Wrong Side of the Advertising Tracks

I am a reader of many of the liberal opinion magazines, listener of liberal talk and news radio and general partaker of media to keep abreast of current events in the United States. I do not have cable, so my television exposure is limited to the Sunday morning political shows, which are increasingly slanting right. I occasionally tune in to the other side, by dialing up O'Reilly, Hannity, Rush and their ilk, or by picking up a conservative paper. I suscribe to a weekly news magazine that does a fairly balanced job of culling both sides of the major issues by surveying many papers across the nation and around the world.

For this column, I do a fair amount of research, mostly on the internet, which is another medium for obtaining information. I even pay attention to the news headlines that stream into the elevator that I ride up to my day job each day.

I think most Americans pay attention to some form of the news every day, even if it's bite-sized teasers for the evening news, or just scanning the headlines as they pass the news stand on their way to work.

I also like to pay attention to the advertising though. I do this because the balkanization of advertising is as important as anything else in determining the depth, quality and immediacy of the news we are getting, and because I believe the advertising environment plays a significant factor in our subjective judgments on the accompanying news (let's pretend for a moment that entertainment and sporting news aren't actually treated as real news).

Advertisements run the gamut from flogging shady vitamin supplements, weight loss pills, miracle cures, and semi-interesting but unnecessary gadgets, to medical advances, automobiles, mainstream technology, brand-name consumer products, and mass-market entertainment. There's also everybody's quadri-perennial favorite, the paid political ad seen and heard only around election time.

Beyond the product itself, advertising needs to focus on a target audience. An ad will implicitly (if well-conceived) try to motivate a particular sub-group of consumer; whether retail or mail order, young or old, alternative or mainstream, by gender or by race, brand-loyalist or impulse buyer, or the seeker of quality vs the price-conscious shopper.

Most of modern advertising contributes to the financial health of a program or publisher, and all of it, to some degree, provides either an aura of authenticity or a sheen of disreputable intent. How does the media consumer's perception of the included advertising (to the extent that it is perceived) reflect on the quality of the media itself? Can low-brow advertising depress the perceived quality of well-researched, well-written, fact-based reporting or well-informed opinion? Will the presence of ads for "house-hold names" add respectibility? If advertising seeks the largest and most appropriate audience, and media cannot obtain critical mass without advertising, then how does one graduate to the big-time to adopt that veneer of authority? What does one do in a fledgling enterprise?

I recently took three full-page ads from one of my favorite opinion magazines and spent five minutes researching the miracle cures (or the books about same) noted in the articles. It took no more than a quick internet search to find that the individuals touting these miracles (presented as brave innovators being suppressed by authority) had been censured by their peers, debunked by other scientists, restricted by (or in some cases, criminally prosecuted by) government and were promoting cure rates or studies that could not be verified or duplicated.

So why would a reputable magazine accept such an ad? Wouldn't the appearance of such an ad undermine the overall respectability of the magazine's editorial content?

The same is true of radio. Talk radio, from left to right, is a awash in a sea of ads for vitamin supplements, weight loss pills, baldness cures, dubious credit counseling services and medical advertising for non-essential procedures. Can you really take that criticism of foreign policy seriously after listening to a ersatz 70 year old tell you he now has a fuller head of hair than when he was in his 20s?

It's hard to criticize an enterprise that may be fighting for survival, and particularly in this instance, because there has to be a presumption on the part of the publisher or broadcaster that their consumer is smart enough to discern the difference between the advertising and the vehicle. Making that argument is a lot like defending a library inside a brothel--it's bound to suffer a readership decline due to the surroundings despite the fact that readers should be able to ignore them.

There's no easy answer to the advertising conundrum. Advertising supported media provides cheap, broadly accessible information. To the extent that it cheapens the content itself, we may just have to ignore it.