Superbowling

An assortment of Super Bowl tidbits: Supposedly sports gambling sites are being threatened with denial of service attacks if they don't pay protection money - also a Reuters story. Infinitus writes "The NFL's legal firm has a PDF up that outlines the NFL's intellectual property rights to words like 'Super Bowl' and 'NFL'. Including a neat little chart that tells you what you can and can't say..." VeggiePossum23 writes "Panthers Upset Patriots, 29 to 21... at least in the Sony Sponsored '989 Sports Game Before the Game' played on NFL Gameday 2004 on the PS2 Console. This annual event, held Wednesday night in Houston, has a perfect 8-year track record of picking the winner of the Super Bowl. Carolina Panthers Wide Receiver Steve Smith controlled the Panthers, winning an upset victory against New England Patriots' Wide Out Troy Brown, also controlling his own team." lordbyron writes "CBS is doing a SuperBowl of commercials that will include a vote for the best commercial in history. You can watch the top 10 now and make sure that you vote at 9pm on Sunday 1/31. It includes some classics like the Apple commercial and the exploding mosquitos from Tabasco."Wing Bowl.--->

Comments

Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.

[kermyt]

For the record, CBS's reason for not accepting that ad is because they don't accept any debatable political issue issue ads. They would have accepted ads from candidates because they have to, but none came forward with the money to do so.

If that was true then CBS certainly would not run the white house ad that connects marijuana users to terrorism. but that is exactly that they are doing.

Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.

[Heisenbug]

A few notes on this ... if you haven't seen the MoveOn Child's Pay ad, it's not exactly incendiary rhetoric. Even Bill O'Reilly said he was surprised they refused to play it.

CBS defends the policy by saying that if they allowed issue ads, large corporations could buy time to push their favorite issues and it would disenfranchise us folks with smaller ad budgets. Eli Pariser of MoveOn responded by pointing out that this creates an awfully friendly environment for the status quo, and those same corporations. We have oil company ads but no anti-oil ads, shoe company ads but no sweatshop ads, drug war ads but no decriminalization ads.

What we're really getting here is a one-sided agenda, and, yes, censorship, in the guise of fairness.

Don't forget CBS is helping MoveOn

[toupsie]

Actually having CBS not air the commercial has allowed more people to see the ad. MoveOn should be jumping for joy that CBS denied the ad buy. It has brought more attention to their message and allowed them to air the ad for free on various news shows. You are even helping out MoveOn by publicizing the ad here on Slashdot.

CBS is making a smart business decision not to air this ad. Why should CBS want to bring in unneeded controversy into the Super Bowl that would distract from the game? Since it has a product that is in high demand for advertisers, CBS can pick and choose which advertisers it wants to fill in those 30 second gaps between plays. Also, if you are spending $2 million an ad as advertiser would you want your commercial message to be drowned out by adjacent partisan political message? Heck no! This would make it hard for CBS to sell the ad space next to the MoveOn ad.

This isn't political censorship, its smart business on the part of CBS.

Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.

[damiam]

A corporation not playing an ad because of its political viewpoints is censorship. It's their right, and it's perfectly legal (unless you want to get into some argument about the "public" airwaves), but it's still censorship. Besides nothing in that ad is at all controversial - the deficit estimate is even a bit low, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If they're gonna air ads from the White House (containing some very shaky statements about drugs and terrorism), they should air this ad (which doesn't even promote a candidate).