As the New York City mayor’s race enters its final, combative stretch, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his opponent, Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., have unleashed a flood of advertisements that contain distorted, misleading and, in some cases, outright false claims about everything from the creation of jobs to plans for tax increases.
With many New Yorkers just beginning to tune in to what has been a late-blooming campaign, the truth-stretching — in TV commercials, Web advertisements and mailed brochures — could be the primary exposure they have to the two candidates.
Both the mayor and the comptroller have misrepresented each other’s records, but Mr. Bloomberg has taken the biggest liberties. In ads that follow Web users as they move from site to site, the mayor claims that Mr. Thompson “never created a single job” (false) and “fought reform” at the Board of Education (misleading).
The mayor implies, in one commercial, that Mr. Thompson plans to raise income taxes across the board, and he has even bankrolled a Web site, ThompsonTaxHike.com, dedicated to the subject.
But Mr. Thompson has not proposed such a tax increase in his campaign; instead, he favors a higher income tax for the rich.