CNN and MSNBC have each broadcast an ad that Fox News rejected in its original form for a documentary about a Nazi rally held in New York in 1939.
The filmmakers of A Night at the Garden, which has been nominated for an Oscar in the category of documentary short, confirmed to The Washington Post on Friday that the 30-second ad spot would air during The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on CNN and The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC on Monday.
The documentary contains footage of the Nazi rally.
“We decided to dig deep and pay for television ads we weren’t planning to buy because we wanted to make the point that Fox News is out of the mainstream,” the movie’s director, Marshall Curry, told The Post, adding that he believed the network’s rejection of the ad was politically motivated.
NBCUniversal said the company had initially rejected the ad for MSNBC because an NBCUniversal standards group deemed the content too provocative, so the filmmakers added context with a title card that explains the footage is part of an Oscar-nominated film, the Post reported.
Fox declined to run the original ad because it was “full of disgraceful Nazi imagery regardless of the film’s message and did not meet our guidelines,” ad sales president Marianne Gambelli had said in a statement. It is not known if Fox would have agreed to run the ad as reworked for MSNBC.
The rally’s 80th anniversary was on Feb. 20.
