Pressures From Advertisers

By Author: FIRELEAVES
Total Articles: 49
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The price of subscriptions does not pay the total cost of producing a newspaper or magazine. Both are underwritten by advertising revenue, and commercial television and radio are almost completely financed by advertising. Their dependence on these external sources of funding renders them vulnerable to boycotts by advertisers. For example, in spring 1986, some Detroit car dealers canceled their ads in the Detroit Free Press after the newspaper published an expose detailing Merrell Shoes On Sale antitrust charges against local dealerships. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had charged 105 dealers and 115 individuals with conspiracy for trying to limit showroom hours and for trying to limit competition by fixing prices.

In August 1995, the Columbia Journalism Review awarded a "Dart" to the Gloucester County Times of Woodbury, New Jersey, when the paper ran a front-page story on the twentieth anniversary of the John Wanamaker store. The paper had just acquired Wanamaker as an advertiser. When the news department told the ad department that it wouldn't run the story, the editor dispatched ...
... a reporter and ordered that the story run, complete with a photo spread.

For the first time, in early August 1995 the FTC acted against a group of advertisers that were boycotting a newspaper over coverage of their product. On May 22, 1994, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News had written an article titled "A Car Buyer's Guide to Sanity," telling readers how to get a better buy on a car. Dealers responded by pulling about a million dollars' worth of advertising. The FTC initiated an antitrust investigation that resulted in a cease-and-desist agreement by the Santa Clara County Motor Car Dealers Association.48 The dealers' boycott raised two concerns, said the FTC official who handled the investigation. The absence of advertising deprived readers of price information, and the boycott might chill the publication of similar articles.

Television, too, is subject to pressure from advertisers. Before the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979, Jane Fonda appeared on a Barbara Walters ABC special to discuss her film The China Syndrome and its antinuclear message. General Electric, one of the four biggest builders of nuclear reactors in the world, promptly withdrew its sponsorship of the program.49 During the health care reform debate of 1993-1994, a number of stations refused to air an issue advocacy ad that attacked a pizza company for not providing health insurance for its employees in the U.S. although it does for those abroad.

In addition, corporations whose environmental practices are portrayed unflatteringly on the news are striking back at the press with angry letters, point-by-point rebuttals, news releases, and paid ads. These include Hooker Chemicals and General Motors, among others.

Still another example was action in early 1989 by the Washington State Fruit Com-mission, a growers' trade association that withdrew $71,300 worth of television advertising for northwest cherries from CBS affiliates in St. Louis, Atlanta, and Tampa to protest a news report on CBS's 60 Minutes. The account dealt with a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council on pesticides in foods that affect children and concluded that eating apples treated with Alar, a chemical used to control ripening, in-creased cancer risks for children. The report was disputed by the apple industry, and federal regulators had declared apples safe to eat, but the report Discount Merrell Shoes sent apple sales into a steep decline. Growers contended that they lost millions of dollars as a result. "Our association wanted to voice its displeasure over the way the CBS broadcast of the 60 Minutes program sensationalized the Alar story," said Pat Dunlop, a spokesperson for the Fruit Commission. Alar is not used on cherries, but many of the group's members grow both crops. The money budgeted for advertising was diverted to other stations in the three markets.

As these examples demonstrate, advertisers actively attempt to affect news coverage.