Political Booknotes Reviews
Torrey, Howard Kurtz and E. Fuller
Political Booknotes Advertising and the Democratic Frees C. Edward Baker Princeton University Press, $24.95 By Howard Kurtz In the early part of this century, when the Gimbel brothers owned a...
...Grab's inability to place contemporary events into a social and political framework may be partly related to his long support by the National Institute of Mental Health, which he credits in the preface as having "been extraordinarily generous in providing a succession of grants...
...It is quite understandable that the Kennedy family itself has remained silent on this issue, perhaps out of respect for Rose Kennedy, who is still alive, but it is not understandable when an historian does...
...Newspapers and magazines therefore alter their content so as to lure these well-heeled customers and avoid offending corporate sponsors...
...Since politics and mental health professionals are close bedfellows, it should prove to be a fascinating history...
...Most sizable newspapers have a broad enough financial base that they can easily resist threats from one company or industry...
...Yet media mores have changed a great deal since Upton Sinclair's day...
...The professor seems to have little idea of how newsrooms ¦actually work...
...Deinstitutionalization of America's mentally ill was the single largest social experiment of 20th century America (with the possible exception of the New Deal), and its failure is visible to every American not living in a cave...
...That movement in turn spawned the community mental health movement of the 1960s, which operated on the belief that tender loving care and a warm home—as opposed to medication and rehabilitation—were all that patients leaving state mental hospitals needed in order to live in the community...
...But this doesn't mean the papers are kowtowing to advertisers, merely that such reporting has fallen out of fashion...
...To be sure, some newspaper owners and managers have pro-business sympathies, and this may subtly affect daily news content, even without any explicit orders to subordinates...
...And commercial television is the most dependent of all, since it cannot air its programs without plenty of 30-second spots...
...Vanity Fair publishes an adulatory cover story on Calvin Klein, who later places a 116-page ad insert in the magazine...
...Even social scientists teaching in universities, a professional group well known for liberal propensities, gave Johnson only 90 percent of its votes in '64...
...The advertising, while important, is quite secondary...
...At fault, too, are advocacy efforts by the Mental Health Law Project and the American Civil Liberties Union to make involuntary hospitalization virtually impossible, and the New York State legislature's failure to pass an outpatient law which would have made Hogue's freedom contingent on taking medication...
...For every Birmingham News there are newspapers like New Jersey's Bergen Record, which boldly published fraud allegations against its biggest automobile advertiser, a local Chrysler dealer, who promptly pulled his $1.6 million a year in ads...
...Political Booknotes Advertising and the Democratic Frees C. Edward Baker Princeton University Press, $24.95 By Howard Kurtz In the early part of this century, when the Gimbel brothers owned a Philadelphia department store, one brother was arrested, charged with sodomy, and committed suicide...
...Some magazines do not, however, which is why pieces on the dangers of smoking are rare in journals that depend on cigarette ads...
...Clearly, advertisers still have considerable clout with news organizations...
...Newsweek runs a fawning cover story on "Disney's New Magic" and later gets a contract for five million copies of a promotional issue celebrating Disney World's 20th anniversary...
...Unfortunately, the 'lessons' of history are less than clear and often fraught with contradictions and ambiguities...
...Howard Kurtz, a Washington Post reporter, is the author of Media Circus: The Trouble with America's Newspapers (Times Books...
...This subsidy, he argues, will tilt the publications away from corporate sponsors and toward the interests of readers currently unwanted by advertisers...
...that is why neither paper had a separate weekly section for city readers until recently...
...This belief underlay the mental hygiene movement of the 1920s, which advocated psychotherapy for all problem children and promoted the widespread idea that therapy would prevent the development of serious mental illnesses...
...Grob succeeds admirably in describing the history and politics of almshouses and insane asylums from colonial times through World War II...
...Given the political persuasion of mental health professionals, it was hardly surprising that the John Birch Society attacked them in the fifties as being Communist agents, or that Presidents Nixon and Reagan were less than enthusiastic about mental health programs...
