Media and Advertising

[T]he New York Times [is] a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. … You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations.

The influence of advertising on magazines reached a point where editors began selecting articles not only on the basis of their expected interest for readers but for their influence on advertisements. Serious articles were not always the best support for ads. An article that put the reader in an analytical frame of mind did not encourage the reader to take seriously an ad that depended on fantasy or promoted a trivial product. An article on genuine social suffering might interrupt the buying mood on which most ads for luxuries depend. The next step, seen often in mid-twentieth century magazines, was commissioning articles solely to attract readers who were good prospects to buy products advertised in the magazine. After that came the magazine phenomenon of the 1970s — creating magazines for an identifiable special audience and selling them to particular advertisers.

Protected by the free speech provision of the First Amendment, corporations marshal huge public relations efforts on behalf of their agendas. In the United States the 170,000 public relations employees whose job it is to manipulate news, public opinion and public policy in the interests of their clients outnumber news reporters by 40,000. A study in 1990 discovered that almost 40 percent of the news content of a typical U.S. newspaper originates as public relations press releases, story memos, and suggestions. The Columbia Journalism Review reported that more than half the news stories in the Wall Street Journal are based solely on corporate press releases (cited in Korten 1995:146 [When Corporations Rule the World]). United States corporations spend almost half as much on advertising (approximately $120 per person) as the state spends on education ($207 per person).

In fact, brand-sponsored content as Steve Golin likes to call this, is as old as television. Today, many gripe that the World Wide Web is nothing but a World Wide Commercial for which securing eyeballs for advertisers is the first and last concern. Lest we forgot, TV was also invented to sell to us in the comfort of our home. Content has always been an after thought. At the dawn of TV, soap operas got their name from the soap that was hawked by the show’s sponsors, who exercised a good deal of control over the show’s themselves, (which existed merely to fill the space between commercials.)

Advertising [in oligopolistic markets] provides a way to protect or expand market share without engaging in profit-threatening price competition.

Even some mainstream journalists are sounding the alarm…. Henry Holcomb, who is president of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia and a journalist for 40 years, said that newspapers had a clearer mission back when he began reporting. That mission was to report the truth and raise hell. But corporate pressures have blurred this vision, he said.

Janine Jackson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a news media watchdog group, told the American Free Press that 60 percent of journalists surveyed by FAIR admitted that advertisers try to change stories.

Some advertisers kill some stories and promote others, she said, asserting that there is an overwhelming influence of corporations and advertisers on broadcast and print news reporting.

The trends are all bad, worse and worse, Nichols said. Newspapers and broadcast journalists are under enormous pressures to replace civic values with commercial values.

He labeled local television news a cesspool. Local broadcasters are under pressure from big corporations to entertain rather than to inform, and people are more ignorant after viewing television news because of the misinformation they broadcast, he said.

Mass advertising is no longer solely a means of introducing and distributing consumer goods, though it does that. It is a major mechanism in the ability of a relatively small number of giant corporations to hold disproportionate power over the economy. These corporations need newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting not just to sell their goods but to maintain their economic and political influence. The media are no longer neutral agents of the merchants but essential gears in the machinery of corporate giantism. And increasingly they are not only needed but they are owned by the corporate giants.

Globalization is integrating not just trade, investment and financial markets. It is also integrating consumer markets. … [Economically, ] there is fierce competition to sell to consumers worldwide, with increasingly aggressive advertising.

On the social side local and national boundaries are breaking down in the setting of social standards and aspirations in consumption. Market research identifies global elites and global middle classes who follow the same consumption styles, showing preferences for global brands. There are the global teens — some 270 million 15—to 18-year-olds in 40 countries — inhabiting a global space, a single pop-culture world, soaking up the same videos and music and providing a huge market for designer running shoes, t-shirts and jeans.

… At the same time the consumer receives a flood of information through commercial advertising. An average American, it is estimated, sees 150,000 advertisements on television in his or her lifetime. And advertising is increasing worldwide, faster than population or incomes. Global advertising spending, by the most conservative reckoning, is now $435 billion.

The leading transnational media giants are often American or at least Western corporations. To expand markets they must continue to look for new regions for expansion. Southeast Asia, for example, may be one of the last major regions to be affected by international satellites.

It really was not until the 1990s, for example, that Southeast Asia saw Western television enter on a massive scale. Advances in technology plus market liberalization were reasons. Asia, of course, is the largest worldwide market (2.8 billion) and has one-third of the world’s television sets. While Asia has been known to foster a distinct culture and linguistic heritage, this specialty is now in jeopardy. We see MTV, Western news and movie channels, and other Western media influences spreading across Asia. The cultural heritage of these countries is being threatened by trans border data flow, media images moving across national borders thanks to new electronic forms of media delivery. People are told they need products they never realized they required. They are told via media that Western styles and habits may be better or more desirable than their own traditions and customs. Young people in particular now grow up with stronger ties to New York and Los Angeles than their own capitals and families.

Then there is the danger that comes when making money is more important than quality of information flow. China’s 1.2 billion people are a very desirable audience. Consider what happened when News Corporation purchased STAR TV in 1993. A controversial program on the Chinese government on BBC Work Television News lead to PRC official complaints. Murdock simply pulled the plug. Note that he also was an investor in the Beijing People’s Daily. Similar pressures caused him to pressure Harper Collins of London to cancel a book contract with a former ambassador to China because it too was critical of the regime.

The problem goes beyond economic concentrations. Because the product of media industries is cultural programming, the concern centers on the very fabric of life.

As stated earlier, the movement is toward grabbing attention and creating a desire for things that people never knew was needed. It also is about using the media to homogenize culture. It involves the world’s children, even in the most communication-savvy communities where children below the age of ten are targeted with clever media campaigns. Yet these children are incapable of cognitively understanding what media does. Hence we have animated television programs as those developed several years ago, He-Man and She Ra, where the programs primarily were introduced to market massive lines of toys for the Christmas season. We are submitting innocent children to strategies of a mega-million dollar advertising industry and most parents are incapable of responding to sales campaigns of this magnitude. MTV is another example. Here we have entertainment programming which doubles as a continuous commercial for music CDs, clothing lines, talk shows involving music personalities, and a variety of other marketing ploys.