Uri Clinton committee apologizes to Sun over use of story

Friday, Sept. 1, 2000 | 11:19 a.m.

The Committee to Elect Uri Clinton for State Senate has issued an apology to the Las Vegas Sun for using copyrighted Sun material without permission in a campaign flier earlier this month.

The Clinton committee placed a two-column by nine-inch ad in today's Sun apologizing for failing to obtain permission for use of a Sun story and headlines in a Clinton flier that attacked state Sen. Joe Neal's alleged stand on nuclear waste in Nevada. The ad appears on page 5B.

The flier, sent to l0,000 households in state Senate District 4, indicates that Neal, whom Clinton is attempting to unseat in the Democratic primary election Tuesday, favors bringing the nation's nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. Neal, of North Las Vegas, who has held the office for 28 years, says that has never been his position.

The Sun story and headline misappropriated for the ad were not about Neal or his position on nuclear waste.

"The Sun appreciates the apology," Michael J. Kelley, managing editor, said, noting it was given after the Sun threatened to sue the Clinton campaign and Clinton's campaign manager, Tom Letizia.

"The entire Sun is copyrighted every day," Kelley said, "and the Sun would never have given its permission for its stories and headlines to be used in a political attack piece. And this particular flier, by the way it used Sun materials, gave the misleading impression that the Sun supported what the flier was saying.

"There is a long political season ahead, and the Sun wants to put the candidates and their advisers and supporters on notice that the newspaper will aggressively guard its ownership of its own work. The Sun will not tolerate unauthorized and distorted use of Sun stories, headlines, photos or graphics by or on behalf of any political candidacy."

The Sun rarely endorses in primaries and has not endorsed a candidate in the District 4 Senate race.

The flier for Clinton, a 27-year-old attorney, featured a photo of a recent fiery wreck of a tanker with the Aug. 3 Sun headline: "What if this cargo had been nuke waste?"

The flier also featured a photo of the front page of the Aug. 9 edition of the Sun, depicting a simulated crash of a truck carrying nuclear waste and reporting on two government crash simulations, one of which showed that the cost of cleaning up such a crash could be more than a billion dollars.

The flier indicates that Neal is not opposed to nuclear waste by quoting from a statement that Clinton says Neal made in 1993 and which Neal says he did not make.

The ad of apology that appears in today's Sun:

"The Committee to Elect Uri Clinton for State Senate recently sent out a mailer which depicted an article that appeared in the Las Vegas Sun and a headline from a different edition of the Las Vegas Sun. Both concerned Yucca Mountain. We did not distort or misquote the Sun's article. However, we failed to obtain permission from the Las Vegas Sun for use of its copyrighted materials in an ad that criticized a political candidate who was neither the subject of nor mentioned in the article. We take out this ad to let readers know that we did not have the Sun's permission or endorsement, and that we apologize to the Las Vegas Sun for any problems our mailer regarding Yucca Mountain, on behalf of Uri Clinton, may have caused the Sun or its staff."