UCC Update
From the press release:

The United Church of Christ today (Dec. 9) is filing two petitions with the Federal Communications Commission, asking that two network owned-and-operated television stations in Miami be denied license renewals for failing to provide viewers "suitable access" to a full array of "social, political, esthetic, moral and other ideas and experiences."

WFOR-TV (a CBS station) and WJVT-TV (an NBC station) -- whose operating licenses are currently up for FCC review -- are being challenged because "there is substantial and material question" as to whether the stations' parent companies, Viacom, Inc., and the General Electric Company, have operated the stations in the public interest, the petitions state.

[...]

Ironically -- long before the current television ad controversy -- the United Church of Christ, through its Office of Communication, Inc. (OC, Inc.), has been at the forefront of media access issues for more than 40 years. During the civil rights era, the UCC was the first voice to demand that those holding FCC licenses and authorizations act on behalf of the public interest and be held accountable as stewards of the public trust.

And here's a point of view from Daily Kos diarist pastordan:

Why should you care?  First of all, because it's a chance to fight back:  against exclusionary policies, against creeping self-censorship of the networks for political reasons, against the FCC that stands idly by while free and fair public debate is squeezed out of the airwaves.

Second--and more important to my mind--is that this helps to spread the UCC's message of "extravagant welcome". I have it from Bob Chase, the Executive Director of the Office of Communications, that this goes beyond "just" the issue of gays and lesbians' place in the church.

Chase spoke about exclusion on many levels: the poor being shut out of public assistance and housing, the public being shut out of control of the airwaves, religious minorities (including agnostics and atheists) being shut out of the public square in favor of religious conservatives. Extravagant welcome goes to the heart, I think, of the public debate that needs to happen in our country in these times: are we going to be a nation by and for the few, or by and for all people?

And from Media Matters:

Media Matters for America noted the networks' rejection of the UCC ad on December 1. In particular, Media Matters contrasted CBS' history of airing ads that support Bush administration policy with its purported justification for rejecting the UCC ad, in part because "the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman." Noting that there is no discernible inconsistency between a church's message of inclusion and the administration's support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, Media Matters asked: Even assuming such an inconsistency does exist, how does CBS justify rejecting an ad that purportedly conflicts with the Bush administration's views, given CBS' apparent willingness to air advocacy ads that support administration policies?

On December 3, CBS contacted Media Matters with a written statement to make the case that the network's policy on advocacy advertisements is consistently applied, but it failed to explain why the network ran advocacy ads that support Bush administration positions while rejecting those the network deemed contrary to administration policies.