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Right-Wing Chilling Effect Makes 'Reproductive Rights' Too Hot for Public Radio
Mon Nov 22, 8:23 AM ET
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Jim Lobe, OneWorld US
WASHINGTON, D.C., Nov 22 (OneWorld) The refusal by a North Carolina affiliate of National Public Radio (NPR) to run an underwriting announcement by a local group that carries out family-planning activities abroad is raising fears that the leadership of federal regulatory agencies may try to enforce a new kind of right-wing political correctness.
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Coming in the wake of the cut-off of funds to HIV (news - web sites)/AIDS (news - web sites) prevention organization that discuss men who have sex with men and the investigation by the Internal Revenue Service (news - web sites) (IRS) of the National Association for the Advanced of Colored People (NAACP), the action by the Chapel Hill-based WUNC radio station is being cited as evidence of a growing chilling effect on free expression.
A statement released Thursday by 22 national feminist, health and population organizations decrying WUNCs refusal to run an underwriting statement that identified the sponsor, Ipas, as a non-profit group that protects womens reproductive rights, charged that the decision threatens the very concept of free speech.
We are both outraged and saddened by WUNCs decision to cave in to the implicit threats of the Bush administration and are hopeful that they will recognize that a free press has a duty to defend the right of free speech, declared the letter, which was signed by Population Connection, the International Planned Parenthood (news - web sites) Federation (IPPF), the Womens Edge Coalition, and the Population Connection, among others.
Ipas, which provided family-planning and reproductive-health training, research, advocacy, and supplies in some 40 countries on five continents, began underwriting programming at the rate of about US$1,700 a month at WUNC last February. In return, the radio station, which is based at the University of North Carolina campus, ran occasional on-air acknowledgements of Ipas support.
The original announcement read: Ipas, a Chapel Hill-based nonprofit that protects womens reproductive health and rights at home and abroad. More information available at www.ipas.org. In October, however, the station informed Ipas that the word rights would not longer be permitted.
After several weeks of negotiation over the wording, Ipas announced Friday that it would was ending its underwriting arrangement. We highly value WUNC listeners and want to inform them about our work, said Ipas president Elizabeth Maguire, but there is no alternative language. Promoting reproductive rights is half Ipas mission, and WUNCs position denies Ipas the right to describe itself accurately and completely.
WUNC general manager Joan Siefert Rose defended the decision, describing it as a precautionary measure designed to protect the station from possible action by the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) (FCC (news - web sites)).
As a noncommercial broadcaster, she told Associated Press, we are not allowed to broadcast donor acknowledgments that include language with political meaning. My first responsibility is to be a good steward of our FCC license.
While Rose conceded that the FCC has never defined reproductive rights as falling within the proscribed category for advertisers or underwriters, she stressed that the FCC can still punish stations retroactively if it determines that the words should not have been aired.
They dont tell you what you can and cannot do, she said, comparing the situation to ABCs decision last week against airing Saving Private Ryan for fear that the FCC might find that its graphic violence and language violated its regulations.
Reproductive rights has indeed become politically controversial under the Bush administration which has repeatedly tried usually without success to have the phrase deleted from communiqus and declarations at international conferences. Administration officials have described the phrase as implicitly asserting a womans right to have an abortion a notion with which it and its Christian Right constituency strongly disagree.
Its efforts to undermine the concept reproductive rights have also included its last-minute withdrawal of funding for a major international health conference in Washington last spring because one of the featured speakers had publicly attacked the priority given by the administration to its abstinence-only agenda and the imposition of the so-called Global Gag Rule.
The gag rule forbids foreign non-governmental agencies that receive U.S. foreign aid from engaging in any abortion-related activities - including even providing information about abortion to their medical clients or lobbying their own governments to ease anti-abortion laws -- even if they use their own money for those purposes.
Ipas, which refused to tell its overseas partners to stop abortion-related activities, forfeited some US$2 million in funding as a result of the gag rule.
In its negotiations with WUNC, the group argued that reproductive rights encompass much more than abortion. It also includes the right to information about reproductive health, infertility treatments, and contraception, according Maguire, who described the phrase as a mainstream concept based on the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court decisions, U.S. laws, and multiple international agreements signed by the U.S.
In addition to the gag rule and its efforts at international forums to delete reproductive rights from the agenda, the administration has also ordered audits against organizations that oppose the administrations abstinence-only agenda.
Each of these actions, as well as the IRS investigation of the NAACP and the cut-off of funding to groups that deal explicitly with men who have sex with men, according to the groups that wrote in support of Ipas, sends a clear message: dissent at your peril.
Under the Bush administration, regulatory agencies have been used with an appalling frequency to punish those organizations that do not conform to its narrow ideological position, the groups wrote, noting that WUNCs fear about possible FCC action were not unreasonable.
According to Ipas Maguire, the WUNCs decision feeds into an environment in which self-censorship is becoming more prominent.
That assessment was echoed in a second letter sent to the station last week by nearly 100 prominent contributors living in the WUNC listening area, including faculty at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, community groups, writers, business people, elected officials, artists and writers.
We feel that the extraordinary caution exhibited by this decision is undue and serves to perpetuate self-censorship, which is all to prevalent in the current political climate, the letter stated. We count on public radio to expose and resist such tendencies, not to reinforce them.
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