The First Amendment to the Constitution is not a neat and tidy matter. Freedom of speech is actually a complicated business, particularly in the political arena, and freedom of speech often clashes with good taste and seemingly even with good sense. This is one of the reasons freedom of speech was included in the Bill of Rights, to assure that it would be protected from the desire of the majority to be free from hearing certain messages. Many First Amendment arguments involve issues such as pornography or commercial advertising, and these discussions usually begin with the idea that the Founding Fathers certainly meant for the first Amendment to apply to political speech even if other sorts of speech might be questionable. Yet, we allow political speech as well to be restricted, as can be seen in the present political season. Television is the primary medium for political communication today, and there should be no restrictions at all on political discourse on television.
Such restrictions are being applied in a selective manner which generally sets station managers up as arbiters of taste, accuracy, and acceptability. The selectivity of their actions occurs not only because of what ads are allowed on the air and which are prevented from airing are decisions they take upon themselves, but also because some types of political advertising cannot be subject to these types of decisions. There are rules set forth by the FCC and Congress to prevent stations from exercising such discretion. A candidate in the mid-west, for instance, has been airing television ads including graphic footage of aborted fetuses to heighten his anti-abortion message, and stations must air these ads because of laws preventing them from "censoring" ads for Congressional candidates and Senatorial candidates. Yet, at other levels and for other types of political advertising, station managers are allowed to decide what airs and what does not, thus creating l...