Craig Cohen: A double standard for Super Bowl ads

This past Sunday, millions of people throughout the world sat on their couches, ordered inordinate amounts of pizza and wings and watched the New England Patriots battle the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl XXXVIII. The game provided a surprising amount of excitement complete with a nail-biting finish. Yet the appeal of the Super Bowl transcends the game itself.

The Super Bowl provides companies both an opportunity to pony up $2.25 million for a 30-second commercial designed to wow and amaze us. Companies plug products ranging from beer to erectile dysfunction pills, and as long as they are willing to pay, they can use the airtime to spread their message or product to the millions of viewers.

At least that's the idea. In an act of deplorable censorship, CBS refused to air a commercial entitled "Child's Pay" submitted by upstart grassroots political group MoveOn.org. The ad depicts young children who appear to be no older than 10 working unhappily at various blue-collar jobs. After about 30 seconds, the screen cuts to black and poses the question, "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1 trillion dollar deficit?" It's simple, direct and incredibly effective.

So why did CBS censor the ad? The network has a policy of prohibiting advertisements that take stands on controversial public policy issues. Now, am I the only one who is completely flabbergasted by this claim? Does this make any sense whatsoever?

First off, MoveOn.org is hardly the paradigm of controversy. The organization's mission, according to their Web site, is to "bring ordinary people back into politics" in a "new kind of grassroots involvement." That sounds like just the sort of third rail that people would want to avoid at all costs. Why bother people with such things as getting them involved in government? The idea is blasphemy!

The fact that the ad itself was censored reeks of hypocritical doublespeak. What bothers me is CBS' blatant and subjectively unfair inconsistencies regarding the standards which it sets for itself. If you are going to censor one ad because you claim it takes a stand on a controversial issue, then censor them all. Or better yet, how about don't censor anything?

In this year's Super Bowl, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy featured an ad portraying a young teenage girl who is smoking marijuana and drinking. It urges parents to get involved "while you still can."

How is this ad any different from the one MoveOn.org wanted to air? Furthermore, this was not the first time CBS let the government use taxpayer dollars to promote an anti-drug campaign (apparently not a controversial public issue). Two years ago, the ONDCP aired a commercial with teenagers appearing on air and proclaiming, "I helped blow up a building" or "I helped teach kids to kill." The government would have you believe that "drug money supports terror;" however, no evidence for this claim is provided.

Maybe it's buried with the intelligence that says Saddam looked into buying uranium from an African nation. What tidbits of wisdom should we expect next year from the government during the big game? People who drink helped Saddam buy his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction? Let me see if I understand this correctly: Drawing a connection between pot and al Qaeda is OK but saying that kids will pay for the deficit is off limits? It boggles the mind.

There is a reason CBS charges an arm and a leg for the precious airtime during the Super Bowl: People who watch will see the advertisement and be influenced by its message. In that case, it might not be such a good idea to get people thinking about anything besides the game unless it's a farting horse or an ID-stealing bear (both commercials from this year).

Moreover, the thing that really bothers me is that MoveOn.org is presenting facts in a creative fashion. This deficit is President Bush's, and it does need to be paid off by someone. The ad demonstrated this. So not only does CBS apparently want to selectively censor opinions, but it is also averse to airing certain facts that might upset people.

However, parading the faces of teenagers who were prosecuted by record companies for downloading and sharing songs -- as Pepsi did -- is still OK. I guess downloading music from the Internet is not a controversial public policy issue either.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) summed the situation up best when he said that in this instance, "the CBS eye has been closed to truth, closed to fairness, closed to presenting the facts honestly to the American people." If you are going to set standards, inane as they might seem, the least you should do is uphold them for all commercials, not just some select few. Arbitrarily suppressing the right of those to present their message in a public forum is a blatant lack of intelligent rational judgment and obvious bias. I, for one, am disgusted.

Craig Cohen is a Wharton sophomore from Woodbury, N.Y. He Hate Me appears on Fridays.

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