If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti

Sunday, August 21, 2005

And here we see free speech in action.

A Utah television station is refusing to air an anti-war ad featuring Cindy Sheehan, whose son’s death in Iraq prompted a vigil outside President Bush’s Texas ranch.

The ad began airing on other area stations Saturday, two days before Bush was scheduled to speak in Salt Lake City to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

However, a national sales representative for KTVX, a locabuyers, writing that it was an “inappropriate commercial advertisement for Salt Lake City.”

In the ad, Sheehan pleads with Bush for a meeting and accuses him of lying to the American people about Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction and its connection to al-Qaida.

“I love my country. But how many more of our loved ones need to die in this senseless war?” a weary-looking Sheehan asks in the ad. “I know you can’t bring Casey back. But it’s time to admit mistakes and bring our troops home now.”

Salt Lake City affiliates of NBC, CBS and Fox began running the ad Saturday.

Oh, you mean radical right-wing propaganda outfit Fox, that the American left never ceases wailing about?  Amazing.  As we all know they must have called Karl Rove’s hotline to find out what to do, so there must be some kind of double-secret plot going on behind the scenes.  At any rate, the general manager of the ABC station defended its decision in an email.

The e-mail read: “The viewpoints reflected in the spot are incompatible with our marketplace and will not be well received by our viewers.” It added that the spot didn’t qualify as an issue advertisement.

For the ad to have been considered an “issue” advertisement a ballot measure would have had to be at stake, D’Antuono said.

Okay, fair enough.  One of the managers of another area station disagreed.

Mark Wiest, vice president of sales for NBC-affiliated KSL television, said that in the interest of freedom of speech, his station didn’t hesitate to run the ad. KSL is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“The bigger picture is, by suppressing the message are we doing what is right under the First Amendment and in an open democratic society?” Wiest said.

The issue here is that while the First Amendment guarantees Casey Sheehen’s mother the right to make her commercial, and it gives left-wing groups the right to purchase ad time to broadcast the commercial, it does not guarantee them the means to broadcast it, and no station is under any obligation to accept their money or provide them air time.  Personally, as despicable as I find what Casey Sheehan’s mother is doing, I fully support her right to do it, and if the decision were mine to make I would have run their ad.  The way to win people to your side is not to silence your opposition, it’s to provide a superior argument.  It’s for exactly this reason that I wrote an open letter to the conservative activist group Move America Forward, requesting that they end their ultimately fruitless campaign to get theaters to refuse to screen Fahrenheit 9/11.  The station is simply making a martyr out of Casey Sheehan’s mother, because by refusing to air her message it implies a sense of validity.  She’s not saying anything hateful, she’s not inciting violence, or suborning the overthrow of the government, so why not let her have her say?  As the old saying goes, the solution to problems arising from free speech is more free speech, not less.  There isn’t a single thing that Casey Sheehen’s mother can say that can’t be logically countered, refuted, and rebutted.  All she has is the rank emotional appeal of her alleged victimhood, and this only plays well with liberals, who are overemotional creatures by nature and see themselves primarily as victims of “they.”

It’s the station’s right to refuse to broadcast her commercial, but I wonder if by doing so they aren’t throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.