Activists wonder why Comcast pulled the plug on an antiwar ad set to run in Washington during the State of the Union speech.

On the morning of Tue., Jan. 28, the Philadelphia-based Comcast company pulled an antiwar ad that was scheduled to run during President Bush's State of the Union address that night. The 30-second ad, produced by the Anti War Video Fund (AWVF), a nonprofit group based in Princeton, N.J., spliced together three- to five-word sound bites from various Jersey residents explaining their opposition to war in Iraq. The piece ended with an American flag emblazoned with the slogan, "No War. Yes Peace."

Two weeks before the State of the Union, the video producers hired Brian Sloman, a British-born media buyer based in Media, Pa. -- "appropriately," he quips -- to advise them on when and where to purchase airtime for maximum effect. Sloman says he told the group that with their budget limitations, "They should concentrate on Washington, D.C., the nation's seat of power, and in my opinion, if they could only afford one network, it should be CNN." The presidential speech is aired commercial-free, but discussion before and after the address does stop for commercial breaks. According to Dan Preston, the producer of the ad, the spots cost roughly $5,000 for six airings over three evenings -- the Tuesday of the State of the Union and the following two nights.

According to Sloman, on Monday the 20th, more than a week before the speech, he placed his order with Comcast, notifying them that the ad was already posted on the Web, so they could view it. (The spot is still posted on the Internet at

On the morning of the speech, Preston was on the Capitol Beltway, heading down to Washington to hold a press conference announcing the broadcast, when his cell phone rang. It was Brian Sloman. He told Preston that Comcast had just called to tell him that the ad would not run because of two "unsubstantiated claims" in the commercial. According to Sloman, a Comcast representative objected to the snippets of a woman talking about a breach of international law, and, in Sloman's words, to the "black gentleman who uses the word 'mercenaries.'"

The day after the speech, faced with media inquiries, Comcast limited its response to a three-sentence statement: "Comcast runs advertisements from many sources representing a wide range of viewpoints, pro and con, on numerous issues of importance to the public. However, we must decline to run any spot that fails to substantiate certain claims or allegations. In our view, this spot raises such questions."

Preston believes "that our ad featuring ordinary Americans giving their concerns about the war was too threatening to them."

Nissa O'Mara, Comcast's Oaks, Pa.-based spokesperson, counters that the cable company had previously run two antiwar ads. Both ads, as it happens, are available for viewing on the Internet at www.moveon.org and www.truemajority.org. The MoveOn spot insinuates that war in Iraq could lead to a nuclear explosion at home. When asked whether this was an "unsubstantiated statement," O'Mara referred to the written company response. Neither of the two antiwar ads shown by Comcast were broadcast during major political events like the State of the Union.

James Floyd, the retired mayor of Princeton Township, is the man who made the statement about the "self-appointed group of mercenaries." He says he was referring to White House policy-makers who are influenced by powerful interests he declined to name.

Ellen Seiler, a retired staffer at the Princeton University economics department, was surprised to learn that there was any objection to her statement about a U.S./Iraq war being a violation of international law. "I'm under the impression that it's true." Seiler says she remembers reading it either in The Nation or The Economist; The Nation did run an article in July claiming the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war violates the U.N. Charter.

Both Floyd and Seiler argue that if anyone was making unsubstantiated statements, it was President Bush. "My remark I thought was pretty innocuous," says Seiler. "President Bush also made some statements that were unsubstantiated, certainly harder to substantiate than mine."

AWVF members doubt that Comcast tries to substantiate claims in commercial advertisements before broadcasting them. Do Comcast officials conduct experiments to see whether Bounty really is a "quicker picker-upper"?

But what irked the antiwar group most was that Comcast waited until just hours before the scheduled broadcast to pull the ad. "The real issue is timing," Preston says. "We had some kind of contract to air the ad during the State of the Union in Washington. By waiting to yank the ad until that morning, they precluded our ability to find another outlet."

Neither AWVF nor Brian Sloman are threatening legal action. According to ACLU spokesperson Emily Whitfield, the legal issues surrounding the rights of cable companies to decline ads are complicated, but when the ACLU was in a similar position it did not seek legal action. "I certainly sympathize with [AWVF] because the ACLU had an ad criticizing Attorney General Ashcroft and the government for curtailing civil liberties in the wake of 9/11 and certain networks refused to run it. '

"We regretted that we were not able to get our message out to those audiences and we let people know," says Whitfield. "They have a right to not run it, and we have a right to tell people about it."

AWVF has certainly told people about what happened to them. In Sloman's media-savvy opinion, "To be blunt, [AWVF] got a lot more exposure because of the controversy."