Group Says Firm Friendly to Bush Reneges on Deal to Post Its Antiwar Ad

[cal04]

Group Says Firm Friendly to Bush Reneges on Deal to Post Its Antiwar Ad in Times Sq


A group of antiwar advocates is accusing Clear Channel Communications, one of the nation's largest media companies, with close ties to national Republicans, of preventing the group from displaying a Times Square billboard critical of the war in Iraq.

The billboard - an image of a red, white and blue bomb with the words "Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War" - was supposed to go up next month, the antiwar group said, and it was to be in place when Republicans from across the country gathered in New York City to nominate President Bush for a second term.

But members of the group, Project Billboard, contend that Clear Channel backed out of a leasing agreement the two had reached in December for the billboard site, on the Marriott Marquis Hotel at Broadway and 45th Street.

A Project Billboard spokesman, Howard Wolfson, planned to file a lawsuit today in federal court in Manhattan charging Clear Channel with breach of contract and asking it to live up to what the group said were the terms of the deal. Last night, the president and chief executive officer of Clear Channel, Paul Meyer, said the company's had objected to the group's use of "the bomb imagery" in the proposed billboard. Mr. Meyer said Clear Channel had accepted a billboard that would replace the bomb with a dove. However, he said, any billboard at the site required the approval of the Marriott Marquis managers , who he said also objected to the bomb. Hotel officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

"We have no political agenda," Mr. Meyer said. "It's the bomb imagery we objected to." Told of Mr. Meyer's comments, Mr. Wolfson said that earlier, Clear Channel had rejected the ad with the dove as well as the one with the bomb, demanding that the words be changed, too. "It's news to us, and not reflected in any prior communications between Clear Channel and Project Billboard," Mr. Wolfson said last night. "This contradicts Clear Channel's demand that the copy be changed."
"I think the idea that political advertising is banned from some part of New York City would be repellent to New Yorkers," Mr. Wolfson said. "I guess we can have a war, but we can't talk about it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/nyregion/12billboard.html?ex=1090209600&en=62ca3a879d538a00&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

[otohara]

1. God Forbid Republican's

see and image of a bomb or a dove