Amanda, I disagree that the Tim Tebow ad was meant to be cruel and braggy. I found it innocuous-and even when I thought it was going to be more explicitly anti-choice, I did not think pro-choice people should protest in order to get it yanked off the air. Dayo, you say that CBS was complicit in the airing of sexist, misogynist ads during the Super Bowl . I agree that those ads, particularly the FloTV commercial, were deplorable. But I don’t think asking CBS to be more strict in its regulation of standards and practices is a good solution. Especially since it’s one that might backfire.
Yes, these misogynistic ads were approved by CBS. But humor is almost always a matter of taste. When you’re asking a network to police something as subjective as taste, there are going to be missteps and some segment of the population is going to be offended. CBS has proven itself to be fairly conservative and tasteless by our standards, but that is its right, as it is our right to complain or to change the channel. It’s better that these ads air and create discussion-and there’s been fantastic chatter all over Twitter and from sites like Jezebel about these awful ads-than for the networks to be censoring more than they already do.
