Advertising and the news media
Lee, Martin A. & Solomon, Norman
The media business operates with a pair of avowed purposes—to provide a public service and to make money. As a result, mixed messages are typical. America's three major newsweeklies, for...
...Yearnings for personal connection are grist for the advertiser's next new mill...
...I think it would be naive to expect publications that take a lot of revenue from the tobacco industry to go after them vigorously," TV Guide's assistant managing editor Andrew Mills said in an interview...
...What appears on television screens often looms so large that the people who live next door may seem less "real" to us than Dan Rather, or the Golden Girls, or even a pleasant woman who's endorsing a pain reliever for the hundredth time...
...Appreciate her good taste...
...By the time Roger Mudd left NBC News in the mid-1980s, his annual salary had reached $1.2 million...
...Which is why Maxwell House wanted her in the first place—and paid her half a million dollars for two days' work...
...So she did the commercial to avoid having commercial pressures compromise the integrity of her work...
...I don't recall that this has ever come up at TV Guide," he told us...
...Koop was right on target...
...Linda Ellerbee's testimonial did much more than demonstrate that celebrity sincerity is available for the right price...
...While receiving more than $30 million each year from tobacco advertisements, TV Guide does not publish any articles critical of the television networks' gentle treatment of the cigarette industry...
...Having founded a new company for producing quality documentaries, she explained, the need for an influx of cash was crucial...
...or do this commercial...
...Under this perennial media barrage, it may slip Americans' unconscious minds that eroticism has no special relevance to buying a new automobile or a particular brand of soft drink, other than the linkage supplied by an ad-mad culture toying with deep human emotions...
...News & World Report has gone on any crusades against cigarette smoking...
...More telling than her cameo role for Maxwell House was her rationale for it: "I did it for the money—I make no bones about it...
...News & World Report schedules a negative article about smoking, spokespersons for those magazines reluctantly admitted to us, the policy is to give the cigarette companies advance notice—and the option of moving, or removing, their ads in that issue, lest readers associate them with the unsavory publicity...
...FALL • 1990 • 525 Notebook Playboy is hardly the only mass-circulation magazine going out of its way to be more sensitive to the well-being of tobacco hawkers than to human lung tissue...
...This article is excerpted from Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, Carol Publishing Group, with the kind permission of the publisher...
...Anacin had an actor play a reporter—standing in front of a printing press no less—to announce 'the news about aspirin.' Shearson Lehman paid a real reporter, Richard Valeriani, to pretend to interview a Shearson-paid spokesman, Henry Kissinger, about the economy...
...On the rare occasions that either Time, Newsweek, or U.S...
...Other unpleasant articles—precipitated by plane crashes, reports on auto safety hazards, studies of alcoholism, and the like—trigger the same early warning system, giving advertisers such as airlines, car manufacturers, and liquor marketers the chance to pull or rearrange ads...
...Reynolds, Philip Morris, and other tobacco sellers indicate why a cigarette industry with an annual death toll of 390,000 Americans doesn't get more bad press...
...But Ellerbee's work as a pitchwoman also spoke high volumes about mass media's capacity to housebreak rebellious souls who might aspire to get some semblance of substance onto the networks...
...EDs...
...Consider TV Guide—a weekly magazine picked up by 42 million American adults plus 5.6 million teenagers—with a total circulation of more than 890 million copies per year...
...RJR Nabisco, makers of packaged goods ranging from Shredded Wheat to Winstons and Camels, canceled its account with a Saatchi & Saatchi ad agency...
...Neuharth's edict, of course, was meant only for USA Today editors' ears...
...In 1980, tobacco companies pulled their ads from Mother Jones after that magazine ran a series of articles about cigarettes as a major cause of cancer and heart disease...
...accept an offer to do a daily syndicated talkshow...
...when their company bought an ad agency putting together anti-smoking messages for the Minnesota Department of Health, Saatchi nixed that million-dollar arrangement rather than jeopardize its $35 million fee for advertising Kool cigarettes...
...Some publications go further to protect cigarette advertisers...
...America's three major newsweeklies, for instance, have published occasional articles critical of the tobacco habit...
...In 1989, U.S...
...FALL • 1990 • 527...
...some come higher than others...
...Yet zeal to capture readers and marketing dollars has entailed reliance on mixing messages...
