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As NORML has previously reported, representatives from the CBS Corporation and Neutron Media Screen Marketing recently rejected a paid advertisement from the NORML Foundation, the educational arm of the National Organization of Marijuana Laws (NORML), that was intended to appear on the CBS Super Screen billboard in New York City’s Times Square.
The fifteen-second ad (Watch it here.) asserts that taxing and regulating the adult use and sale of marijuana would raise ‘billions of dollars in national revenue. It was scheduled to appear on CBS’s 42nd Street digital billboard beginning on Monday, February 1, 2010, where it would have been viewed by 1.5 million people a day.
We also noted the hypocrisy of telling us that NORML’s ad was too contentious an issue ad for the billboard while running – on Super Bowl Sunday – the controversial Focus on the Family anti-abortion ad featuring college QB Tim Tebow and his mother.
Now courtesy of Huffington Post we can show you another acceptable, anti-abortion advertisement for CBS Billboards in Atlanta saying that, “Black Children Are An Endangered Species”.
It does not matter which side of the abortion debate you lie, you can certainly agree that abortion is one of the most contentious and controversial issues of our times. NORML, Focus on the Family, and the African-American anti-abortion outreach group Life Education and Research Network that funded these latest Atlanta billboards are all non-profit advocacy organizations lobbying for very controversial issues.
However, the anti-abortion groups seem to have no trouble getting their message out on CBS airwaves and billboards, while NORML is denied four times in two years the opportunity to pay to use the same airwaves and billboards.
It’s also interesting to note that the groups whose messages are accepted by CBS are trying to criminalize a legal activity (abortion), a policy position only supported by 42% of the American people surveyed in the latest Quinnipiac University poll; whereas NORML’s message of legalization rejected by CBS is a policy position supported by 44% to 53% of the American people surveyed lately by Gallup and Angus Reid. Even more interesting when CBS itself polled support for legalization at 41%.
NORML’s friends at the online advocacy website Change.org established an online petition targeting the CBS Corporation and demanding the network to reverse their decision.
Please take a couple minutes to sign this petition.