The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
A Texas dark money group lied about what we said. That’s not politics, it’s fraud.
Let’s get one thing straight from the get-go: the Franklin Reporter & Advocate has never endorsed a political candidate. Not in our 13 years of existence. Not once. We take that principle seriously, and we intend to keep it.
Which is why we are furious.
A political action committee calling itself the Florence Avenue Initiative — headquartered not in New Jersey, but in Texas — is circulating mailers in the Democratic primary for the NJ 12th Congressional District, the race to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman. One of those mailers displays the Franklin Reporter & Advocate’s logo alongside the phrase: “Altman’s flip-flops ‘on Iran are troubling’.”
The clear, unmistakable implication is that those are our words. Our judgment. Our editorial voice weighing in against candidate Sue Altman.
They are not.
What the Florence Avenue Initiative actually did — and we want readers to understand exactly how cynical this is — was lift a single line from a Letter to the Editor published on our site on April 29, 2026. A letter. Written by private citizens. Submitted to us for publication as an expression of their opinion, not ours. The mailer makes no effort, none whatsoever, to distinguish between a letter from readers and a statement from this publication. Our logo sits there like a stamp of editorial approval on an opinion we never expressed and a candidate we have never evaluated.
That is not a technicality. That is a lie.
The mailer’s headline, with breathtaking irony, reads: “We can’t trust Sue Altman.” We’ll leave Democratic primary voters to make up their own minds about Ms. Altman. But we know exactly who we can’t trust: an anonymous Texas money machine that can’t make its case without putting fabricated words in the mouths of local journalists.
Dark money groups operate in the shadows by design. They dump cash into local races, flood mailboxes with slick attack pieces, and vanish before anyone can hold them accountable. The Florence Avenue Initiative appears to be a textbook example of the species. Its backers are unknown. Its interests in a New Jersey congressional primary are unexplained. And apparently its standards for factual accuracy are nonexistent.
The audacity is something to behold. This group has the gall to tell New Jersey voters that a candidate isn’t “from our district,” while the organization making that charge is based in Texas. Texas. A state that, last we checked, shares no border with New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, or any other part of this state. The hypocrisy would be funny if it weren’t so contemptible.
We are a small, independent, community news organization with a 13-year record of honest, straightforward local journalism, and a deep obligation to the readers who trust us. When someone trades on our name and our logo to deceive those readers, we will not be silent about it.
To the Florence Avenue Initiative: you do not get to use us. You do not get to launder your political attack through our credibility. Correct the record, pull the mailer, and in the future conduct your out-of-state meddling without fabricating endorsements from publications that want nothing to do with you.
To our readers: we did not say what that mailer implies we said. We are telling you that now, loudly and clearly, because the truth still matters, even when, perhaps especially when, powerful and shadowy outside interests are working hard to bury it.
