El Salvador ‘Advocacy’ Ad Rejected : Television: Commercial seeks to influence public opinion on upcoming Senate vote. Many stations say they don’t accept “advocacy advertising.”

A TV commercial designed to influence public opinion regarding an upcoming Senate vote on military aid to El Salvador has been rejected by TV stations in Los Angeles, New York and other cities across the country.

The 30-second ad, which links the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador to continued U.S. aid, has been turned down by KABC-TV in Los Angeles, WCBS-TV and WNBC-TV in New York, and other TV stations on the grounds that they do not accept “advocacy advertising.”

Producers of the ad say that they are being denied access to the airwaves for their viewpoint by stations that regularly air advocacy positions in commercials for political candidates.

The commercial, which contains photos of the murdered Jesuits and cites statistics on civilian casualties in El Salvador, shows blood seeping through an American check for aid. It urges viewers to “tell your Senator: Vote no on aid to El Salvador.”

The Senate is expected to vote this week on an amendment to withhold half of an $85 million appropriation in military aid to the government of El Salvador. Several members of Congress have contended that the military in El Salvador is obstructing the investigation into the murder last year of six Jesuit priests and two women who died with them in gunfire from Salvadoran military forces during an offensive by leftist guerrillas. Several officers have been arrested, but the lack of progress in the case has made debate over aid to El Salvador the most heated in many years.

The ad to drum up opposition to the aid measure was produced by Neighbor to Neighbor--a San Francisco-based political-advocacy group, in conjunction with several Jesuit organizations and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

Denise Bergez, media director for Neighbor to Neighbor, said that all of the network affiliates in Los Angeles, New York and Washington have rejected the ad. But it has been accepted by network affiliates in Sacramento and San Diego, along with stations in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Oregon and other states.

A total of 13 stations have accepted the ad, while 23 have rejected it, she said.

“WNBC-TV in New York turned us down because they said we couldn’t prove that the Salvadoran military killed the Jesuit priests, when even their own government has accused them of doing it,” Bergez said.

“Another station’s lawyer said, ‘We can’t take this--there are corpses in this ad,’ even though the shot that we used--the Jesuits’ bodies lying together--had appeared regularly on the evening news. The lines that the stations are drawing seem completely arbitrary to us. It looks like people with a different point of view on a controversial issue are being unfairly shut out of getting that point of view on the air.”

John Riedl, general sales manager of KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles, said that the company’s policy is that “we do not accept advocacy advertising, which is defined as any advertising that takes a stand on a controversial issue.”

Commercials for political candidates are different, he maintained, citing what he said were legal and governmental requirements for broadcasters to run them. “Pete Wilson can call Dianne Feinstein every name in the book (in a TV spot during the gubernatorial campaign); we have no control over that,” Riedl said.

Although WNBC-TV in New York recently has begun accepting advocacy ads “on a case-by-case” basis, David Vacheron, manager of broadcast standards and licensing administration at the station, said that the El Salvador ad was rejected because the producers did not provide the station with sufficient evidence to support the claims in the ad.

“We needed support for their claims about the United States providing billions of dollars worth of support, that the (aid) was used to murder the Jesuits and 40,000 innocent civilians,” Vacheron said. “They gave us articles where the president of El Salvador purportedly admitted the military was involved in the death of the Jesuits. But the case was never solved in court, and nobody was ever found guilty.

“We furnished them with Congressional reports and Congressional testimony saying that the military in El Salvador is clearly implicated in the killing of the priests,” Bergez said. “It’s ridiculous to hold the commercial to the standard that the soldiers have to have been convicted--the whole problem is that they haven’t been convicted.”