• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, October 19, 2010

Is Cablevision borrowing from the famed "Daisy" ad in its campaign against News Corp.? In a print ad Tuesday, it uses an adorable young girl à la the 1964 TV spot that helped keep LBJ in the White House.

The Cablevision ad in The New York Times -- and possibly elsewhere -- has the girl staring at readers full of sorrow and pleading: "Hey News Corp., do I look like a bargaining chip?"

News Corp.'s Fox and MyNetworkTV stations have been taken off the Cablevision system, and the ad is part of the public battle about who's wrong. What's unusual, however, is that neither station has much in the way of programming that would compel a preschooler to leave Nickelodeon. She might like "Wild About Animals" on Saturday mornings, or singing along to "Glee," if her parents let her stay up that late, but that's about it.

Instead, the ad seems to be an attempt to simply capitalize on the oft-effective cuteness factor. Below her photo, Cablevision accuses News Corp. of "corporate greed" in taking the Fox station off its system, but makes no reference to the darling in its text.

The "Daisy" ad, by contrast, used its young girl -- who is about the same age -- in a more relevant fashion. In the controversial one-time Sixties ad, she counted petals on a flower, before a hearty male voice warns against what nuclear weapons might do to her.

The Cablevision-News Corp. standoff has, in a sense, gone nuclear. Both sides are fulminating across the media. But Cablevision's little girl breaks from the text-heavy print ads and radio spots with stern arguments: a full-page letter from Lew Leone -- general manager of the Fox and MyNetwork stations in New York -- that lays out various anti-Cablevision arguments that have run in multiple outlets.