owl is being 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, the network that refuses to air it during this year's Super Bowl broadcast, it is an ad that no one will see.

During the Super Bowl that is. 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 (If you’re not one of them, you can watch the spot by clicking on the video player at the top of this page.) 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. Fiery e-mails to the press from MoveOn supporters accuse CBS of currying favor with the Bush White House. Newspaper advertisements paid for by MoveOn characterize CBS’s decision as a “tragedy of free speech.” CBS's switchboards have been jammed for the past week with callers complaining about the network’s refusal to air the ad. And MoveOn is urging its supporters to boycott the Super Bowl broadcast for a minute during halftime on Sunday.

"Child's Pay" 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, tells NEWSWEEK 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 questions about broadcasters’ civic obligations, censorship and the blurry line between political and commercial advertising. But the furor surrounding "Child's Pay" also provides a window on the emerging PR savvy of activists on the Internet. The MoveOn saga shows how in the current polarized political climate, getting censored can be the best publicity there is.

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, tells NEWSWEEK 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, tells NEWSWEEK 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." As a side benefit, the budget deficit is even getting some attention. It's not the center of attention, though. That would be Moveon.org.

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One Thing That Won't Be Tackled on Sunday: Issues

By Eli Pariser

The Los Angeles Times

Friday 30 January 2004

Eli Pariser is national campaigns director for MoveOn.org Voter Fund, an online issues advocacy group.

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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