Transportation Nation
Court Ruling Leads MTA to Propose Banning Political Ads Altogether
Back In 2012, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority tried to reject an ad that called opponents of Israel "savages." This year, it tried to block an ad that quoted a Hamas-run television station as saying "Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah."
In both cases, courts sided with the advertiser.
The MTA's solution: reject all advertising of a political nature. The MTA's general counsel, Jerome Page, told board members on Monday the agency wanted the freedom to "maximize advertising revenues while enabling the MTA to exclude controversial and disruptive viewpoint advertising which adversely affects our mission."
To do that, the MTA needed to designate its property a "limited public forum" instead of a "public forum." (See the proposed policy below.)
Board member Jonathan Ballan objected. He said the First Amendment — not the MTA — determines what qualifies as free speech.
"We’re on the wrong side of history," he warned the board, "and the wrong side of constitutional law."
His colleague Allen Cappelli agreed: "I believe very strongly that the antidote to hateful speech is more free speech."
But board member Mitchell Pally said there were exceptions, and that the MTA owed its employees and the public a safe place in which to work and ride.
"There are situations in which everybody's First Amendment rights can be restricted in some regard because of what is intended to be extenuating circumstances," he said.
The committee voted 7 to 2 to adopt the new policy. The full MTA board votes on it on Wednesday. It is unclear whether advertisements for, say, climate change marches would also be banned. But the MTA says the new policy would only affect one percent of its ad revenue.