CBS Behind Slew of Anti-Choice Billboards in Georgia

[depakid]

What, 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.

It is the CBS that then pushed for inclusion of Focus on the Family ads on the website of the NCAA.com, and for airing ads by the same during the March Madness college basketball tournament, until the latter pulled those ads in response to protests from the LGBT community and likely after someone, somewhere in the NCAA finally (re)read their own guidelines against ads coming from messengers that, for example, denigrate gay people.

That CBS.

There are currently 65 billboards throughout the Atlanta area, and Georgia Right to Life told the New York Times that it intends to soon have 80 such signs. These are owned by and rented from CBS Outdoors, which is now the target of a campaign by women’s rights groups in Georgia seeking to remove the Georgia Right to Life signs.

One of the groups leading the campaign is SPARK Reproductive Justice Now, an organization that works to address the complexities of the lives of women and girls.

“http://sparkrj.org/content/">SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW respects and defends Black women,” says a statement from the group, “and all people’s, reproductive health decisions including the right to abortion.”

More: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/26/cbs-behind-slew-of-anti-choice-billboards-in-georgia/

[Iris]

1. I may be wrong, but don't they air the PTL Club after their morning news show?

The Atlanta local affiliate does

[slampoet]

4. Your Atlanta local station gets paid money by the PTL for that time slot.

Your local station gets paid for the time or they get a percentage of the donations that viewers think are going to the PTL ministry.


It has very little to do with CBS HQ.

[secondwind]

2. I'm in......just joined SPARK. K&R

[Captain Hilts]

3. They own a billboard company. There's a recession, so many are empty. Someone pays for the ads.

CBS then puts them up.

They also own the lighted 'billboards' in the Washington, DC metro.

It's not a CBS plot.

[Tesha]

5. I tell you what...

You try and place an outright lefty message on a billboard.

Then you can report back here and tell us how well you did.

Tesha


P.S. This is a setup - the experiment has already been run.