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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Elections & Legislation : International Relations : Peace : Right Wing |
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Antiwar Group Says Its Ad Is Rejected |
Current rating: 0 |
by RAYMOND HERNANDEZ and ANDREA ELLIOTT
(No verified email address) |
12 Jul 2004
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Clear Channel limits discussion of bombing to regime viewpoint, rejects ad from anti-war group that questions war through use of bomb imagery |
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The first ad that Project Billboard says a Clear Channel subsidiary rejected.
A group of antiwar advocates is accusing Clear Channel Communications, one of the nation's largest media companies, with close ties to national Republicans, of preventing the group from displaying a Times Square billboard critical of the war in Iraq.
The billboard - an image of a red, white and blue bomb with the words "Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War" - was supposed to go up next month, the antiwar group said, and it was to be in place when Republicans from across the country gathered in New York City to nominate President Bush for a second term.
But members of the group, Project Billboard, contend that Clear Channel backed out of a leasing agreement last month that the two had reached in December for the billboard site, on the Marriott Marquis Hotel at Broadway and 45th Street.
A Project Billboard spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said the group planned to file a lawsuit today in federal court in Manhattan charging Clear Channel with breach of contract and asking it to live up to what the group said were the terms of the deal.
Last night, the president and chief executive of Clear Channel, Paul Meyer, said the company had objected to the group's use of "the bomb imagery" in the proposed billboard. Mr. Meyer said Clear Channel had accepted a billboard that would replace the bomb with a dove. However, he said, any billboard at the site required the approval of the Marriott Marquis management, which he said also objected to the bomb.
"We have no political agenda," Mr. Meyer said. "It's the bomb imagery we objected to."
A spokeswoman for the hotel, Kathleen Duffy, said that the management considered the ad with the bomb "inappropriate," but that it had not seen the version with the dove.
Told of Mr. Meyer's comments, Mr. Wolfson said that earlier, Clear Channel had rejected the ad with the dove as well as the one with the bomb, demanding that the words be changed, too. "It's news to us, and not reflected in any prior communications between Clear Channel and Project Billboard," Mr. Wolfson said last night. "This contradicts Clear Channel's demand that the copy be changed."
The dispute had led members of the antiwar group to accuse Clear Channel of censorship.
"I think the idea that political advertising is banned from some part of New York City would be repellent to New Yorkers," Mr. Wolfson said. "I guess we can have a war, but we can't talk about it."
This is not the first time that Clear Channel, one of the nation's largest owners of radio stations, has found itself in the middle of a debate over free speech and censorship.
The company has been accused of using its radio stations to rally support for the war in Iraq, while trying to silence musicians who oppose it.
The company's critics point out, for instance, that some Clear Channel country music stations stopped playing the songs of the Dixie Chicks last year after the group's lead singer, Natalie Maines, told fans during a London concert, "We're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."
The company's critics also point out that the Federal Communications Commission is considering regulations that would make it easier for companies like Clear Channel to own more television and radio stations.
But even some of its fiercest critics agree that some claims against Clear Channel are overstated. As it turns out, for example, its stations were only sporadically involved in a boycott against the Dixie Chicks.
Part of what may be fueling speculation about the company's motives is the close relationship that its executives have with the Republican Party and the Bush administration. In the 2000 and 2002 election cycles, for instance, the company and its officials donated slightly more than $300,000 in unregulated money, almost all of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization in Washington that monitors political contributions.
In addition, Tom Hicks, the Texas Rangers' owner who has longtime ties to President Bush, is a top executive at Clear Channel.
Project Billboard's representatives said the contract they signed in December with Spectacolor, a division of Clear Channel, required the antiwar group to pay $368,000 to use the billboard space from Aug. 2 through Nov. 2, Election Day.
But they said Spectacolor began balking after company officials saw the ad that included the image of the bomb. The group then sent a second ad, which replaced the bomb with a red, white and blue dove accompanied by the same words, but Mr. Wolfson said that was also rejected.
A lawyer for Project Billboard, Doug Curtis, said that at one point Clear Channel suggested that the group use a less provocative billboard ad, one with the image of a little girl waving a flag accompanied by the words, "Democracy is best taught by example."
Mr. Curtis said that earlier this month, a vice president for marketing for Spectacolor and Clear Channel, Barry Kula, sent the group an e-mail message that said, in part, "We hope you will appreciate that New York City has endured a horrific attack and businesses in this area that serve a wide array of clientele are extremely sensitive to references to war."
Project Billboard's director, Deborah Rappaport, indicated that the reaction of Clear Channel executives was not a complete surprise given what she described as its poor record on free expression. "This is not the first time," she said. "They try to suppress speech with which they don't agree."
The dispute between Clear Channel and the antiwar group drew a mixed reaction yesterday from visitors in Times Square.
When shown a printed copy of the antiwar ads that Clear Channel is said to have rejected, Nene Ofuatey-Kodjoe, 36, of Stamford, Conn., became visibly upset. "Clear Channel should not have a position one way or another about what they put up there as long as it's not obscene," he said.
He also scoffed at the alternative billboard proposed by Clear Channel, with a little girl waving the flag. "All the fence-sitting is what has gotten us to where we are today," he said. "You have got to take a stand."
