New Romney Attack Ad Uses Debate Footage Recorded Off PBS Channel He Wants To Defund

Mitt Romney today released an ad attacking President Obama for what Romney calls an “apology tour,” but the ad uses debate footage recorded from PBS, the very entity Mitt Romney promised to defund if he becomes president. The Romney campaign had the opportunity to record footage from eleven TV networks, and well over a half-dozen online sites that streamed the debate last night.

READ: Presidential Debate: Mitt Romney Lied 24 Times

Romney, in the first presidential debate, promised to stop federal funding of Sesame Street and all of PBS, telling moderator Jim Lehrer, “I’m sorry, Jim, I’m gonna stop the subsidy to PBS…. I like PBS, I love Big Bird — I actually like, you too — but I am not going to keep spending money on things [we have] to borrow money from China to pay for.”

ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, FOX, PBS, C-SPAN, Univision, and Telemundo all carried the debate last night. Additionally, YouTube, Ustream, C-SPAN, NPR, the Huffington Post, Hulu, Mashable, and the Obama campaign all live-streamed the debate.

Romney’s ad itself is a lie.

“The President began with an apology tour of going to various nations and criticizing America,” Romney says in the ad.

In fact, Politifact debunked this very claim that Mitt Romney made last month, and several times before — giving it their worst ring: “pants on fire” — which is an old GOP talking point but nevertheless a lie:

We found not a single, full-throated apology in the bunch. And on the new angle Romney has added — that the trips were intended to offer the president a forum to apologize to other countries — we think it’s a ridiculous charge. There’s a clear difference between changing policies and apologizing, and Obama didn’t do the latter. So we rate Romney’s statement Pants on Fire.