Boycott Of LA Times Shows Advertising's Power Over Media

by Christian Christensen

The column's headline called the Pontiac G6 "a sales flop." It also said the automaker should "dump" Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner and "let the impeachment proceedings begin."]

It is always enlightening to see how the mainstream news media cover a story like the decision by General Motors to suspend advertising in the Los Angeles Times. When advertisers pull their money in response to news content they consider to be objectionable, journalists and media activists hurl accusations of censorship and overt corporate pressure, as if the power relationship between news organizations and large corporations had been some kind of shocking secret kept from the general public. That GM is using the withdrawal of ad money as leverage in order to get more favorable coverage is not shocking at all. In fact, it is utterly mundane. What is interesting about the story, however, is the way in which journalists address the relationship between news and advertising.

A comment made in an article by Stuart Elliot in the New York Times, is an excellent case in point. Elliot began his piece on the GM-LAT saga with the following statement of commonsense "fact" about commercial media:

"Marketers have been turning on media outlets for offenses real and perceived, for almost as long as there has been advertising space and commercial time to buy. Although marketers and media companies do business together, they are not in the same business, a distinction that manifests itself in fractious disputes caused by the tension between the media's right to say what they please and marketers' right to advertise where they please."

This assertion is either touchingly naive or a clinical case of denial, but it is certainly misleading.

Where to begin? How about with the most obvious point that many of the "media companies" Elliot writes about are, in fact, synergistic conglomerates that engage in heavy marketing and advertising campaigns for many of their other, non-news products? The most mind-numbingly obvious example is that of ABC (who provide more people with their daily news than the Los Angeles Times or New York Times ever will): a television company owned by Disney. You know, Disney (owners of Miramax), the company that tried to prevent distribution of "Fahrenheit 9/11" (target: George W. Bush), possibly on the grounds that it would affect lucrative corporate tax breaks in Florida (Governor: Jeb Bush; Home: Disneyworld, Celebration, etc.). And we should be able to trust these guys to separate journalistic and corporate interests at ABC News? Or how about NBC, owned by General Electric? The collapsing of barriers between the companies that advertise and the companies that run ads has been going on for over 20 years. Not only are these supposedly separate companies "in the same business," they are literally the same business. (For a detailed list of major media companies and their corporate holdings, visit the website of the Columbia Journalism Review. )

What is interesting about the volume of coverage devoted to the GM-LAT story is that it serves as an excellent reminder of how rarely we see the inverse: stories on how commercial media companies and marketers get along just fine and make billions in profits as a result. GM has actually done all of us a huge favor by exposing a more accurate version of the relationship between commercial media and their corporate sponsors. The GM-LAT spat appears to be the exception to the advertiser-media relationship, not the rule. If GM is willing to drop $10 million in advertising from the LA Times over unflattering coverage, one could reasonably ask why events like this do not happen on a regular basis. One answer could be that media companies, while not part of a smoke-filled-room-conspiracy to keep advertisers happy, are quite good at providing a "supportive media environment" for their sponsors.

This isn't rehashed Marxist fluff, it's basic Capitalism: if a media outlet doesn't give an advertiser a good environment for selling, then the advertiser will look elsewhere. Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Hearst and Cox are a newspaper oligopoly, and monopolize newspaper advertising in the U.S. Are we to believe that these corporations have a "tense" relationship with major advertisers? This is a mutually beneficial relationship...with a heavy emphasis on the "beneficial."

Elliot's statement about the media and advertisers also cuts to the heart of one of the great myths of global commercial media (we need to stop pretending that this is an American disease): that members of the public are the primary "clients" for mainstream media output. As any introductory business class will tell you (and as any introductory media class should tell you), your "primary client" is the person or organization providing you with your greatest inflow of revenue. For commercial media outlets, the primary clients are advertisers. Every business sells something, and the business of commercial media is to sell the audience (attracted by the non-advertising content) to advertisers. The audience -- preferably the "right" audience, of course -- is the "product" of commercial media. Not comedies, not drama, and not news. If members of the public do not buy the products advertised in newspapers and on television, there will be no commercial newspapers or television.

The assertion (or was it a Freudian Slip?) that there is a "tension between the media's right to say what they please and marketers' right to advertise where they please" is rather confusing. I'm no constitutional scholar, but while I'm pretty sure that newspapers have certain freedom of speech rights under the First Amendment, I wasn't aware that marketers actually have the "right" to put ads wherever they please. I can only assume that once something like taking billions of dollars from advertisers becomes so ingrained into corporate journalistic culture, it is easy to confuse a "business decision" with a "right."