CBS won’t air the winning ad in the MoveOn.org “Bush in 30 seconds” contest, but it will run (for the third straight year) an ad from the White House Office of National Drug Control.
CBS claims the ad is “too controversial to air”. I’ve watched the ad, and can’t quite find the controversy. The ad implies that future generations are going to be handed a whopping deficit. You can argue for or against the truthfulness of the ad’s message, but where is the controversy? I’ll tell you where it is: it’s in the White House’s 2002 ad that claimed drug users are supporting terrorism.
Meanwhile, in what I am sure is totally unrelated news, President Bush vowed to veto a $390 billion spending bill over a provision that, for one year, would bar networks from owning local television stations that reach a combined 35 percent or more of the national audience. According to the MoveOn site, Senator John McCain says this deal “is custom-tailored for CBS and Fox”.
And we don’t have to think back too far to remember what happened to The Reagans, a two part made-for-tv movie that was originally supposed to run on CBS.
The general proposition is that the right to broadcast on the airwaves belongs to the television station licensed to use that particular chunk of airwaves, and, absent a rule forcing them to broadcast particular content - such as the “equal time” election rules, the station is free to broadcast what it wishes to.
Similarly, the network has a contract with each of its affiliate stations, and, subject to the same restrictions I mention above, it too is free to broadcast what it wishes. If it wishes to air ads promoting war with France, it may do so. If it wishes to decline ads criticizing the budget, it may do so.
I dunno. Maybe CBS just doesn’t want “downer” political adds during an upbeat show. If they were airing a negative anti-Democrat add, but not this on, you might have a point. Moveon.org should take CBS to court if they think there is a law being broken. If there is, I’m sure they will win their case. The article doesn’t indicate whether they intend to sue, so I can’t tell how good they think their case is.
Or they can try the boycott approach like some conservative groups did over the Reagan movie.
For any lawyers in the house, Are the airways “public property” as the moveon.org article claims?
And what is “controversial” about an anti-drug add during the Super Bowl? Are you saying that terrorists have never used drug money to fund their activities?
according to the thread started on this ad a few weeks ago, the liberals are saying that it wasn’t a MoveOn sponsored bit. So CBS doesn’t have to answer to them
CBS’s public position is that they won’t run *advocacy * ads during the Super Bowl, no matter who the sponsor is or what is being advocated. They’ve also nixed a PETA ad, ftr. Bears watching during this election year, though.
I think you’re confusing this with the “Hitler” ad. MoveON is explicitly endorsing the “children working to pay off the deficit” ad, which is what this debate is about.
John - IANAL, but the airwaves are public property, not private. Let me cite the U.S. Code, Title 47, Chapter 5, Sec. 301:
The FCC is charged with regulating the use of such airwaves in a manner serving the “public interest, convenience, and necessity,” a phrase that crops up repeatedly in Title 47.
At the beginning of the Reagan Administration, there was a seismic change in the manner by which that aim was supposed to be accomplished. Up until then, the prevailing standard (as this nonlawyer understands it) had more or less been that while people might disagree over the details of what use of the airwaves best served the public interest, human judgment was the best means of determining whether and to what extent it was being served. But it clearly involved going at least somewhat beyond broadcasters doing what they would do anyway: in return for their broadcast licenses, which are essentially a license to make money using a public asset, they were expected to occasionally serve the public in some ways that didn’t necessarily help their bottom line. These ways, among others, included providing quality news coverage, public service programming, and emergency information in the event of natural disasters. (I’ll come back to this.)
But in 1981, Reagan’s FCC chairman Mark Fowler (a name that should live in infamy, IMHO) changed the standard. From then on, he ruled, the market would determine the public interest. And so it has been ever since.
There are obvious problems with that, beginning with the disconnect between ‘the public’ and ‘those who can best be parted with the most money through ads’. (There’s a reason why TV and radio are geared towards the young; they’re the ones most easily influenced to part with the most money via advertising.) There are other problems, but that’s the biggest.
