by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
CBS, the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, seems hellbent on rushing into insignificance. I have been skeptical of their ability or desire to report hard news fairly ever since Dan Rather was hung out to dry over reporting about George W. Bush's less than stellar military career, a story that made conservatives howl, but did not bring even the meekest of denials from Bush. The corporate Gods at CBS did not want to do anything that would upset their stockholders - many of whom were Bush supporters.
There have been two stories in the news this week that illustrate that CBS is still bent to the right. For the first time ever, the network said that it will accept advocacy ads for their Super Bowl coverage. Well, they will accept some advocacy ads.
In point of fact, it looks as though CBS will accept only one advocacy ad: an anti-abortion message featuring Florida quarterback, Tim Tebow, and his mother. Tim's mother had supposedly been advised by a physician to abort the fetus that eventually became the quarterback. Touching? Certainly. Applicable to everyone considering an abortion? Certainly not. But someone at CBS wanted this message to get out during the most watched television event of the year.
But then a gay dating organization called ManCrunch.com tried to get the network to run its ad. Sorry, boys. Gay dating is not a message that CBS wants to promote, regardless of how green your money is.
Okay. The first was an ad promoting a political agenda, and the second was an ad promoting a business - and a political agenda. Maybe its not apples to apples, but it still feels like CBS is being a corporate whore. The door is open, and there are lots of apples lying around just waiting to be picked up and tossed through. The problem is that the trolls inside of the room will throw out the ones that they find personally disagreeable.
CBS takes the money of other businesses, but they apparently pick and choose relative to their network values, values that ignore a big segment of America.
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