Free Speech: Missing in America.
George Bush and the media are always touting how free we are in America, how we have free speech as compared to those other nations such as in Mideast and elsewhere. Yet, a recent Washington Post article by Alan Cooperman shows that television, the most powerful media in America, is not really free.
Here is quote from the beginning of the article.
WASHINGTON — CBS and NBC have rejected an advertisement for the United Church of Christ that shows two beefy bouncers turning away a gay couple, a Latino woman and a disabled man outside a church.
Officials of the Cleveland-based denomination, which has nearly 6,000 congregations and 1.3 million members, said the 30-second ad is intended to boost name recognition and attract members. “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we,” the ad says.
In a written explanation to the church’s ad agency, CBS linked the ad to the issue of same-sex marriage and said it does not accept advertising “on one side of a current controversial issue of public importance.”
NBC’s rejection notice simply called the ad “too controversial.”
I haven’t seen the ad, but according to reports about it I probably wouldn’t like it. But — why should NBC and CBS not run the ad? The group wanting to run the ad certainly cannot start their own network, and there are only a handful of broadcast networks in the United States. the 21st century is not like 1776 when the state of the art media was a printed broadside sheet that anyone could have produced and distributed. When a point of view is kept off the major networks in America, freedom of speech and expression is effectively blocked.
NBC and CBS can editorialize all they want on certain positions, they can (and do) slant their news coverage to suit their own viewpoint. Americans have a lot of valid complaints about that bias, and there are many organizations that reveal it. But, the idea that the major networks even block paid advertising should send loud warning bells up the spine of every freedom-loving American.
In rejecting the ad, NBC and CBS maintained that they do not accept advertising “on one side of a current controversial issue of public importance.” Of course, that’s a lie, they have accepted many ads promoting a particular controversial point of view.” But, the real question is why shouldn’t they accept advertising on controversial issues of public importance?
Whatever happens, the media masters don’t want any real debate on “controversial issues of public importance.”
The fact that they would suppress these ads and then make a statement that they don’t want to air controversial opinions shows the sad state of American freedom today.
In the days before the beginning of the Iraq War launched to “destroy Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction,” many Americans, including me, made the argument that the evidence clearly pointed to the fact that Iraq had no such weapons. If we really had hard evidence of such weapons, Bush and Powell would have sent some of our hundreds of inspectors and CIA agents to simply uncover a single cache of them. Then Bush could have easily have justified his war to the world.
But, the arguments against the war were never really heard by Americans as they were in other nations. So we had a war that has so far caused over 10,000 Americans to be maimed, crippled, blinded or killed, has cost us a national treasure of over $200 billion dollars and only made anti-American terrorists stronger and far more popular around the world. After all of this we find out that the dissadents in America and the vast majority of our European bretheren were right. A little too late, I’d say.
But, listen to NBC and CBS! For gosh sakes, lets not have advertising on controversial issues of public importance!
–David Duke