...The exploitation of sexuality to create allure for products that have nothing in particular to do with sexual fulfillment, seems to involve no moral dilemmas for corporate journalism...
...Savan put her finger on the symbolism: "Although the public ranks reporters right next to politicians on the sleaze spectrum, news types are still associated with 'facts,' especially in pop-up appearances like ads...
...Reinforced is the idea that all people have their price...
...Print ads with several pictures of long-necked beer bottles ran under the headline: "When you meet the Right Girl, how should you treat her...
...The advertising firm handling the account, the Times reported, "nicknamed the target market the Charmed Winner...
...Federal law has banned cigarette commercials from the airwaves since 1971, but viewers consulting TV Guide—now the property of Fox Television Network owner Rupert Murdoch— keep getting plenty of color pitches for cigs...
...As a result, mixed messages are typical...
...Sex Sells A wholesome image has always been central to the facade of USA Today, which accumulated more than six million daily readers during the 1980s...
...Tip your cap to her...
...Yet most of their back covers in 1989 were advertisements for cigarettes...
...Vehement instructions about front-page photos came from the top boss, Allen Neuharth, who got the attention of editors one day by repeatedly slamming a newspaper rack in a conference room...
...Celebs-for-hire on commercials convey the message by example too, so that spectacles like James Garner peddling many a Mazda, or Bill Cosby cashing in as he smiles for everything from pudding to stockbrokers, are endorsements of specific products as well as of insatiable zeal for ever more wealth...
...T]hey've killed sections when they haven't gotten the advertising...
...Like a torturer in a late-night B-movie, sooner or later media conglomerates convey a chilling message to a recalcitrant professional: Ve have vays to make you talk...
...Pauli Girl beer mounted a $5 million advertising blitz...
...Pauli Girl promo drive, the Times discussed the new ad campaign only in terms of potential for boosting sales with its "suggestive humor...
...The mixed message, while self-contradictory, is powerful: To be truly yourself, imitate others...
...In the spring of 1989, St...
...The continuous stream of advertising, news, and entertainment imparts paradoxical concepts: Problems are individual, and so are solutions—yet you should strive to live (and buy) as others do...
...Ethical considerations go unmentioned...
...The target's psychological profile: confident, stable, full of fun, not married but with female friends...
...Only weeks after appearing on the cover of Mother Jones magazine as a go-your-own-way pathbreaker, Ellerbee was on national television commercials selling Maxwell House coffee...
...The back cover was an advertisement for Merit Ultra Lights, headlined "Tasty little number...
...Actually they're reading articles that exist only because of specific sponsorship...
...Purchasing ads in TV Guide to the tune of about $590,000 a week, tobacco companies also buy the magazine's silence...
...The massive ad budgets of R.J...
...When we thanked Mills for his candor, he replied: "Facts are facts, right...
...Commercials say so explicitly, as do the myriad television shows glorifying the rich and famous...
...Like Ellerbee doing her good-to-the-last-drop spot, television newscasters are well paid...
...But planned titillation to boost mainstream publications is commonplace— paralleling the misuse of women's bodies as sales props in printed ads...
...That concept has long been established in the ad world—paralleling the vital advertising precept that a person can never have "enough" money or possessions...
...the ads were "using coy word plays about how a young man should treat the 'Right Girl' when he brings her home...
...Suggestive" advertising in search of "target markets" may on the surface seem savvy and lusty—and its detractors perhaps unduly prudish...
...In those cases, a Newsweek spokesman informed us, "the advertising sales people at Newsweek commission the content of those special sections" —a practice that, he conceded, "has occasionally raised concerns...
...The New York Times' advertising column—a daily feature in the business section—takes for granted the appropriateness of brandishing sexual imagery as a marketplace tool...
...But General Foods' coffee-achieving company has outdone those previous press plugs by hiring someone who could be sold as someone who could not be bought...
...Eight years later, butt-pushers pointedly disciplined the largest ad-agency group in the world when one of its subsidiaries strayed from the nicotine-stained road by having the temerity to produce a television commercial that dramatized passenger applause for the advent of Northwest Airline's strict no-smoking rule...
...Repetition has rendered even absurd rhetoric quite familiar, and unlikely to raise eyebrows, as when commercials entreat viewers to break through and express their 526 • DISSENT Notebook real individuality by buying the new car that millions of other people will also be driving...
