American Document / Berkeley Barbs
On November 30, 1992, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal brought national attention to another controversy at the University of California-Berkeley. It arose when the student editors at the...
...I submit for your consideration the fact that this is not about free speech, but about paid speech...
...There is no ban on ads with political content, but some controversial political ads have been refused in the past...
...It arose when the student editors at the Daily Californian overruled their advertising manager to reject a 12-page insert from the Berkeley Students for Life...
...Among the ads that we have regularly banned in the past are recruiting ads for the CIA, cigarette ads, Coors beer ads (because of their anti-union policies) and ads for pornographic materials...
...The first problem was the ad's format...
...The scenario we imagine was of a typical Daily Cal reader picking up the paper, seeing this insert drop out, and associating that point of view with the Daily Cal...
...In itself, our being offended is not reason enough to refuse the ad...
...But we have to be concerned about the paper's imageand its perception in the community, not least for financial reasons...
...Our opinion page and guest column are open to pieces from a variety of view points about virtually any subject, provided they -ire well-written, topical, and not overly repetitive of other points of view previously printed in the paper...
...We are generally hindered in that effort by the small number of people who are willing to sign their names to that sort of thing in this town...
...However, a full-page ad purporting to "prove that the Holocaust was a hoax" did not pass muster...
...I myself was offended by what I considered overly graphic photos, misleading text, and questionable statistics...
...Nonetheless, we recognize that most of our readers, on and off campus, are pro-choice, and likely to be greatly offended by the insert...
...The fact that the advertisement was in the form of an insert was also of great concern to the editors...
...Note that she construes the word free in free speech to mean not "unrestricted" but "gratis": Berkeley Students for Life do Theresa Peyton Berkeley, CA 94704 Dear Members: After the Daily Cal's refusal of your advertising insert last month, Theresa Peyton asked me to write a letter to you explaining our reasons, which I agreed to do...
...Virginia Matzek, writing in the Daily Californian, December 2, 1992 Matzek had written to Berkeley Students for Life on November 11...
...Some of you may be thinking in terms of "censorship" and wondering how a newspaper can be in favor of the First Amendment right to free speech and yet refuse to distribute the ad...
...I apologize for not following up immediately, and hope you will forgive the lateness of this response...
...It, too, was regarded as misleading and offensive by the staff...
...And we are nothing without our readers...
...CI...
...Unfortunately, I got distracted in the days immediately following that conversation and forgot all about my promise...
...There was long and impassioned debate about "free speech" when we discussed the ad...
...For example, we ran two full-page ads in the same day last semester, one in favor of animal rights and another defending animal research...
...The primary reason, however, was financial...
...We frequently publish inserts of our own . . . [and] did not want readers to associate the insert with Daily Cal-produced news copy...
...The insert was worth, approximately, $1,600 to us in revenue, and at this paper, that's nothing to sneeze at...
...And we believed that, if you picked up the Daily Cal and this piece of slime dropped out of it, you would wonder why we had been willing to accept money to mislead you...
...comparing their ad to one that had claimed the Holocaust didn't happen and calling it similarly "misleading and offensive...
...Simply put, that is not something we can afford...
...First of all, a little context: the Senior Editorial Board, made up of 11 Daily Cal editors ranging from editor in chief to the staff representative, has the power to interpret and enforce the corporation's advertising policy, which bans various types of ads, including "misleading" ones...
...It, too, was in newspaper style with a headline font that matched ours exactly...
...In fact, since the pro-life viewpoint (like the Republican viewpoint and the pro-death penalty viewpoint) is in the minority in Berkeley, we consider it especially important to get it into our pages...
...There were several reasons for the refusal of your insert...
...The following contributions to the affair from Daily Cal editor-in-chief Virginia Matzek might be said to rest on the premise that diversity is bad for business in a model liberal community: If you're a typical Daily Cal reader, you're probably pro-choice, and you're definitely savvy enough to recognize an outright attempt to mislead you...
...The insert, though labeled "paid advertising" in small letters, was formulated to resemble newspaper style, with newspaper-style "stories" and graphics, and a typeface and headline style similar to that of the Daily Cal...
...And it, too, was judged to be paid speech that we didn't want to accept money for...
...Sincerely yours, Virginia Matzek Editor in Chief Editors' note: On December 4, 1992, Express, a Berkeley weekly, reported: "In hindsight, Matzek feels that she was set up by Berkeley Students for Life president Theresa Peyton, who, she says, repeatedly insisted on a written explanation for the rejection of her ad...
...There are many parallels here with the "Holocaust hoax" ad...
Vol. 26 • February 1993 • No. 2
