From Jodi Jacobson's blog at RH Reality Check:
CBS Behind Anti-Choice Billboards in AtlantaWhat, exactly, is happening with CBS? Has it suddenly merged with the Christian Right and become the "Christian (Right) Broadcasting System?"
It would seem so.
For the past month, reproductive justice groups in Atlanta, Georgia have been fighting against an anti-choice campaign by Georgia Right to Life and a group called the Radiance Foundation. The two groups have collaborated to buy billboard space throughout the city calling black children "an endangered species," and advocating for laws to limit the reproductive choices of women of color, as well as to push for laws banning abortion based on "the race or the sex of the child."
Now it turns out that the billboards are the property of
CBS Outdoors, a subsidiary of the multi-media CBS corporation. This is not the CBS of my childhood (I Love Lucy, the Ed Sullivan Show) or of the once venerated show, 60 Minutes.
This is instead the CBS that "suddenly changed its advocacy policy" to air a Super Bowl advertisement earlier this month from Focus on the Family, the ultra-right conservative organization that seeks to limit the rights of women, homosexuals, and people of color generally. Meanwhile, they denied ad space to several organizations representing gay rights and gay advertising interests.
Amazingly here is an article from the New York Times earlier in February. The connection to CBS is not mentioned.
Anti-Abortion Ads Split AtlantaAnti-abortion groups have erected scores of billboards here with an alarming message: “Black children are an endangered species.”
The groups responsible insist that they are not exaggerating, despite contrary federal data. The billboards, which show a close-up of a worried-looking African-American boy, are an effort to highlight data showing that black women get a disproportionate number of abortions, especially in Georgia, and that the number in Georgia is increasing.
“The impact of abortion has become so great that it has begun to impact our fertility rate,” said Catherine Davis, the minority outreach coordinator for Georgia Right to Life, the state’s main anti-abortion group, which has sponsored the billboards in partnership with the Radiance Foundation, a group based in Atlanta that encourages adoption.
The billboards — there are 65 now and will eventually be 80, Ms. Davis said — were created in conjunction with a new Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com, which says that all of Georgia’s abortion clinics are in “urban areas where blacks reside.” The Web site connects abortion to segregation, saying that after the civil rights era, racists went “underground,” and that today “abortion is the tool they use to stealthily target blacks for extermination.”
This is ugly and shocking stuff. Glad RH Reality pointed out the connection to CBS.
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