President Bush seized yesterday on Senator Kerry’s statement about making terrorism a mere “nuisance,” citing it as evidence that the Democratic presidential nominee is naive about the threat facing America.

“I couldn’t disagree more,” Mr. Bush told a campaign rally in Hobbs, N.M. “Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorists, and spreading freedom and liberty around the world.”

Mr. Bush’s campaign also rolled out a television ad that takes the Massachusetts senator to task for his comments. “How can Kerry protect us when he doesn’t understand the threat?” the ad asks.

Mr. Kerry made the remark envisioning terrorism as a nuisance in an interview published Sunday in the New York Times Magazine.

“We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” the senator was quoted as saying. “As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

The Kerry campaign accused the Bush camp of distorting the senator’s comments and ignoring his promises elsewhere in the same interview about “destroying terrorists” wherever they are found.

In a conference call arranged by the Bush campaign, Mayor Giuliani joined in the criticism of Mr. Kerry’s branding terrorism as a potential nuisance.

“The idea that you’re going to have an acceptable level of terrorism is frightening,” Mr. Giuliani said. “This is not illegal gambling. This isn’t prostitution. And having been a former law-enforcement person for a lot longer than John Kerry ever was, I don’t understand this confusion.”

Mr. Giuliani pointed to a string of terrorist incidents, beginning with the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. “I’m wondering exactly when Senator Kerry thought they were just a nuisance,” the former mayor said.

Mr. Giuliani acknowledged that Republican presidents were in office during many of those attacks and he con ceded that more could have been done to deal with the scourge of terrorism.

“We hadn’t really appreciated the danger until September 11, 2001. We now have seen the danger,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I think John Kerry still hasn’t gotten it.”

Democrats argued that Mr. Kerry’s comment about reducing the prevalence of terror was remarkably similar to the view Mr. Bush offered in an interview with NBC in August. In that exchanged, Mr. Bush described the war on terror as unwinnable.

“I don’t think you can win it, but I think you can create conditions so that the – those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world,” Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Giuliani noted that Mr. Bush disavowed that sentiment soon after he made the statement. “That was not at all what he said,” the former mayor said. “He made it clear immediately thereafter.”

In his campaign speech yesterday, Mr. Kerry steered clear of the controversy over his interview. Instead, the Democratic nominee focused on record-high oil prices and attempted to lay blame for the surge at Mr. Bush’s doorstep.

“When it comes to developing a real energy policy, George Bush has run out of gas,” Mr. Kerry said. “As usual with their plans, they are plans that warm the hearts of their powerful friends and leave you out and leave the American people out in the cold.”

Meanwhile, Democrats seethed yesterday at a broadcasting company’s plans to air an anti-Kerry documentary in the waning days of the campaign. The Sinclair Broadcast Group will show the 42-minute film “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal” on all of its 62 stations in late October, according to the film’s producer, Carlton Sherwood. The documentary, which will reportedly air without commercial interruption, features former American prisoners of war in Vietnam decrying Mr. Kerry for his public assertions that war crimes were routinely committed by American troops in Southeast Asia.

The Democratic National Committee said it will file a complaint today with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that Sinclair is making an illegal donation to Mr. Bush’s campaign.

“They’re running it days before the election for the obvious, manifest, and inarguable purpose of influencing the election,” an attorney for the Democratic Party, Joseph Sandler, told reporters yesterday. He described the film as a “vicious personal attack” on Mr. Kerry.

The party’s national chairman, Terence McAuliffe, noted that Sinclair recently refused to air a Democratic Party ad critical of Mr. Bush. He observed the company’s executives have made numerous donations to Republican candidates.

“In this election cycle, they have put their money where their right-wing mouths are,” Mr. McAuliffe said. “Sinclair’s owners aren’t interested in news. They’re interested in pro-Bush propaganda.”

Sinclair also came under fire from Democrats in April, after it refused to carry an ABC “Nightline” broadcast that consisted of the names and photographs of American military personnel killed in Iraq.

Officials from Sinclair did not return phone calls yesterday seeking comment for this article.

Mr. McAuliffe also blasted the film’s producer, Mr. Sherwood, describing him as a “disgraced former TV reporter.” The Democratic Party chief noted that in 1984 a Washington television station retracted and apologized for a series of news reports Mr. Sherwood prepared about alleged improprieties involving fund-raising for the Vietnam veterans memorial in the capital. The station said it conducted an internal investigation into the stories and “turned up no evidence” to support the central charges in the series.

Democratic operatives noted that Mr. Sherwood worked for the Washington Times and was accused of unethical behavior while producing a book on the Unification Church.

They did not mention, however, that Mr. Sherwood won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for his reporting on a fund-raising scandal involving a Catholic charity, the Pauline Fathers.

Mr. Sherwood, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, said he has been a registered as an independent for more than 30 years. He said the Democrats are attacking him because they cannot dispute the facts in his film about Mr. Kerry.

“Nobody is questioning a single thing that’s in this documentary. There’s nothing in it that’s false. There’s nothing in it that’s misleading,” the filmmaker said.

Mr. Sherwood said the criticism of his earlier work was a result of his aggressive investigative reporting. “No matter what we do, there’s always going to be people on the other side who want to trash us,” he said.

A law professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, Daniel Lowenstein, said that while corporate donations to federal campaigns are illegal, most campaign finance laws have an exception for bona fide news coverage or commentaries.

Mr. Lowenstein said Sinclair’s conduct “may be pushing it a little bit” but the government should not be in the business of determining whether specific broadcasts or films are fair to political candidates.

“We wouldn’t want the government going in and saying you’re within the news exemption as long as this editor’s making the decision and not this editor over here,” Mr. Lowenstein said.

Mr. Sandler, the party’s lawyer, said the Democrats do not consider Michael Moore’s anti-Bush film, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” to be an illegal donation to the Kerry campaign. “Michael Moore is an established, legitimate documentary filmmaker,” Mr. Sandler explained.

Many Democrats contend that Fox News, a division of News Corporation, is flagrantly biased in favor of Mr. Bush and the GOP. In response to a question from The New York Sun, however, Mr. Sandler said no action is planned against Fox. “We would not consider filing such a complaint against News Corp., notwithstanding the evident bias in many circumstances,” Mr. Sandler said. “We may not like them, but it’s on every day. It’s something they do normally, and they’re acting as a press entity in doing so. This is different.”

Mr. Lowenstein said he doesn’t see the distinction from a legal point of view. “I think we’re better off letting all these voices be heard,” he said. “It actually is possible to turn off a television set.”