Terry and Jim Baugh, two Californians strolling north on Seventh Avenue, said the image of the bomb bordered on treason. "That looks like they're trying to blow up America," said Mrs. Baugh, 59, a retired dental hygienist.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Clear Channel Kills Nonprofit's Ad for N.Y.'s Times Square |
by Demian Bulwa, Leah Garchik
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
12 Jul 2004
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A group of prominent Bay Area women, including pioneering chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, is jousting with media giant Clear Channel Communications over a minimalist anti-war billboard they want to unfurl in New York City's Times Square amid flashy ads for Broadway shows, banks and sneakers.
Project Billboard, the women's nascent nonprofit, rented prime real estate on the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Broadway and then proposed an illustration of a cartoonish bomb draped with stars and stripes, accompanied by the words "Democracy is best taught by example, not by war."
It was supposed to run from Aug. 2 to Nov. 2, well-timed to a Republican National Convention starting Aug. 30 in Manhattan and the presidential election Nov. 2 dominated by the conflict in Iraq.
The women say their group is nonpartisan and the design is "pro-democracy, pro-peace, and nothing more.'' But it was rejected last week by Clear Channel's Spectacolor division, which rents out more than 70 displays in Times Square, as well as by Marriott.
"We're just not going to run bomb copy in New York City,'' said Paul Meyer, president and chief executive of Clear Channel Outdoor -- which oversees the Spectacolor division -- Sunday afternoon.
While accusing Clear Channel of rejecting the ad because the company favors the Bush administration, the women on Friday changed course, turning the bomb into a dove. They were told they would have a response sometime this week.
But with a Thursday deadline looming for them to finalize a design -- and with Clear Channel suggesting it also didn't like the phrase "not by war'' -- the women decided to file a breach-of-contract lawsuit in U.S. District Court in New York today. They allege they were never told they couldn't cover political ground.
The fast-moving controversy, though, took another turn Sunday night when Meyer said he found out from Spectacolor officials that Clear Channel had approved the second design, and was awaiting word from Marriott, which he said has the right to reject any ad on its facade.
"In the contract, they represented they owned these billboards. There was never another layer of approval," said Baifang Schell of Project Billboard, who is married to Orville Schell, dean of the school of journalism at UC Berkeley.
Schell and two other Project Billboard founders, Deborah Rappaport and Amy Harmon, flew to New York on Sunday morning to go to court and keep negotiating. Another member of the group, Laurene Powell Jobs, is married to Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs.
New York Marriott Marquis spokeswoman Kathleen Duffy said Sunday that the hotel management considered the first proposal by Project Billboard to be inappropriate because of the bomb image and said the hotel was led to believe the ad would simply encourage people to vote.
She said management had not seen the dove design yet.
"I'm constantly shocked by how there is such an effort to really prevent people from contemplating the difficult issues of our time,'' Waters said. "The message of the sign was trying to get people to think about this. And clearly, it's not what the powers-that-be want people to do.''
But Meyer said Sunday that the company reserves the right to reject advertising for any reason. He said advertising is rejected routinely for being indecent or offensive, or because the business owner simply doesn't want the sign on his property. But, he said, the problem is never partisan politics.
"Never has anyone said to me from Clear Channel corporate that I should or should not put up copy because of its political ramifications,'' Meyer said. "That's contrary to the principles of the company -- we're in the business of maximizing profits for our shareholders.
"I'd love to get the Democrats' spending, the Republican spending and the Nader spending,'' he said.
The billboard flap pits a group of influential, well-heeled and progressive Bay Area women, many of them Democratic Party contributors, against a Fortune 500 company that is responsible for quite a bit of what Americans see and hear.
Clear Channel, of San Antonio, owns or operates 1,270 radio stations and 39 television stations in the United States and has 776,000 outdoor advertising displays worldwide. Some critics have accused Clear Channel, whose top executives and political action committee have given heavily to Republicans, of using radio airwaves and other far-reaching assets to push its views.
According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C., as of the end of May, the company's PAC this year had given $170,000 to U.S. House and Senate candidates, with 70 percent going to Republicans.
Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition in San Rafael, an advocacy group for freedom of expression and open government, said that Clear Channel's rejection of the ad was "obnoxious to the First Amendment,'' but that the company was probably on firm legal ground because it's private.
"But Clear Channel is a huge corporation. ... I think one could argue that it's gotten so big that it could have forced on it responsibilities much like those that a government agency would have,'' Scheer said. "Obviously, it's engaged in censorship here, and it is the worst kind of censorship because it is based directly on the content of the message.''
"That's a specious theory,'' Meyer responded. "To my knowledge, there's no law that supports that.''
Project Billboard was launched last year, with its founders saying they want to foster open national debate on important issues and support diversity, tolerance and free expression. It signed a contract with Clear Channel Spectacolor last December for $368,000, not including production and installation costs.
In an e-mail to Barry Kula, Spectacolor's vice president of sales and marketing, Rappaport said: "Our billboard does not support or oppose a particular candidate, government officer, or political party. ... Nor do we believe that a reference to war is somehow 'distasteful' to the community.''
Meyer said the decision to reject the ad was made independently by the Spectacolor division. But he said the company generally does not run copy that would be unsuitable for children or cause them to ask difficult questions, nor does it run political attacks that could be considered "personally offensive.''
"We err on the side of rejecting the copy,'' he said.
© Copyright 2004 San Francisco Chronicle
http://sfgate.com |
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