> The idea was to reach Congress members, Cabinet members and other >
Washington decision makers, said the Rev. Robert Moore, executive
> director of the 2,000-member peace group, which is based in Princeton.
>
> "This is an outrageous infringement on our First Amendment rights, in
> the center of our democracy, Washington, D.C.," he said.
Comcast are pigs, and this isn't the first time that lefty ads have been rejected for carrying "unsubstantiated" (read: not approved by govt/corp media) claims. But, it is not censorship to reject someone's ad. Comcast is not stopping the group from speaking in other outlets. They simply won't allow their commercial airwaves to be used.
I recall, on a smaller scale, when in 1985 Erwin Knoll of the Progressive ran ads for Feminists for Life, a lefty anti-abortion group. This ruffled the fetus-snuffing crowd, who naturally objected ("pro-choice" meaning that you must choose abortion or you are the enemy of all women). The Funding Exchange, Nat Hentoff and Michael Ratner all got involved, and then Alex Cockburn, who at that time could still form decent sentences. (These were Beat the Devil's early days, the one reason, other than Minority Report, Andrew Kopkind and Robert Sherrill, to purchase the Nation. How long ago it was . . .)
In his July 20/27 column, the Cockmeister quoted Ratner as saying, "The First Amendment applies only to governments; it is to assure the people that the state will not suppress speech. It has little, in fact nothing, to do with private magazines. Such magazines in fact strengthen diversity by taking particular points of view and not by becoming bathroom walls where everyone can write a message."
The Cockmeister himself added, "So we have the ludicrous spectacle of Knoll announcing that a portion of his magazine is for sale to any bidder 'within the law,' proposing that this intellectual prostitution deserves praise for following the most virtuous traditions of the Republic. We may be treated shortly to the sight of Knoll touting The Progressive as a magazine so courageous that it accepts advertisements even from the Ku Klux Klan or the contras. This has everything to do with opportunism and petty greed and nothing to do with free speech or the First Amendment."
Quite so. If the Rev. Moore wanted to make a point about his ad being rejected, he could talk about private ownership of broadcast media and the limitations that corporations place on public speech. But to say that Comcast is infringing on his First Amendment rights is not accurate, however noble it sounds to the Enlightened.
DP