Ruling Clears Way for Political Ads on Public Stations Reversing a rule that has been in place for decades, a federal appeals court said Thursday that public television and radio stations cannot be prohibited from broadcasting paid political advertisements. The ruling could prompt some noncommercial stations to start including ads from candidates and political action committees on their broadcasts, just as commercial stations do. Hundreds of millions of dollars are expected to be spent on advertising in the period leading up to the elections this fall. The ruling startled the television industry when it was issued Thursday afternoon, in part because the case before the three-judge panel of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had initially involved advertisements bought by corporations, not from candidates. The case dates back a decade, when the Federal Communications Commission fined Minority Television Project, the operator of the San Francisco TV station KMTP, for carrying promotional messages from companies like Chevrolet and State Farm. According to Judge Carlos Bea, who wrote the main opinion issued Thursday, Minority argued in court that a federal statute prohibiting ads on public stations was a violation of the First Amendment "because its restriction on advertising was not narrowly tailored to the government's interest in preserving the educational programs on public broadcast stations." The court on Thursday concluded that the statute's ban on political ads was unconstitutional, but it upheld the ban on ads for "goods and services by for-profit entities." Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a senior vice president at the Media Access Project, a public interest law firm, said the ban on all such ads had effectively been in place "since the advent of noncommercial broadcasting in the 1940s." He said he expected that most stations would regard Thursday's ruling as a potential danger. However, "public broadcasting is in rough shape," he said. When people start dangling money in front of them - particularly in states where governors have cut off funding - I can see some succumbing. Judge Richard Paez, who dissented, wrote that the court's judgment could "jeopardize the future of public broadcasting." "For almost sixty years, noncommercial public broadcasters have been effectively insulated from the lure of paid advertising," he wrote. Mr. Bea noted in his opinion that Congress could "try again": "If there truly is evidence that broadcast of public issue and political advertisements would cause substantial harm - that their broadcast would change program content as directly and substantially as would for-profits" advertising - Congress could compile a record to show as much, and perhaps pass a law restricting such speech." The Minority Television Project did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.