DURHAM - What one candidate calls negative campaigning might be what another calls truth in advertising.

The four Democrats vying to be Durham's next district attorney have differing opinions on campaign ads that are making a big splash this week.

Tracey Cline, an assistant district attorney, held a news conference Tuesday afternoon to try to shift the focus from mailers and door messages being distributed by two of her challengers in the primary, Keith Bishop and Freda Black.

In Durham, a county that saw its last elected district attorney stripped of his law license and ousted from office for his misconduct in the Duke lacrosse case, Cline has tried to distance herself from the phony sexual assault case and Mike Nifong, the prosecutor who pushed ahead with the charges.

Both Cline and Mitchell Garrell, the other assistant district attorney seeking the elected post, have been forced to answer questions about their ties to Nifong, their former boss.

Black, a former prosecutor who was pushed out of the District Attorney's Office by Nifong, has not been satisfied with Cline's assertions that she had nothing to do with the lacrosse case.

In one campaign mailer, Black tries to win over voters with pictures of Cline and the slogan "Don't Get Nifonged Again."

On the postcard, Cline is pictured sitting by Nifong in a Durham County courtroom and in a yellow Nifong campaign T-shirt, clapping her hands.

Bishop has been hanging pages of campaign literature on doorknobs with copies of the same pictures and his assertions that Cline was indeed linked to the lacrosse case.

Garrell said Tuesday that he had not used similar tactics, although he has questioned at forums Cline's attempts to distance herself from the case.

On the steps of the Durham County courthouse Tuesday afternoon, Cline appealed to Durham voters to ignore the campaign ads and focus, instead, on her plans for Durham.

She spoke in support of programs through which court officials and school officials would work together to keep teens in school and away from guns and activities that might lead them into lives of crime.

Cline said she would fight for programs that offered education to all children of Durham -- not just those on the college track.

"I cannot worry about the tactics of others," Cline said. "I cannot worry about the mudslinging. I don't have time."

But Bishop and Black supporters at the news conference Tuesday afternoon shrugged off Cline's complaints as those of a candidate who was more interested in spinning a new take on the past than dealing with what had happened during the lacrosse case.

"Pictures, they tell one thousand words," Bishop said. "The issues are clearly trust, trust, trust. Can you trust the Nifong holdovers?"