That was quick. A day after reportedly being in “negotiations” to broadcast the winning commercial from MoveOn’s “Bush in 30 seconds” contest during the Super Bowl, CBS announced yesterday that the ad has been rejected.
Ad Age magazine reported that a CBS spokesman “said the decision against broadcasting the spot had nothing to do with either the Super Bowl or the ad’s specific issue but was because the network has had a long-term policy not to air issue ads anywhere on the network.”
Eli Pariser, MoveOn’s campaigns director, told Salon, “Ads which do not promote the selling of things basically are not welcome. The scary thing about it is that advertising at this point is one of the only ways you can even get access to the media. To have it restricted on the basis of viewpoints is dangerous.”
Pariser raises a good point. I had always assumed the networks were concerned most, to the point of near obsession, with money. MoveOn was prepared to pay the same rate as everybody else, but CBS rejected the ad anyway because it’s political speech instead of commercial speech.
Censorship is a word that gets thrown around a lot, even when it doesn’t really apply. CBS, as far as I can tell, isn’t literally censoring MoveOn, it’s just rejecting the group’s ad for their broadcast. It’s a private network that has a policy about political advertising. Fine.
But the fact that CBS, ABC, and NBC all share this policy creates an unusual free speech conundrum. The public owns the airwaves, but those who own the networks have control over who has access to those airwaves, even when they’re willing to pay for access.
“I can tell you exactly what the rules are,” Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, told Salon. “The rules are exactly what the owner of the news medium wants them to be, and they are not rules, they are simply choices. For many news organizations, the rules are governed by such things as taste and accuracy. In the case of some, the question of taste slips over into finding the message disagreeable or believing that the audience would find that message disagreeable. The long and short of it is they don’t have to run any advertisement they don’t want to.”
Worse, CBS’s policy isn’t literally going to restrict all non-commercial advertising. Indeed, this year’s Super Bowl will feature an anti-smoking ad, a public service announcement about AIDS, and a commercial from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Is this consistent with a “long-term policy not to air issue ads anywhere on the network”? Doesn’t sound like it.
So why would CBS accept these spots but not one about the national debt? Apparently, because it feels like it.
As MoveOn’s Pariser said, “What I’ve learned in my year of doing political advertising is that the powers that be can reject an ad at any time for any reason without explanation. It’s one of the really thoroughly undemocratic parts of the media process.”