Illinois Gov. Candidate Fabricated Headlines for Ads

By: (AP) It is common practice for candidates to use headlines from newspapers in television ads to boost their records and criticize their opponents.

But in the case of two spots for Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Oberweis that were to begin airing Wednesday, the headlines in question never appeared in print.

The ads, which are critical of front-runner Judy Baar Topinka, include headlines that look as if they ran in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The (Springfield) State Journal-Register.

The headlines never appeared in the papers but were excerpted from stories, said Oberweis campaign manager Joe Wiegand.

"We are not printing a newspaper," Wiegand said Tuesday. "We are doing a television advertisement."

However, a review by the Tribune found that the text appearing in the ads did not exactly match the stories in question.

For example, one ad shows the Chicago Tribune masthead with the words "Investigation Into Topinka." But the headline for the 2003 story cited by Oberweis was "Campaign probe of Topinka launched; U.S. subpoenas workers' records."

A second ad displays the Journal-Register with the words, "Attorney General Blocks Bad Deal." But the headline that ran read, "Hotels' debt deal blocked; Attorney general cites U of I study."

The ads misrepresent what the newspapers actually reported, said Charles Wheeler, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

"It strikes me that you are trying to use the newspapers' good name for your own purposes," Wheeler said.

It is not the first time that an Oberweis campaign ad has been criticized. In the U.S. Senate primary two years ago, Oberweis appeared in an ad blaming illegal immigrants for taking Americans' jobs. The spot angered many Hispanics and split from the party line.