...The author, whose leaden academic prose will appeal only to a specialized audience, assumes a degree of financial cunning that is missing from most newsrooms...
...At the end of the book he also seems genuinely puzzled regarding how the lessons of the past can be applied to the present: "It would be useful if knowledge of past policies could offer a sound prescription for the present and future...
...Many newspapers have become bland and inoffensive not because they're worried about the local supermarket or department store, as Baker believes, but because they're scared of alienating any segment of their remaining readership...
...Thus, CBS's refusal to continue losing $1 million a pop by airing news specials during the Persian Gulf War is cited as further evidence of capitulation to advertisers, rather than a recognition that news increasingly takes a backseat at networks devoted to entertainment...
...Rosemary's condition was a major reason—probably the major reason—President Kennedy supported legislation to create the community mental health centers...
...But Grob never makes clear the fact that Hogue is the direct product of decisions made by the National Institute of Mental Health, America's mental health professionals, and New York State's community health centers to devote the majority of their time to counseling and psychotherapy for less serious cases rather than to treating the seriously mentally ill...
...Grob must be aware that lobotomies were never used for people who were merely "mildly retarded...
...NBC's incendiary reporting on General Motors pickup trucks was quite shameful, but at least the network proved willing to take on GM, a major advertiser (which, predictably, threatened to pull its ads...
...To argue that publishers and editors "tailor message content" to maximize advertising revenue is to take a conspiratorial view of the media...
...He has mined the voluminous primary sources for anecdotes and arguments, and skillfully ties the various phases and fashions of psychiatric care to the social and political milieu of the times...
...Baker's indictment, drawn solely from secondary sources, is unconvincing...
...The last quarter of the book, covering 1950 to the present, fails rather badly...
...Since 1966, he has published four books on America's care for its mentally ill in different historical periods...
...E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., is a research psychiatrist in Washington, D.C...
...Yet according to Upton Sinclair's 1920 book The Brass Check, not a single Philadelphia newspaper reported the news...
...He proposes a 10 percent government sales tax on newspaper advertising, with the money plowed back into the papers based on circulation...
...Examples of news executives shamelessly knuckling under to advertiser pressure are relatively rare, rare enough so that the capitulation itself sometimes becomes news...
...For an historian, a recital of random events is not sufficient...
...Other proposals—legally barring advertisers from using their clout against news organizations, requiring television to randomly schedule commercials so as to reduce corporate influence over any one program—would be impossible to enforce...
...Some newspapers simply turn over their real estate, auto, and travel sections to marketing types, who fill them with corporate fluff designed to ring cash registers...
...Another example of Grab's failure to deal with contemporary events is when he says that John Kennedy's "younger sister Rosemary had been diagnosed as mildly retarded and had undergone a lobotomy which had appreciably worsened her condition...
...His most recent books are Freudian Fraud (HarperCollins, 1992) and Schizophrenia and Manic-Depressive Disorder (Basic Books, 1994...
...Baker's book is useful insofar as it forces the reader to consider these issues in a new light...
...The author paints a dark picture of cowering journalists in need of rescue from all-powerful companies able to suppress unflattering news with a single phone call, or even the imagined threat of one...
...Such was the power of a prominent advertiser that the urge to suppress any unpleasant headlines probably came naturally...
...Grob describes various events and developments but is unable or unwilling to put them into a social and political context...
...Still, on my voluminous list of common media sins, caving in to brutish advertisers ranks fairly low...
...Grob describes people like Larry Hogue, a mentally ill substance-abuser who has attracted national attention by terrorizing an upscale Manhattan neighborhood...
...Gerald N. Grob, a professor of the History of Medicine at Rutgers University, is uniquely qualified for the task...
...Now comes C. Edward Baker, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to argue that the sinister influence of corporate advertising "poses a major threat to press freedom...
...It's hardly an accident that few papers have fulltime consumer reporters any more, or that the consumer's perspective is often missing from business stories...
...In 1991, Dennis Washburn, a Birmingham News columnist who edited the paper's "Wheels" section, told the Washington Journalism Review that the section was "designed to sell cars," and that the News was unlikely to jeopardize such advertising by investigating car dealers...
