Politics

George W. Bush's campaign for re-election starts airing its first round of TV ads this week, PR Week reports. Campaign press secretary Scott Stanzel "denied reports that sinking poll numbers led the President to change strategy, abandoning an earlier plan to remain politically 'above the fray' until later this year," PR Week writes. "There's been lots of speculation, but we've always indicated that we were anxious for a debate once the race narrowed to two people," Stanzel told PR Week.

According to New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney,"Senator John Edwards said yesterday that his proposal to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact he has repeatedly blamed for economic distress, would not significantly cut the flow of jobs abroad." As Zachary Roth observes in on the Columbia Journalism Review's campaign weblog, that's not what Edwards said.

"Sometimes one wonders if campaign reporters could write a declarative English sentence if they were stripped of their cliches," complains the Columbia Journalism Review's Susan Q. Stranahan.

"A new dirty tricks campaign to embarrass the Democratic frontrunner, John Kerry, backfired ignominiously yesterday when it emerged that a widely circulated photograph of a protest against the Vietnam war was a crude forgery," reports Suzanne Goldenberg. "The photograph, falsely credited to Associated Press, combined two separate images to make it appear as if Mr Kerry shared a stage at an anti-war rally in the early 1970s with the actress, Jane Fonda." The fabricated photos are not the only recent attempt to smear Kerry.