Notice how the media was told to jump by the Kerry campaign, and they merely asked "how high?". Though to their credit they eventually brought out families who did not object to the Bush ads. I have a feeling the latter group was starting to make so much noise at this attack on the president the media had no choice but to grant them airtime.
Here's the entire portion addressing the ads:
TENSIONS BETWEEN THE KERRY camp and the DNC were exacerbated on Wednesday and Thursday last week when the DNC was attacking the Bush campaign for including four seconds of scenes from the World Trade Center terrorist attacks in the President's first campaign ads.
"The DNC is yapping about this and the Bush ads are running on every news station and on every nightly newscast around the country for two days straight. The Bush guys basically got full saturation from an ad that perhaps one million people might have seen on one of those cable channels had no attention been given," says a Kerry campaign staffer. "Then they put these spokespeople out there to talk about the ads who were just embarrassingly bad. The party guys did us no good."
It isn't as though the Kerry people weren't looking to attack the ads themselves. Despite denials that the Kerry campaign criticized the Bush ads, the Kerry camp did reach out family members of people killed on 9/11 whom they knew were supporters of Kerry and asked if they'd be willing to denounce the ads publicly. Those people were given the names of assignment editors at cable news channels and network news outlets, as well as talking points for them to use if they were interviewed.
~snip~