What happens to civilization when its main source of knowledge is ads?

In the last issue, I ended this column by recalling a TV commercial I had seen, in which it was suggested to us that eating fast food while watching solitary TV is a good way to "get on with your life." I commented that I thought that ad was "criminal." In retrospect, I think maybe my use of that term was too impulsive. The commercial I described probably didn't break any laws. When you're paying $2 million for 30 seconds (the price of advertising on that broadcast), you make sure to have your lawyers check out what you're saying.

But as I think about it, that's just the problem: that legalistically speaking, an ad like the one for "Chili's baby-back ribs" is not criminal--yet it really ought to be. To encourage 90 million people to do something that could make them even more sedentary, fat, and socially isolated than they already are, is to grease the way for even more obesity, heart failure, and hostility than we already have. But what really is not the fast food itself, so much as the implied message that goes with it--the message that to "get on with your life" is something you can accomplish through passive consumption. That message, if not exactly criminal, is pathologically disingenuous.

Ironically, our assurance that lawyers check every detail these days may actually make us more vulnerable to being deceived by ads than we once were. We can be fairly confident now that major advertisers won't actually lie the way they did a century ago. Most of us have seen those antique medicine-bottle labels that claimed to cure everything from malaise to malaria, and we can laugh at how gullible people must have been then. But that may lull us into overlooking the newer ways advertisers have learned to manipulate us. Lies are only one kind of deception, perhaps the easiest kind to legislate against. But other kinds of dishonest messages are now all around us, in every medium--and I think getting worse.

Lest this preoccupation with advertising seem a marginal issue for a magazine focused on the larger questions of sustainability, please consider that advertising is now arguably the most pervasive and multifarious form of communication from which the modern public gets its beliefs about what makes life healthy, satisfying, and sustainable in the long run:

* More people now get their impressions about what prescription medicines they need from magazine or TV ads than from their doctors. Notice all those ads for Claritan or Nexium or Lipitor, which largely drown out the advice of your doctor. It's you and your doctor who should be the deciding what medicine you need, not you and a drug pusher.

* Yet, a lot of doctors, pestered by requests from their patients for medicines advertised on TV, end up writing prescriptions that have been more influenced by the ads (which they know won't contain outright lies, at least) than from their knowledge of medical science.

* I'm fairly sure that more people decide what refrigerators, food, or clothes to buy because of the ads they've seen than because of evaluations they've gleaned from Consumer Reports or Green Guide or the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Annual advertising expenditures in 2002 were about $247 billion in the United States alone. I doubt that the outreach budgets of public interest groups add up to one-tenth of 1 percent of that.

* And, I'd bet that more people decide who to vote for as a result of direct advertising or other forms of paid persuasion than as a result of their appraisals of the candidates' policy papers or legislative track records. Otherwise why does G.W. Bush think he needs to raise $200 million for his reelection campaign, and why was Howard Dean's early fundraising success considered so important? People will evidently learn more about these candidates from the ads they air than from what they've done with the governments of the United States or Vermont.

One reason Americans are now so polarized is that advertising has been widely used to persuade the public that spending their tax money on public services--on education, health, environmental protection--is bad for the economy. Roughly half of the population believes this, and the other half sees that this claim is essentially a rationalization for keeping government off the backs of businesses. We are unlikely to break the impasse until more people see how their perception is being manipulated.

One way to see it is to recognize that perception is a form of physiological intake, just as is eating, drinking, or breathing. Like food, water, or air, the information we take in can be polluted. In the past few decades, the forms of pollution that have crept into our food, water, and air have proliferated--ranging from organic chemicals to invasive species to rogue genes from GMOs. And now, it seems, the various forms of information pollution, too, have proliferated. Advertising is transmogrifying into forms not always recognizable as advertising:

* First, there's that seemingly innocuous form of industrial diplomacy known as public relations, a fascinating history of which is recounted by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton in their book Trust Us, We're Experts. Stauber, who now heads the nonprofit group PR Watch, notes that at least since the 1930s, American businesses have been systematically--and very successfully--shaping public perceptions about everything from Coca-Cola to war.

* Then, there's what we euphemistically call "product placement." For example, the movie Chicago, which won a lion's share of Oscars in 2002, contains numerous scenes (including the opening one) in which the camera moves in on a woman seductively smoking a brand of cigarette whose manufacturer has presumably paid a hefty fee to be so featured.

* A third form, particularly of concern to environmentalists, is the spread of disinformation about climate change and other impacts of oil or coal pollution, by "research institutes" that--if you follow the money--turn out to be creatures of the fossil fuel industry.

* For anyone who can't sleep and turns on the TV at 3 a.m., there are those shows in which the viewer-in-a-stupor vaguely thinks he's watching a news report about some amazing new weight-loss or life extension product, until it dawns on him that the reporter is urging him to "call this number now" to buy the product, which is "not available in stores."

