Today the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California invalidated LA Metro’s prohibition on noncommercial advertising as violating the First Amendment.
I wrote a bit about the background of this case here. In short, Metro purported to prohibit noncommercial advertising on Metro buses and rail because it did not want to be dragged into the “culture wars” by running advocacy issues. But in reality, Metro ran all kinds of noncommercial advertising, much of which addressed hot button “culture war” issues, including abortion, homelessness policy, LGBTQ Issues, COVID policy and vaccination, teachers’ unions and policing.
But for whatever reason, running this ad from PETA was a bridge too far:
The constitutional problems with Metro’s policy and practice were compounded by Metro’s exception to its policy: Metro would allow noncommercial advertising if the noncommercial advertiser got approval from a government agency for the ad. So speakers who the government agreed with could advertise, but those who the government didn’t agree with were censored.
All of this violated the First Amendment, the federal court found. Even though the court found Metro’s advertising space was a limited public forum – where the government has the strongest ability to restrict speech it doesn’t like – Metro’s prohibition failed even the low standards that apply in such spaces. The prohibition on noncommercial advertising was unreasonable because Metro showed it could run such ads – and in fact ran them quite often. And Metro allowing in only speech that the government approves is both viewpoint discrimination and unreasonable.
The ruling is here if you’d like to read more.