Over the past weeks, ABC viewers across the country have been shown a graphic advertisement featuring images of aborted fetuses, as part of a campaign by antiabortion rights advocate and long-shot presidential candidate Randall Terry.
By Jeremy Barr
and But the network said it has no say in the matter. Because Terry is a political candidate on the ballots in about a dozen states, ABC said that it is bound by Federal Communications Commission rules to air the ad, unedited. In addition to the graphic imagery, the ad includes photos of major media personalities and compares them to Nazi leaders and supporters.
The ad has run 795 times this month, costing Terry nearly $200,000, according to data provided to The Washington Post by AdImpact, an ad-tracking platform. It’s a small fraction of the more than $2.7 billion spent on ads during the presidential race. He’s also run eight other ads as part of his presidential campaign. But his graphic ads that aired on national television have attracted the most attention Terry has received in this race. After Republicans have for decades staunchly supported restricting abortions, polling has shown that most Americans opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade and voters have consistently sided with protecting abortion rights.
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Terry told The Washington Post that he chose to advertise on ABC because he specifically wanted to reach the audience of “The View,” a show he said is particularly disliked by some of the people who donated to help fund his advertising campaign.
“When we showed that we could, in fact, run ads speaking the truth there, it helped us raise the money to run more and more television ads,” he said.
Viewers have been shown a disclaimer from the network before and after the advertisement conveying that “the ABC television network is required to carry it by federal law” and that it “contains scenes that may be disturbing to children.” (ABC News had no further comment on the ad when asked Friday.)
Terry’s ad includes images of CNN anchors Dana Bash, Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer, who are Jewish. In response, CNN issued a response denouncing the ad as “outrageous, antisemitic and dangerous.”
Unlike broadcast television networks, cable news networks have editorial discretion over which ads they air. In the past, networks like CNN and Fox News have both refused to air certain advertisements. In 2019, CNN rejected two ads from the Donald Trump campaign that it said were not factual. The network has also said it can reject ads that disparage CNN personalities.
Last year, the progressive advocacy group MoveOn said that Fox rejected an advertisement that accused the network of “lying to its viewers” and cited email communications released as part of the defamation lawsuit filed against it by Dominion Voting Systems.
Ishan Mehta, who serves as director of the Media and Democracy Program at the watchdog group Common Cause, said the rules were designed when the United States had only three main broadcast networks and were meant to prevent censorship.
“I think it was incredibly important at that time to protect against biases from broadcasters,” he said. “You wouldn’t have wanted the president of ABC, CBS or NBC deciding that they don’t like this candidate so they’re not going to allow a certain ad to run.”
While there has been some interest in amending the regulation, Mehta said “we should be very cautious with what changes are made and how.”
ABC’s on-screen disclosures have not been sufficient, some viewers say. “There isn’t enough time to get kids out of the room,” one user wrote on X on Thursday. “It felt like an ambush.”
Terry’s attention-drawing stunts — chaining himself to medical equipment used to perform abortions, organizing blockades on clinics and running for various state and federal offices over the years — have earned him headlines in the past. But he remains largely unknown to most voters and is not expected to draw many votes. The nominee of the Constitution Party knows that.
In an interview this summer, Terry said the main aim of his campaign was to keep Kamala Harris from being elected president. “I’m not running to be president,” Terry said. “I’m running to un-elect a president.”
Terry’s slate of ads includes ones specifically targeted to certain voters, including Black viewers and Catholics. He said the disturbing imagery can effectively cause “a crisis of conscience for the viewer.”
Terry said the FCC rule that allows him to air his unedited ads is “one of the wonderful moments that the federal government got something right.”
When pitching the advertising campaign to potential donors at an antiabortion conference in Washington, D.C. this past summer, Terry said he intended to sway the Republican Party back toward its stronger antiabortion stance.
“Think of the media attention that this is going to get,” he said at the time. “These ads are like pouring a 55-gallon barrel of diarrhea into an industrial fan.”
