It's the giant bug that gets your attention. With spider legs and industrial-grade mandibles, the creature looks like an escapee from a bad B-grade movie.

This is a dust mite, magnified thousands of times, displayed atop a full-page ad in the N&O. The headline says "Take a deep breath...if you dare."

The ad by America's Best Home Service goes on to lay out the litany of ills caused by dirty heating and air-conditioning ducts: unexplained headaches, chronic fatigue and lethargy, asthma onset, confusion...and on and on. To ease those worries, the ad offers duct cleaning for $49.95.

Seemed like a reasonable price to N&O reader Kay McManus of Raleigh. "I figured, well, if they can afford that type of ad in The N&O, I assume they're good. I called and talked to them. Boy, could they give you a sales pitch. They could sell you a dead cat in a paper bag."

An America's Best "technician" called on McManus on June 21 and by the time he'd left, her $49.95 cleaning bill had mushroomed to $2,211. Her ductwork had additional problems, it seemed.

That sad tale played itself out repeatedly around the Triangle in recent months, leaving customers' wallets vacuumed out more than their ducts. On Aug. 24, the state Attorney General's Office filed suit to shut down the company and get customer refunds.

The suit accuses America's Best of illegal bait and switch tactics, baiting consumers with low price offers in its ads and coupons and then switching them to extra services that cost as much as $2,000. After The N&O ran a story Aug. 27, the paper received more complaints from readers who'd had unhappy experiences with America's First. They have been referred to the attorney general.

Good for the AG's Office for taking action. And good for The N&O for publicizing the problem (after the AG issued a press release).

But what about the ad that allowed the scheme to work? What responsibility does the newspaper have to screen advertising to make sure it's not aiding and abetting consumer fraud? What expectations should readers have of the advertised claims they see in the paper?

Tom Bowers, longtime advertising professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, says the expectations should be high. "I think readers ought to be able to expect the same standards of accuracy and truthfulness in the advertising as they expect in news columns and entertainment columns," said Bowers, who is serving as interim dean of the UNC journalism school. Ideally, he said, newspapers ought to be able to check out every advertiser, although "whether it's practical to do that, that's another question."

Attorney General Roy Cooper agreed that it's difficult for newspapers to verify every ad, but, he said "we'd like the newspapers to be as vigorous as possible" in screening for fraudulent advertising. He credited The N&O for stopping the dirty vent ads as soon as the paper was contacted by his office in August.

What policies exist at the newspaper? The paper regularly turns down or edits advertising that looks fishy, usually because of exaggerated claims, says Jim McClure, vice president for display advertising. But as a practical matter, McClure said, it's impossible for the paper to check out every advertiser.

"Our policy is to never knowingly publish advertising that is untruthful," he said. "I can't promise you that it won't happen again, but it is our intention that it would never happen within the reach of what is a reasonable and prudent way of doing business."

By that, he means that there are too many ads for the paper to do a background check on every one. The N&O runs more than 100,000 ads a month, including both display and classified advertising (a number of the ads are repeated).

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