Precisely. This is really no different from the decision to not show _Saving Private Ryan_, for fear of possible prosecution for excessive violence, langauge, etc. This sort of 'chilling effect' has been mentioned before, and often by people on the right, when regarding university speech codes. Quite a bit on the FIRE site, for example. Or see Diane Ravitch's _The Language Police_, in which she observes that both sides of the political spectrum engage in efforts to suppress things which they find objectionable, and the result is publishers seek to remove ALL material that ANY vocal group may find objectionable, and the result is a very thin gruel. However, the thing is, a private enterprise makes these decisions ona business basis, more than an ideological one. The networks, like the text book publishers, would rather remove the material that offends big audience groups. This includes big audiences on both the left and the right.

Perhaps we really need to revisit the First Amendment, and start reminding the various complaining groups, both right and left, that free speech is guaranteed for them only when we protect opinions we disagree with, not just those we agree with.

CVM

That's Hinkle

Good of you to speak up here, Anthony. Of course, we'll have different reactions to different parts of "Brainwashing 101". I thought that posing the female student at Bucknell with her outsized purple and white teddy bear made her look pretty simple-minded, for instance. And I thought that the Economics Prof at Bucknell held his own in the conversation pretty well. Still, libertarians (gag!) probably do have a legitimate gripe at Bucknell if readings in economics begin with Marx and work through feminist and Afro- glosses on Marx as if that's an adequate survey of modern economic thought. Where's the Adam Smith? Where are the capitalist critiques of Marxism? wtf!
The film probably does things some disservice by simply counterposing academic support for war efforts in WWII with indifference and opposition in the current Iraq war. WWII is remembered as "the good war" for good reasons, even tho, as John Quiggin put it at Crooked Timber, war is always a crime. It's a crime because it looses the forces of mutual destruction, from which there is no sanctuary. Many of us believe that in WWII there simply was no decent alternative to that. Many of us believe that in Iraq there had to be.

I generally agree about the first part of the film. It was very good when it focused on speech codes especially the Michael Mooresque section on the harassment of Mr. Hingle.

Some conservatives are so busy wrapping themselves in the flag and condemning the musings of Marxist professors in class that they forget about the importance of defending free speech across the board.

I don't quite understand the point that you are making. The policy of inclusiveness is, according to the ad and according to your first paragraph, essential to a universal faith. The issue is whether that inclusiveness must overtly apply to certain people. The networks have, of course, no right to make that judgment one way or the other. The ads will, likely, get more attention because of the widespread furor on the net about the networks' rejection of them than they would have if the networks had simply quietly accepted and run them. Some of the usually relentlessly secular sites, such as Atrios, have taken up the hue and cry.