CNN began airing an advertisement Tuesday featuring a clip of Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum endorsing the reliability of its news coverage and deriding Fox News during Sunday’s Florida gubernatorial debate.
The clip, taken from the face-off between Gillum and his Republican opponent in the race, Representative Ron DeSantis, plays for five seconds before the screen cuts to CNN’s recently adopted “facts first” slogan.
“This is CNN, not Fox,” Gillum says to DeSantis in the clip. “You have to bring facts to the conversation.”
CNN now using Democratic Florida gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum's swipe at Fox News as a 'Facts First' TV ad pic.twitter.com/76FnvI9lM8
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 23, 2018
Gillum criticized Fox News after DeSantis accused him of “presiding over the city that’s out of control in terms of crime.”
“You know, when you have the record number of murders, in fact, the guy running to succeed him as mayor was his former chief of staff and he’s sending out literature to voters saying most murders in history last year,” DeSantis said. “Something needs to change.”
“Thats right — Andrew couldn’t keep Tallahassee safe,” DeSantis added. “He’s not the guy to keep Florida families safe.”
“Alright well, Ron is being Don, and that’s Donald Trump, neglecting all sense of reason and facts,” Gillum responded. “I preside over a city that is experiencing a five-year low in our crime rate, on trajectory to be at a 20-year low in our crime rate. No matter of restatement of what he has to say is going to change the facts.”
“This is CNN, not Fox. You have to bring facts to the conversation,” he concluded.
The debate, which was hosted by CNN, took place just two days before the Florida ethics commission released a trove of records revealing that Gillum lied about the source of Broadway tickets he was gifted during a 2016 trip to New York with his brother and Adam Corey, a longtime friend and lobbyist.
After an FBI investigation was launched into possible corruption in Tallahassee government, Gillum claimed that he did not know who purchased the tickets at the time he attended the show. Gillum’s campaign later released a statement claiming the tickets were purchased by his brother, but text messages between Gillum and Corey released by the ethics commission showed that Gillum knew the tickets were purchased by an undercover FBI agent whom he believed to be a land developer with business before the city.
“Mike Miller and the crew have tickets for us for Hamilton tonight at 8 p.m.,” Corey texted Gillum on Aug. 10, 2016, referring to one of the two undercover FBI agents who attended the trip to New York while posing as developers.
“Awesome news about Hamilton,” Gillum replied.
The RealClearPolitics polling average has Gillum leading DeSantis by 4.7 percentage points with under two weeks to go before Election Day.