Cooch agrees to restrictions on use of debate footage

Following up on an earlier report on a disagreement on the planned Saturday, June 20, debate between attorney-general candidates Steve Shannon and Ken Cuccinelli, it appears that the debate will go on as scheduled now, as it also appears that I was right about the objections that had been raised by the Shannon campaign on a key point about the use of campaign footage.

“We have agreed to use unedited answers but not to use audio/visual ‘slices’ of our opponent’s answers in ads or postings,” Cuccinelli, the Republican nominee, said in a statement released today, after having made the issue from his perspective earlier in the week one of how he simply wanted to be able to put a video of the Virginia Bar Association-sponsored debate in its entirety up on the Internet.

“Once we get through tomorrow’s debate, there will be discussions about future debates in this campaign. Of course, it will be our position that there should be many debates all over Virginia, and there should be as little in the way of restrictions on the dissemination of such debates as possible. For now, we look forward to debate number one in Virginia Beach,” Cuccinelli said in the statement.

Translation: He still wants to be able to slice and dice debate comments from Shannon to use in ads down the road, but for now he’ll settle for the free pub that comes with a June debate that nobody is going to be paying attention to anyway.

– Story by Chris Graham