Seems the stuffy old TriMet folks — you know (or perhaps you don’t), the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon — have refused to let the Karuk Tribe run a decidedly anti-Klamath-dams ad on their public buses. So today the Karuk, ACLU and Friends of the River turned around and slapped TriMet with a free speech lawsuit.
TriMet’s Advertising Standards Committee (indeed, everyone should have one of those) said the Karuk’s message — above — was not an ad but, rather, some sort of pesky political blather about some pesky public issue that they didn’t want intruding upon the pleasant apolitical thoughts of their ridership. Or something like that.
This article appears in Zoned For Kids.
This is mildly fascinating to me.
TriMet is the obvious key component of Portland’s strongly environmentally-driven transit strategy.
I’ve admired a lot of what TriMet has done — they are more aggressive about developing and promoting transit than any other agency I can think of. Incidentally, they were the first on Google Transit and have one of the top-rated transit websites in the U.S.
Surely, for a transit agency which is a progressive leader, they must have a good reason for denying the ads? Though, I must admit I am surprised that they found these ads to be a significant problem.
don’t understand the free speech suit. Karuks have the right to say what they want and TriMet ha the right to refuse their ad. That’s called freedom. Forcing them to put political advertising on their buses is not freedom.
Maybe they don’t want to get involved in the lies of politics. Just advertising.