Will CNN run dishonest NARAL ad?

There were stories this morning that NARAL has produced an anti-John Roberts commercial and was placing it in the media, to begin playing this week. The story this evening is that the ad, according to factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, is false. In every regard. (The factcheck analysis, along with the text of the ad, is available here.)

To summarize, in 1991, while serving as a Deputy Solicitor General in the George H. W. Bush administration, Roberts, for the U. S. Government, filed an amicus brief in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic, arguing that "federal anti-discrimination law couldn't be used against abortion blockaders because they weren't discriminating against women – they were blockading men, too." A 6-3 majority of the United States Supreme Court agreed.

How is NARAL portraying that brief? After showing footage of a victim of a 1998 abortion clinic bombing, the voiceover proclaims "Supreme Court nominee John Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber." Incredibly dishonest.

And now, if Matt Drudge is to be believed, CNN has vetted the ad and decided to run it. The Washington Post this morning said that the ad was "set to begin airing tomorrow on local channels in Maine and Rhode Island and nationally on the CNN and Fox News cable networks." If that's true, if those outlets had looked at the ad and agreed to run it, shame on them...