The network owned by the Boston Red Sox pulled a Senate candidate’s campaign ad that blamed private equity for destroying the team.
Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee in Maine’s Senate race against Susan Collins, ran the commercial during a Red Sox game on NESN on Friday. The ad references a March 2021 Axios report on RedBird Capital Partners taking an 11 percent stake in Fenway Sports Group and broadly accuses private equity of “buying up our homes, our sports and our lives.” It ends with Platner pledging to “reverse the private equity curse” before signing off with a reference to missing Mookie Betts, who FSG traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2020.
Private equity is taking our homes. It’s taking our hospitals. It’s taking beloved local businesses and stripping them for parts.
And now private equity is running the Red Sox into the ground.
Our new ad ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/w7LapElpdA
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) May 22, 2026
NESN pulled the ad partway through the broadcast. The network confirmed the removal in a statement to the New York Times, saying it pulls advertisements when “credible concerns arise regarding the use of intellectual property” and that the creative included “unauthorized use of third-party intellectual property.”
Yesterday we started running this ad during the Red Sox game.
Midway through the game the ad was taken down by the station (which is owned by Red Sox ownership).
And then the Sox blew a 4-0 lead. https://t.co/3Ilim6xQ9f
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) May 23, 2026
The ad generated attention that Platner probably didn’t want, as well as the attention he did want.
Platner has spent his entire campaign building himself up as a working-class insurgent, so running an ad targeting Red Sox ownership on their own network was on-brand, but it brought renewed attention to a story that’s dogged him since the summer.
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy published an email exchange showing a campaign consultant had reached out before Friday’s game to pitch him on the ad’s “populist streak.” Portnoy passed, and said he would rather discuss a tattoo on Platner that resembles the Totenkopf death’s head image used by the SS before and during World War II. Platner has said he covered it up after learning of its associations, and Bernie Sanders — who endorsed him at a Labor Day rally in Portland — has maintained his support.
Platner is a Marine and Army veteran who served four tours across Iraq and Afghanistan, an oyster farmer who attended George Washington University on the GI Bill, and a progressive challenger who beat back the Democratic establishment in the primary after Maine Gov. Janet Mills dropped out while trailing him in polls. He is one of the party’s best pickup opportunities in November, running against five-term incumbent Collins in a race that could determine control of the Senate.
The Collins campaign, for its part, called the NESN episode an attempt to “change the subject,” according to the Times.
NESN is a cable network with no FCC obligation to carry federal candidate advertising. But pulling an ad from a Senate candidate without specifying what intellectual property was actually violated — on a network owned by the subject of the ad — is why a $14,000 buy has turned into a national news story.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.