NEW YORK TIMES REFUSES PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S AD

Planned Parenthood’s newspaper ad attacking the networks for rejecting commercials about contraceptives met with some rejection of its own: The New York Times refused to run it.

The problem was the headline: “They did it 9,000 times on television last year.”

“It was a question of taste,” Bob Smith, manager of advertising acceptability for the newspaper, explained Wednesday. “These are very subjective things. We just felt the language was a little bit more risque than we would like to have.”

Herb Gunther, executive director of Public Media Center, the advertising agency that created and placed the ad, said the New York Times was alone among the seven papers to which it was submitted in rejecting it. He said that it ran as written in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Post and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

“It’s ironic,” Gunther said, “because when the networks censored an American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ ad last year about birth control, the New York Times fired off the first editorial calling the networks hypocritical. I’d love to see what their editorial writers have to say about their own advertising policy.”