bother to offer any defense of this radio ad. Perhaps it hoped it could slip this past reporters asking too many questions,” the Washington Post noted.
“But if an organization is going to argue that a particular law was the cause of a racially-charged shooting death — leaving open the suggestion that the same sort of incident could take place in North Carolina — than it has a duty to explain its reasoning. Otherwise, voters have every right to think the worst about Senate Majority PAC’s purpose in making such accusations on radio stations that have large African-American audiences,” the report added.
The Fact Checker notes that “Stand Your Ground” laws were discussed at length after Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old self-appointed neighborhood watchman who later stood trial for the teen’s death.
But “Stand Your Ground” laws were never actually invoked by Zimmerman to defend himself at trial.
“[D]escribing the law as the ‘cause’ of the shooting is incredibly reductionist, especially when SMP offers no evidence that Tillis was a ‘leader’ in the effort to pass a similar law in North Carolina,” the Washington Post reported.
