By Eli Pariser
Eli Pariser is national campaigns director for MoveOn.org Voter Fund, an online issues advocacy group.
January 30, 2004
When the Super Bowl is beamed
into living rooms around the world Sunday, you can expect to see TV spots
hyping cars, beer, razor blades, three different erectile dysfunction cures,
toilet paper and snack foods.
The ads will be slick and clever, lavishly produced, brilliant in their marketing.
Some, no doubt, will be sexually suggestive or violent. Most will cost $2
million to $3 million to produce and broadcast.
But here's what you won't see: a single ad about the big issues that face our country today.
Outrageous as it may sound, CBS has decided that ads selling erectile dysfunction
medicines and toilet paper are appropriate for Americans, but serious discussion
should be banned. An ad about our country, our war, our president, the state
of our schools or the size of our budget deficit? That, in the eyes of CBS
officialdom, would be too controversial.
We know, because we tried.
We thought that the Super Bowl, with 130 million viewers, would be a great
place to get our message out. So we held a contest on the Internet to select
the best ad we could possibly run. The ad we selected — from 1,500 submissions
— shows children cleaning offices, washing dishes and hauling trash. It ends
with the question: "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1-trillion
deficit?" (It's viewable at http://www.MoveOn.org ).
But even though we were willing to pony up the $1.6 million to pay for it,
CBS refused to sell us the time, citing what it says is a 50-year-old policy
prohibiting ads that take stands on controversial public policy issues.
CBS claims its policy is designed to keep the Citibanks and Microsofts of
the world from buying time to tell Americans how to think. "It is designed
to prevent those with means to produce and purchase network advertising from
having undue influence on 'controversial issues of public importance,' "
the network said this week.
Sounds fair, doesn't it? But what it
really means is that if McDonald's buys an ad promoting its tasty Big Mac,
no one can run an ad that says Big Macs are full of fat and unhealthful.
Pfizer can run a spot saying it's "helping people in need" get medicine,
but we can't air an ad saying that Pfizer lobbied to weaken the new Medicare
bill to prop up drug prices. Halliburton has slick ads that stress its role
supporting the troops in Iraq. But CBS would reject an ad that pointed to
Halliburton's profiteering.
The fewer issue ads run, the more time
there is for ads with mud-wrestling women selling beer and leggy models peddling
fast cars. CBS execs think Americans love mindless consumerism more than
anything else and that it's their duty to pander to this.
But with "fairness" doctrines no longer governing the airwaves and the media
more concentrated each day, it's getting harder and harder to engage regular
people in political discourse. Even the town square has been replaced, in
most communities, by private malls, where politics is not encouraged.
Instead of taking every opportunity to promote civic discussion, commercial
broadcasters like CBS shrink away. The airwaves are, more than ever, private
enterprises. And for that we pay a price: As public political speech becomes
more difficult and infrequent, the public becomes less engaged in the policies,
processes and laws that govern us.
"Controversy" isn't the real problem.
Network front offices love it when one group or another protests sexy babes
in bikinis peddling beer brands, or violent video games in which the highest
body count wins. That builds buzz.
The CBS policy represents the
triumph of corporate self-interest over the public interest. This is the
same CBS, after all, that yanked the Ronald Reagan miniseries recently when
Republican bigwigs complained. As Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) noted this
week, "These are the same executives at CBS who successfully lobbied this
Congress to change the FCC rules on TV station ownership to their corporate
advantage." CBS simply would rather not risk offending powerful people in
Washington who decide such critical regulatory matters.
But try getting that issue into a 30-second spot for Super Bowl audiences.
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