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Egregious Error in Reporting of State Senate Race

Today North Carolina Chamber PAC sent the following response to The News & Observer regarding an egregious error in its reporting of the Chad Barefoot N.C. Senate race. The complete text of the email sent today is as follows.

To: Kara Bettis
The News & Observer
November 2, 2014

Subject: Egregious error in article titled State senate race prove equal financial match

Kara,

Your article titled, State senate race prove equal financial match, makes a wildly inaccurate claim stating that, “Among the PACs, Crawford drew her largest support from the North Carolina Chamber, which gave her campaign $5,000.”

At no point during this election has North Carolina Chamber PAC contributed any funds to Sarah Crawford. In fact, North Carolina Chamber PAC has been an active supporter of her opponent, Chad Barefoot.

Who or what was your source for this information? The facts are readily available as North Carolina Chamber PAC reports all of its activities as required by the Board of Elections. Additionally, our team has provided open access to all media inquiries regarding our activities and posted every PAC endorsement online here. Several reporters at The News & Observer actually received that list of endorsements via news release. At no point in time were we contacted by you for this piece.

We demand a complete retraction and correction to this story as soon as possible.  Considering the wide readership of the Sunday edition and with the election on Tuesday, a complete retraction and correction in both Monday and Tuesday’s editions is warranted.

John Goodman
Manager
North Carolina Chamber PAC