Kiss your ads goodbye

You probably saw a lot of interesting things last night if you watched the Super Bowl, but here are two things I bet you didn't see: commercials from the advocacy groups MoveOn and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.\nThat's because both groups, which tried to buy ads at market rate -- reportedly in excess of $2 million -- for the most-watched TV event each year, were turned down by CBS, a unit of Viacom, Inc. \nThe network told MoveOn, a progressive political advocacy group, and PETA, an animal rights advocacy group, it would not air their ads on the grounds they violated policy and the network doesn't run ads on "controversial issues of public importance."\n"We have a longstanding, clear and consistent policy of not allowing advocacy ads so deep pockets cannot control one side of a public policy debate," said Dana McClintock, senior vice president of communications for CBS.\nMoveOn's low-key spot, called "Child's Pay," features a bluesy soundtrack and images of children working menial jobs. It's capped off with the tag: "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1 trillion deficit?"\nPETA's ad claims "Meat can cause impotence" when a meat-eating pizza delivery man isn't up for the job with two scantily clad women. Instead, the girls snuggle with a vegetarian.\n(This is comparatively tame to past campaigns PETA has employed, including one which compared egg-farm chickens to Holocaust concentration camp victims.)\nCBS's rejection of the ads would make a lot more sense, however, if its standards were consistent. Instead, according to the online magazine, Ad Age, the network had no intention of preventing other ads which were both advocating and controversial in nature. \nThe American Legacy Foundation and Philip Morris USA were allowed to run anti-smoking ads, and for the third year in a row, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy used tax-payer dollars to run its two messages about the drug war -- a spot a few years ago linked recreational drug use to the financing of global terrorism.\nAh, another longstanding, clear and consistent policy upheld once again.\nBut I suppose being faced with a choice between the drug war and the federal budget, it's easy to see what any rational person would find more controversial.\nConcluding CBS does indeed run advocacy and controversial spots, you have to ask why the two rejected spots were turned down and why a major network was allowed to do it.\nAmazingly enough, the answer seems to be, because they wanted to -- and because they can.\nAlex Jones, the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, told www.salon.com, "The [airwave] rules are exactly what the owner of the news medium wants them to be, and they are not rules, they are simply choices."\n "The long and short of it is they don't have to run any advertisement they don't want to," he concluded.\n Should we expect a lawsuit? Don't count on it. Even though airwaves are public domain -- that is, media powerhouses don't own their frequencies -- there is no right to free speech on network TV, even if, like MoveOn and PETA, you can pay the admission price.\nYou don't have to agree with the ads to realize conglomerates are moving slowly, but surely, toward having twisted control over what we see and the news we hear.\nPeople should expect and demand CBS and the other media giants have clear standards, either allowing all issue ads or limiting all issue ads, and those standards should be enforced. Anything else is clearly censorship.