Anti-War Ad Showing Body Bag Airs on NBC’s L.A., N.Y. Stations

A paid 30-second TV commercial against war in Iraq--showing a body bag in which an American soldier is supposedly being returned for burial--began running Friday on NBC stations in Los Angeles and New York, with other runs scheduled in many small markets around the country.

The spot was rejected by Cable News Network and the Los Angeles and New York affiliates of ABC and CBS, reportedly because of policies against running “advocacy advertisements” on controversial subjects, officials said.

The commercial, being sponsored and distributed by the Los Angeles chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has the camera surveying a body bag while an announcer says that this is “how we bring dead Americans home from war” and that “you can stop that war” by writing U.S. representatives and senators and urging them to let the U.N. sanctions against Iraq work. It then displays the phone number for Congress.

Pacy Markman, a partner with the Santa Monica political consulting and communications firm of Zimmerman, Markman & Hunter, prepared the spot. It ran twice Friday on KNBC in Los Angeles and WNBC in New York, with another airing set for Sunday morning on WNBC. The $10,000 cost for the five runs is being paid for by the local chapter of the physicians’ group, but copies of the commercials are being widely distributed, with stations donating time or with fees being paid by other chapters or individual donors.

Markman said that even though CNN would not sell its commercial time, the spot was run as part of a news report.

Markman said the body bag is “the language and image of death from war that everybody can relate to.”

The idea for a strong statement against a shooting war began with Dr. Mark Haddad, an emergency room doctor at Whittier Hospital Medical Center. “I see a lot of violent injuries and blood,” he said, “and one morning after working a night shift, I heard a lot of impatient war talk from President Bush and Secretary of State (James A.) Baker, and I became very angry that impatience was now replacing the sanctions.”

Haddad paid for a full-page ad in the Nov. 8 West Coast issue of the New York Times. Markman’s ad showed a body bag on a gurney with the same plea to people to contact their congressional representatives.