Voters Have A Right To Be Informed

Three network affiliate television stations with access to voters in Santa Barbara, Calif., are refusing to run a political commercial that describes verbally, but not visually, what occurs during a partial-birth abortion. Three candidates are competing for the House seat left vacant by the death of Rep. Walter Capps, a Democrat, whose widow is seeking election. (The open primary is Jan. 13.)

The commercials are pretty innocuous. One shows a picture of a baby in a crib. The baby is crying while an announcer reads testimony by a nurse about what happens during partial-birth abortion. “First, the baby’s legs are pulled into the birth canal, and the entire body is delivered except for the head. Then, an incision is made in the skull and the brains are removed. After the head shrinks, the entire body is removed.”

The other commercial, the one I’ve seen, shows a small group of women discussing partial-birth abortion and concluding that it is wrong. At the end, an announcer tells viewers who is on record as favoring the procedure (Republican candidate Brooks Firestone) and who is opposed (Republican state assemblyman Tom Bordonaro). Lois Capps is not featured in the ad.

The Campaign for Working Families (CWF), a political action committee headed by conservative leader Gary Bauer, has threatened legal action if the stations don’t air the ads.

Station managers give some amazing excuses for refusing to run the commercials. Richard Armfield, general manager of NBC affiliate KSBY, said: “The descriptive terms used for the procedure, we think, are a little too vivid, a little too graphic. It’s pretty tough. I can see it scaring little children to death.” An appropriate observation, given the condition of little children following the procedure.

KEYT general manager Byron Elton says the commercial is “pretty strident” and “the language is stronger than we were comfortable with.” KEYT is an ABC affiliate that carries “Ellen,” “Nothing Sacred” and “NYPD Blue,” three shows with situations and language offensive to large numbers of people. “NYPD Blue” occasionally shows partial nudity. At least these are actors. Partial-birth abortion kills a fully developed baby.

All three stations carried graphic images of the carnage that followed the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. Had the stations had access to pictures of Princess Diana’s death scene, is there any doubt they would have aired some of them?

What does it tell us when television stations that have regularly attacked conservatives for attempts to “censor” offensive material now censor language they don’t like, even though it accurately describes a procedure that apparently they do like, or at least don’t oppose?

The question of equal access to the public airwaves and the First Amendment’s protection of speech will be the focus of any legal action taken against the three stations, Bauer tells me.

In the ‘60s, I worked for NBC News in Washington. That network properly aired film of civil rights demonstrators who were sometimes beaten, shot with powerful water hoses and guns, cattle-prodded and occasionally murdered. The power and reality of those pictures stunned the nation and changed hearts about the outrages perpetrated against black Americans.

Now, when political people attempt to air commercials about another civil rights issues - the right of a nearly born baby to be allowed to complete the trip down the birth canal without being killed - they are told their language describing the procedure is “a little too graphic.” Had network executives felt this way in the ‘60s, there would have been no civil rights legislation, or it would have been delayed, because the public would not have been fully informed about the nature and depth of discrimination and racial hatred.

All the CWF is asking is that the standards applied back then be applied now. The station managers should have another meeting, call off the censorship and let the people have the information they need to cast fully informed votes.

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