Advertising and the Democratic Press.

Advertising and the Democratic Press

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. Yet according to Upton Sinclair's 1920 book The Brass Check, not a single Philadelphia newspaper reported the news. Such was the power of a prominent advertiser that the urge to suppress any unpleasant headlines probably came naturally.

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. The paper promptly fired Washburn for his candor.

Clearly, advertisers still have considerable clout with news organizations. 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. Vanity Fair publishes an adulatory cover story on Calvin Klein, who later places a 116-page ad insert in the magazine. 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.

Yet media mores have changed a great deal since Upton Sinclair's day. Examples of news executives shamelessly knuckling under to advertiser pressure are relatively rare, rare enough so that the capitulation itself sometimes becomes news. 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).

Most sizable newspapers have a broad enough financial base that they can easily resist threats from one company or industry. Some magazines do not, however, which is why pieces on the dangers of smoking are rare in journals that depend on cigarette ads. And commercial television is the most dependent of all, since it cannot air its programs without plenty of 30second spots. Still, on my voluminous list of common media sins, caring in to brutish advertisers ranks fairly low.

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." 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.

Baker' s indictment, drawn solely from secondary sources, is unconvincing. The professor seems to have little idea of how newsrooms actually work. 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. 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.

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. To argue that publishers and editors "tailor message content" to maximize advertising revenue is to take a conspiratorial view of the media. In fact, most journalists like kicking advertisers in the teeth now and then, if only to demonstrate their independence. 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.

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. Proctor & Gamble withdraws $1 million in ads from Boston' s WHDH after it carries an ad criticizing the company' s Folgers coffee. Cigarette companies cancel their ads in Mother Jones after the magazine runs an article on the hazards of tobacco. This hardly proves the author's contention "that advertisers buy a 'kept' mentality in relation to the press."

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. 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. But this doesn't mean the papers are kowtowing to advertisers, merely that such reporting has fallen out of fashion.

Yet Baker can't resist throwing every stray allegation into his evidentiary pot. Thus, CBS's refusal to continue losing $1 million a pop by siring 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.

Baker's thesis is as follows: Advertisers favor affluent readers to whom they can peddle more perfume or Porsches. Newspapers and magazines therefore alter their content so as to lure these well-heeled customers and avoid offending corporate sponsors. 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.

What Baker seems not to grasp is that most editors would be chasing yuppie readers (with whom they identify) regardless of advertising. Low-income folks in Harlem or South-Central L.A. are not the prime consumers of The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times; that is why neither paper had a separate weekly section for city readers until recently. 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. The advertising, while important, is quite secondary.

Even if the author is right that advertising subtly corrupts the news business, his remedies are both farfetched and politically unrealistic. He proposes a 10 percent governmerit sales tax on newspaper advertising, with the money plowed back into the papers based on circulation. This subsidy, he argues, will tilt the publications away from corporate sponsors and toward the interests of readers currently unwanted by advertisers. But the likely impact would be marginal, except for giving politicians more sway over the press by allowing them to fiddle with the formulas. 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. Even Baker concedes that his ultimate plan, using the advertising tax to fund public broadcasting, is a tough political sell. Baker' s book is useful insofar as it forces the reader to consider these issues in a new light. But whatever the problems of advertisers-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. 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.

Howard Kurtz, a Washington Post reporter, is the author of Media Circus: The Trouble with America's Newspapers (Times Books)