...One free-market solution would be for more reporters to blow the whistle on their brethren, embarrassing the hell out of anyone who sells his journalistic soul to corporate devils...
...Baker's thesis is as follows: Advertisers favor affluent readers to whom they can peddle more perfume or Porsches...
...The failure of community mental health centers to take responsibility for individuals being discharged from state psychiatric hospitals, the abandonment of seriously mentally ill individuals by most mental health professionals who preferred the private practice of psychotherapy, and the continuing dumping of patients onto the streets and into jails in 1990—just as Grob had described it happening in 1830—these and related events appear to happen like random droppings from birds overhead...
...His current book is a distillate of those four books, together with an update of the current scene...
...Proctor & Gamble withdraws $1 million in ads from Boston's WHDH after it carries an ad criticizing the company's Folgers coffee...
...In fact, most journalists like kicking advertisers in the teeth now and then, if only to demonstrate their independence...
...Grob seems to be paraphrasing a contemporary bumper sticker: "Things Happen...
...What Baker seems not to grasp is that most editors would be chasing yuppie readers (with whom they identify) regardless of advertising...
...It was Freud's curious belief that parent-infant interactions were the cause of serious mental illnesses...
...But the likely impact ' would be marginal, except for giving politicians more sway over the press by allowing them to fiddle with the formulas...
...Even if the author is right that advertising subtly corrupts the news business, his remedies are both farfetched and politically unrealistic...
...The paper promptly fired Washburn for his candor...
...Grob will remain a respected historian on the care of the mentally ill in early America, but the definitive social and political history of events in the second half of the 20th century must await another book...
...Baker's few examples of advertiser pressure actually undercut his own argument, for they show that news organizations are willing to publish and damn the consequences: The Washington State Fruit Commission pulls $71,000 worth of ads from CBS after "60 Minutes" airs a critical report on the hazards of the fruit pesticide Alar...
...Even Baker concedes that his ultimate plan, using the advertising tax to fund public broadcasting, is a tough political sell...
...Cigarette companies cancel their ads in Mother Jones after the magazine runs an article on the hazards of tobacco...
...But whatever the problems of advertiser-subsidized journalism, more government intervention—with the sort of political grandstanding and bureaucratic overkill made famous by the battles over the National Endowment for the Arts—is most assuredly not the answer...
...This hardly proves the author's contention "that advertisers buy a 'kept' mentality in relation to the press...
...He blames advertising for the decline in newspaper competition, apparently forgetting that cable TV, talk radio, computer services, and a hundred other infotainment alternatives have stolen part of the newspaper industry's audience...
...The history and politics of America's mental health establishment have never been fully analyzed...
...Low-income folks in Harlem or South-Central L.A...
...In presidential elections, 79 percent of psychoanalysts voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1952, 85 percent for Stevenson in 1956, 90 percent for John Kennedy in 1960, and 95 percent for Lyndon Johnson in 1964...
...Freud was the spiritual father of community mental health, the psychiatric Charon who directed the boats across the river Styx to the social disaster that we call deinstitutionalization...
...Published historical accounts are plentiful in strongly suggesting that Rosemary Kennedy developed schizophrenia in addition to her mild retardation, and that is the reason she was given a lobotomy...
...If publications could be made less dependent on advertising, they would be free to crusade to their hearts' content, to appeal to all readers instead of just monied folks...
...The Mad Among Us: A History of tlio Care of America's Mentally III Gerald N. Grob Free Press, $24.95 By E. Fuller Torrey The voting record of mental health professionals is more consistently liberal Democrat than any other group of professionals in America...
...What's more, the media's move toward softer and more superficial fare is part of a frantic attempt to stem a 30-year decline in readership levels...
...His one major and rather surprising omission during these years is giving almost no space to Sigmund Freud...
...This is very disappointing...
...Yet Baker can't resist throwing every stray allegation into his evidentiary pot...
...are not the prime consumers of The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 3
