430
Opinion of the Court
tral justification for its selective ban on newsracks that prevents the city from defending its newsrack policy as content neutral.
By the same reasoning, the city's heavy reliance on Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc., 475 U. S. 41 (1986), is misplaced. In Renton, a city ordinance imposed particular zoning regulations on movie theaters showing adult films. The Court recognized that the ordinance did not fall neatly into the "content-based" or "content-neutral" category in that "the ordinance treats theaters that specialize in adult films differently from other kinds of theaters." Id., at 47. We upheld the regulation, however, largely because it was justified not by an interest in suppressing adult films, but by the city's concern for the "secondary effects" of such theaters on the surrounding neighborhoods. Id., at 47-49. In contrast to the speech at issue in Renton, there are no secondary effects attributable to respondent publishers' newsracks that distinguish them from the newsracks Cincinnati permits to remain on its sidewalks.
In sum, the city's newsrack policy is neither content neutral nor, as demonstrated in Part III, supra, "narrowly tailored." Thus, regardless of whether or not it leaves open ample alternative channels of communication, it cannot be justified as a legitimate time, place, or manner restriction on protected speech.
Cincinnati has enacted a sweeping ban that bars from its sidewalks a whole class of constitutionally protected speech. As did the District Court and the Court of Appeals, we conclude that Cincinnati has failed to justify that policy. The regulation is not a permissible regulation of commercial speech, for on this record it is clear that the interests that Cincinnati has asserted are unrelated to any distinction between "commercial handbills" and "newspapers." Moreover, because the ban is predicated on the content of the publications distributed by the subject newsracks, it is not a valid time, place, or manner restriction on protected speech.
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