Advertising and the Democratic Press. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, March, 1994 by Howard Kurtz

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.