The Buck Stops Here

AT some point, both for individuals and for institutional bodies, there comes a time when one must take a moral stand. Newspapers cannot hold themselves apart from this imperative because, contrary to what we might like to believe, we create social trends as much as we reflect them.

After we saw that The Crimson had published a full-page advertisement by Eastern Airlines asking readers to fly "the fairest fare in the air" for only $29--a substantial discount from the pre-strike cost--we, the undersigned, decided this was one of those times.

By publishing this advertisement, we are complicitous. We are forced to acknowledge that for every $29 fare that Eastern sells to our readership, we are contributing $29 to Frank Lorenzo's attempts to bust Eastern's machinist union--which for two grueling months has been on strike, on the picket lines, and off the pay roll.

The Eastern conflict is particularly significant because it has been steeped in dirty tactics by a management that seeks to secure profits before equitable working conditions or even economic stability. This strike represents one of the largest labor-management disputes of this decade--one that will help to determine the boundaries and the precedent for many conflicts to come.

IT is in this political context that we must decide whether we can continue to publish the Eastern advertisement.

As newspaper editors, we firmly believe in the right to free speech. We assert the need for balanced reporting on our news pages, and the imperative to present a wide range of opinions on our editorial pages.

But in our advertisements, we cannot begin to call for--or offer--free speech because we do not offer equal access; only those who have money can afford to use our advertisement pages as a medium. And, to compound this inequity, we, as the producers of our advertising, attempt to charge the highest prices possible in order to bring in the 'best' revenue--profits that reflect our own self-interest. Clearly, advertising cannot be included in the ideological notion of a "free press."

Unlike our news coverage, where we can analyze facts, or our editorial pages, where we can offer both sides of an issues, advertisements offer no means for maintaining journalistic standards of fairness. Thus, in advertising, we enter a business arrangement in which we have the right and the responsibility to determine who our patrons will be.

Like all members of the media, we already set limits on advertising, and in the past, we have, in fact, chosen not to run advertisements because we found them offensive to women and because they represented a contribution to a social discourse from which we could not, in all good conscience, accept money.

In acknowledging that we choose at different moments to print some advertisements and not others, we cannot avoid our resposibility for those we do publish. And although Eastern's statement is not overtly offensive, it contains political and social overtones that we cannot ignore.

Most insidious, however, is the advertisement's deceptive attempt to ignore the deeply political issue of union busting that would be required to fly Eastern's $29 shuttle. Lorenzo would have us ignore the ethical issues surrounding the labor-management struggle. He encourages us to accept the advertisement outside of a social and political context--something we, and the strikers, cannot afford to do.

As a corporation which espouses the need for ethics and moral responsibility in business, The Crimson must hold itself to the same standard we would impose on any other institution.

WHILE we refuse to contribute to Lorenzo's destruction of the machinists' union ourselves, we would argue that Eastern has the right to sell its commodity in someone else's advertisement space. In addition, we would welcome Eastern's political opinions on our editorial page. But we don't want Lorenzo's business, we don't want his money and we don't want to be accomplices to his tactics by having his product on our ad pages.

While this is a specific case, it need not be an isolated one. We are not afraid to look at all our advertising. We realize this would require us to create boundaries, but these are ethical lines that we are willing to draw.

In accepting any advertising, we put ourselves in a difficult position. Clearly, we need businesses' money to survive as a newspaper. But, financially, we don't need to accept all advertisements from all companies. In pulling Eastern's advertisement, we are not asserting that we can achieve any moral purity; rather we hope to take a step in the right direction because doing something is better than doing nothing.

In our recent and unsuccessful attempt to remove Eastern's advertisement from our newspaper, we felt this was the time and the place to put our money where our mouth is.

As editors, we acknowledge that we must have a moral consciousness. And, in examining our values, we find our publication of Eastern's sales pitch to be reprehensible.

We have every right to pull an advertisement--especially one that does not discuss any overt editorial view, and one that attempts to tacitly assert that business can exist in a political vacuum.

It cannot. And, we cannot.