* More recently, some advertisers have begun acquiring entire radio stations or publications of their own, in which they can pose as objective journalists. The National Rifle Association (NRA), for example, will soon be able to disseminate its anti-gun-control propaganda disguised as straight news.

Critics are concerned that the latter development will allow groups like the NRA to exploit free speech rules to avoid normal truth-in-advertising constraints, while ignoring the normal responsibilities of journalists. But an even bigger worry, I think, may be that as more and more media are aimed at manipulating consumer appetites or beliefs, using more and more sophisticated forms of disguise, the public will be increasingly unable to discriminate between responsible information services and propaganda and will gradually lose its freedom of independent thought and decision. If the ad comes disguised as a news report, scientific study, expert analysis, or neighbor's candid opinion, it may deceive even those who try to be vigilant.

At the same time, fears of such insidious developments may divert our attention from conventional ads of the "ordinary" kind, which may now seem to us doubly innocuous: we know they are ads; and we know they're probably not outright lies.

And so, we're doubly lulled.

It was in that lulled state that I opened a recent New Yorker magazine, turned a couple of pages, and came upon a two-page ad by Altria Corporation. Maybe you've seen it--it looks like one of those public service ads put out by companies that go out of their way to be good corporate citizens. On the left, there's an attractive, conservatively dressed woman, and across the two pages runs a rhetorical question in large type: "If your most valuable assets were at risk, wouldn't you protect them?"

The accompanying text begins: "Domestic violence affects 1 in 4 women." it goes on to explain what a terrible cost that violence has been to society. If you weren't familiar with Altria, you'd have to infer that whoever those Altrians are, they certainly are a compassionate and socially conscientious group. Of course, that is just what the ad's designers are doubtless counting on. A lot of people who used to know what this company is no longer do, because the company not long ago changed its name--from Philip Morris. As the purveyor of a product that has led to the deaths of millions of people, Philip Morris might have found it hard to continue doing business as usual. By taking a new name and logo--and spending millions to change its identity--it employed the time-honored tactic of the crook in the "wanted" poster who grows a beard and dons a wig to evade recognition.

But can a company with a sordid past shrug off that past so easily? I have no problem with a company trying to reform. We need to encourage changes of heart. I liked it when British Petroleum began saying that BP now means "Beyond Petroleum"--even though I know perfectly well that BP has so far put too little into making that a reality. At least BP's slogan doesn't deny its past--and present. Altria, on the other hand, is in full denial and disguise--not so much ashamed of its legacy as shamelessly willing to avoid acknowledging any responsibility for it.

What's dangerous here is not that the ad creates a deception far bigger than any single lie, but that it further accelerates the movement toward a culture in which no one is accountable for anything. Two years after Enron Corporation robbed many of its shareholders of their life savings while its CEO was paid tens of millions, the U.S. justice system still can't seem to hold the CEO accountable. Coca-Cola isn't held accountable for the effects of its product on the incidence of obesity and, eventually, heart attack. G.W. Bush isn't held accountable for the effects his "bring 'em on" taunt to terrorists has had in recruiting new terrorists and probably increasing the number of his country's youths being blown up in Iraq. The NRA isn't held accountable for the effect of its "jackbooted thugs" direct-mail ad in provoking naive anti-government rage like that of the Oklahoma City bomber. My neighbor isn't held accountable for the chemicals he spreads so liberally on his lawn, which then wash into a river that flows into the Chesapeake Bay.

And Altria isn't held accountable for the ads of Philip Morris, which promoted a product that killed--and continues to kill--millions. When it asks that question about "your most valuable assets" (your with, or daughter, or mother)--"wouldn't you protect them ?"--I doubt that its intention is to get you to protect them from lung cancer. For a closer look at this ad, see "Between the Lines" on pages 34 and 35.

Conservatives like to promote the notion that bad corporate behavior is rare, and that industries generally do a good job of policing themselves. That hasn't worked with such companies as Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Tyco, Boeing, Parmalat, and hundreds of others. But what might work now is for the media that carry advertising to be accountable for the claims of their advertisers. Traditionally, news media have maintained a "wall" between reporters and advertisers, ostensibly to protect reporters from conflicts of interest. But I suspect the real reason is that it allows publishers and editors (whose salaries are paid for by the ads) to distance themselves from any responsibility for the deceptions those ads perpetrate.

Now that the ads do at least as much to shape public worldviews, opinions, and lifestyles as does the reporting, however, it's time to stop that "see no evil" game the media play. Publishers, editors, and producers, as long as their papers or channels have not actually been bought up and taken over by their advertisers, should be the ones who hold those advertisers accountable. The New Yorker, which has courageously unmasked wrongdoing in U.S. policy and industry in many of its comment columns and articles, should now begin to unmask the hypocrisy of advertisers like Altria. It won't, of course, since it would likely not survive. But someday, perhaps, a publisher will do that--and will start a revolution in honest communications.