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Censored at the Super Bowl By Robert E. Martin The big outrage at this year's SuperBowl wasn't Jason Timberlake pulling off Janet Jackson's snap top to give us a glimpse of her jewelry, as CBS executives would have you believe. Nor was it the Patriots-Panthers matchup that caused controversy. Instead, the great struggle of this year's Super Bowl was waged over a short advertisement-a 30-second spot with few words, none of them spoken aloud. It's an ad underwritten by the grass-roots political organization Moveon.org criticizing the ballooning budget deficit under George W. Bush. Thanks to CBS (who also censored the Ronald Reagan Mini-series earlier this year) the network refused to air the spot during this year's Super Bowl broadcast. Meanwhile, the White House and Congressional Republicans are on the verge of signing into law a deal, which Senator John McCain (R-AZ) says, is custom-tailored for CBS and Fox, allowing the two networks to grow much bigger. CBS lobbied hard for this rule change; MoveOn.org members across the country lobbied against it; and the MoveOn.org ad was rejected, making it rather obvious that CBS gave their interest in this legislation priority over what their responsibility was to honor the right to free speech. Plenty of people have already watched the MoveOn ad, called "Child's Pay," on CNN, viewed it on the Internet, read about it in news stories and seen it excerpted on television news. In fact, "Child's Pay" has gotten a tremendous amount of attention since CBS first declined to air it, citing a policy that prohibits "advocacy" ads. Still, it is playing everywhere, all the time, often at no cost to its creators. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on political advertising says that MoveOn's spot may rank as "the ad that has achieved the most air time with the least dollars expended of any ad in the history of the republic." The controversy over the ad raises serious questions about broadcasters' civic obligations, censorship and the blurry line between political and commercial advertising. In retrospect it was perhaps a blessing in disguise that CBS declined to run the ad, saving the organization $1.5 million that it would cost to air one spot in order to air many. And if nothing else, The MoveOn saga shows how in the current polarized political climate, getting censored can be the best publicity there is. According to Newsweek, the advertisement's story, like everything else, begins on the Internet. MoveOn, which is dedicated to getting Big Money out of politics, Big Business out of the media and the Bushes out of the White House, last fall ran a nationwide contest for the best 30-second advertisement criticizing the Bush administration's policies. The contest, entitled "Bush in 30 Seconds," scored headlines before it was even over when Republicans complained that two of the competing ads featured on MoveOn's Web site made an inappropriate comparison between Adolph Hitler and George W. Bush. MoveOn distanced itself from the Hitler ads but the attention paid to the incident made one thing clear: MoveOn wasn't afraid to ruffle some feathers to get its message across. For its winner, MoveOn's panel of judges chose "Child's Pay," an ad with an understated tone and a direct message. The spot depicts an array of angel-faced children performing grueling adult tasks-working in factories, vacuuming floors, hauling trash. Its only words are written in white across a black screen toward the end: "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1 trillion deficit?" With the winner in place, MoveOn focused its energy on securing a high-profile venue for the ad. It waged a fierce Internet fund-raising campaign to meet the Super Bowl's astronomical advertising costs and managed to raise $1.5 million, enough to pay for a 30-second spot. All the organization needed was a greenlight from CBS. MoveOn says that at first, the signals seemed good. Eli Pariser, MoveOn's campaign director, says he had initial conversations with CBS advertising salespeople who "talked with us about how much they'd love to run this ad." (A CBS spokesman denies this account). Pariser says MoveOn thought it was sailing smooth toward Super Bowl Sunday. "We had no reason to expect for them to reject it." But after MoveOn submitted the ad for CBS's consideration, the network faxed MoveOn a rejection letter calling "Child's Pay" an advocacy advertisement that didn't meet the network's standards for broadcast. MoveOn officials were outraged. The network, they felt, was stifling their message, denying them their right to "free speech." CBS says it was well within its rights to turn down the ad. In a statement, the network said it based its MoveOn decision on a "decades-old" policy of preventing "those with means to produce and purchase network advertising from having undue influence on 'controversial issues of public importance'." "Child's Pay," in other words, attacked the Bush administration without giving the Bush administration an equal chance to respond. The problem with this argument, MoveOn and others say, is that CBS and other networks run this kind of politically charged advertising all the time under other guises. "What you run into," says Jamieson, "is the pharmaceutical-manufacturers association in essence telling you how wonderful the pharmaceutical companies are and how good it would be to have a [government-sponsored] drug benefit that had these characteristics, but it never mentions a candidate and the networks don't recognize that that's actually issue advocacy." The battle over "Child's Pay" is now one of public perception. And by most, accounts, it is a battle that MoveOn is winning. Condemnations of CBS have appeared everywhere from The New York Times op-ed page to Capitol Hill. In a letter to CBS president and CEO Leslie Moonves, more than 20 members of Congress accused CBS of limiting "the debate to ads that are not critical of the political status quo, and ... of the President and the Republican-controlled Congress." Vermont Rep. Bernard Sanders, a coauthor, says that "Child's Pay's" rejection symbolizes the dangerous implications of corporate-controlled media. "There is virtually nobody nationally who has a different point of view, who has a progressive point of view, and I don't think that's an accident, frankly. I think that's what the people who own the media want and what the people who do the advertising want." Buffered by these deafening cries of discontent, the MoveOn ad has generated more buzz as a censored commodity than it ever would have as a Super Bowl ad. Some, most notably CBS, say this is what MoveOn.org wanted all along-for the network to punt on running the Super Bowl ad and thus deliver MoveOn tons of great publicity, free of charge. Pariser denies this was his intent. "Frankly, if I had the choice between running the ad and demonstrating how a grass-roots competition can create an ad that makes it to the Super Bowl or getting this attention on the issue, I'd rather just run the ad," he says. Sanders thinks MoveOn is smart to make a fuss. "If I were the head of MoveOn.org and CBS rejected me, man, I would tell as many people as I could about it. And I suspect that's what they're doing."
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