...In retrospect, Walter Cronkite's famed closing line was an ominous trademark for a television news industry with the power and arrogance to squeeze slanted versions of events through the Tube and then underscore its pretensions with the matteroffact declaration: "And that's the way it is...
...Ellerbee's Confession A maverick television journalist is rare enough that when one cracks a national network, the result can be a media novelty item...
...Surgeon General C. Everett Koop angrily alleged that many magazines and newspapers thick with cigarette ads remain unwilling to publish articles on smoking dangers—a charge that received scant media mention and no appreciable follow-up...
...Introduce her to your friends...
...Despite the reassuring myth that ads don't affect news content, neither Time nor Newsweek nor U.S...
...But, taking measure of such winsome determination not to be a commodity, the big-time television business sees opportunities for marketing another commodity...
...The media business operates with a pair of avowed purposes—to provide a public service and to make money...
...The process is more circuitous than with a commercial, but the requirement of pleasing a CEO and board of directors is no less stringent—and obedience no less lucrative...
...Mills acknowledged that television has ducked the cigarette story—"It doesn't seem to me that TV has done much with it" —but his magazine wouldn't touch the subject with a ten-foot antenna...
...Propose a toast to her...
...Money is everything nowadays...
...Linda Ellerbee gained a reputation as a witty no-nonsense critic of televacuities...
...Journalism's widest reach is via television, providing vivid images of "reality...
...Captions provided the answers: "Open the door for her...
...Had another journalist mugged for Maxwell, it would have raised enough eyebrows," Village Voice columnist Leslie Savan wrote, "but Ellerbee is supposed to be some kind of keeper of journalistic cynicism, most biting about the hypocrisies of the TV news industry itself...
...Meanwhile, on television, the sexual pandering in many programs is an echo of commercials' more blatant and sometimes sublimi nal methods that would have kept Sigmund Freud glued to a slow-motion VCR...
...In theory the articles on these pages are distinct, set in a different typeface on specially marked pages, but readers might easily make the mistaken assumption that they're looking at journalism...
...Ties between articles and advertiser patronage become more direct in projects called "special sections" or "advertising supplements...
...The September 1989 Playboy featured an attorney's essay denouncing proposals to restrict cigarette ads...
...The threat of retaliation is more than conjecture...
...So, in seventeen paragraphs about the St...
...The subtext was unmistakable, for instance, in gas commercials starring Bob Hope—already one of this country's richest men—seemingly determined to prime his fiscal pump with Texaco's largess until (and perhaps, with residuals, even past) his dying day...
...When you run a picture of a nice clean-cut all-American girl like this," he lectured, "get her tits above the fold...
...In 1989, Playboy received about $900,000 a month from cigarette advertisements—a quarter of all its ad revenue...
...Filling the first two pages of that month's Playboy was a full-color spread for Camels...
...Time magazine's publicity manager, Brian Brown, spelled out the fundamentals: "We're not going to run a special section that doesn't have advertising...
...It is necessary to destroy integrity in order to save it...
...My personal opinion is that it wouldn't look good for TV Guide to go after the networks when TV Guide runs cigarette ads in every issue...
...Salaries of television journalists have spiraled since the early 1970s, when the top yearly wages were in the $100,000–$150,000 range...
...He complained that "network television news has become an increasingly difficult place to be for those of us who came to it in the 1950s...
...The article advocated the right of cigarette companies to advertise without further legal restraints—and specifically defended a Camels ad campaign aimed at teens...
...The scripted outcome is that quasi-renegades wind up trading on their outsider reps to develop leverage as insiders...
...All told, the issue contained twelve full pages of cigarette ads, along with a tear-out postcard for three free packs of Marlboro Menthol...
...I had three choices—get an investor, which would mean giving up control...
...Each one of those copies contains cigarette ads...
...Low achievers can only hope to go on sale for low prices...
...Admire her body...
...successes command more impressive price tags...
...But in reality the methodical use of sexual metaphors—so central to American advertising for cars, cigarettes, alcohol, packaged foods, soda pop, toothpaste, chewing gum, and any number of other products—is a high-intensity assault, feverishly seeking to wring maximum monetary gain out of the populace's sexual desires...
...Executives at Saatchi were not about to make the same mistake twice...
...Such is the whiplash of TV's corporate power...
Vol. 37 • September 1990 • No. 4