The broadcast industry has always had an interest in minimizing the public’s awareness of the requirement that they serve the public’s interest, but the presence of public service announcements and programming kept at least some minimal awareness there. That pretty much bit the dust after 1981. Since then, the airwaves have pretty much been operated as private property, and so most people have little clue that they aren’t in fact owned by the broadcast stations. This of course minimizes public pressure for them to serve the public in ways other than those dictated by profit.
(Which was why, in the hours after Hurricane Isabel came through last fall, it was next to impossible for me to turn on the radio and get any information about why our power was out, how bad the overall situation was in our area, and how long it might be before we would get our service restored. The classic rock stations kept playing Tom Petty; the alt-rock stations kept playing Red Hot Chili Peppers, the teenybopper stations kept on playing Avril Lavigne, and so forth.
Pre-1981, this would have been exactly the sort of lack of public service that would have gotten a station in the FCC’s doghouse, because this was one function that broadcasters were expected to provide to serve the public: when emergencies arose, they were supposed to inform the public. In the fall of 2003, of course, many of those stations couldn’t do that; their service was automated, controlled from hundreds of miles away. Isabel? Yes, we heard there was something about a hurricane. Whatever.)
[End of historical digression.]
John, there’s no law that requires CBS to sell ad space to anyone with the money to buy the time, so Moveon.org has no grounds to sue. (What Bricker said, IOW.) However, there are obvious problems with this. It puts the networks and other licensees in the position of being gatekeepers in terms of what viewpoints get aired. Not only does the public have no control over their programming itself (and this isn’t good in itself, since a fair amount of programming is political in content, and there is no requirement for balance), but members of the public have no right to even buy their way on to present differing views during the commercial breaks.
Sure, we’ve got a right to listen to diverging points of view; we can each choose to seek out media with varying points of view on TV, the radio, and the Web. But the key aspect of freedom of speech is the right to speak, and not to just listen to what’s already being said.
This is what is being restricted (dangerously, IMHO) by the current legal right of CBS to play gatekeeper, to say OK to everything from the White House’ anti-drug ads to ads for three different erectile-dsyfunction drugs (I’m not kidding; follow Attrayant’s link) while saying no to Moveon.org. Increasingly, we’re all getting into our little niches when it comes to what we watch and listen to and see on the Web, but broadcast programming still reaches across boundaries. Advertising during such programming is one of the few opportunities for a group of Americans with one set of opinions to try and do something besides preach to the choir - to reach out and say something to people who don’t necessarily believe the same things they do. It may violate no laws, but I think it’s dangerous, in the long run, for the broadcasters to have the power to veto advertisements simply because they represent a political or social or religious point of view. On preview: thanks, John, for responding to duffer. I was going to, but this post ran away with itself enough already.
Not to hijack too much, but this statement ignores the realities of the war on drugs. The reason that terrorists can use drug money to fund their activities is because the pointless and wasteful war on drugs has insured that there is huge profit in drug trade. That particular add is astonishingly deceptive and completely ignores the nuances involved.
If we had a simple harm reduction approach to addiction, and got over our puritanical notion that anything that is enjoyable is somehow inherently evil there would be no more black-market profit in drugs than there is in milk.
(Apologies in advance if you were being funny and I am being whooshed).
Why is anyone surprised? This is the same CBS that chickened out of airing “The Reagans” just because the GOP made a stink that it didn’t portray Ramblin’ Ron as the second coming of Jesus Christ. The idea of airing an anti-Bush ad (“Gosh, what if they call us unpatriotic?!”) during a high-profile venue like the Super Bowl would be more heat than they want to bear.
I’m sure CBS will be glad to place the ad in a less “controversial” timeslot, though – like, two minutes before the local stations’ 2:00am sign-off period…
While I agree with you, I am trying to look at this from the government’s perspective. Those folks think drugs should be illegal (as do most Americans) and so it is not unreasonable to link drugs to undesireable activity in order to reduce the demand side.
RTF:
Thanks. I think the key issue here is whether or not CBS refuses to ever run that add. We’re talking about one show here, not their whole lineup. I’ve already seen this add dozens of times on different channels, so I don’t see that it’s getting a short shrift. And as I said, if CBS chose only to run ads from one party during the SuperBowl, but not the other party, then that might also be a problem. If that is happening, someone should point it out.
