Dictating Content

Advertising pressure does more than influence content; it sometimes dictates it. Indeed, when advertisers wield their financial clout, they may enforce private economic censorship with as heavy a hand as that of the government. Such private censorship may be either direct or indirect. One telling example of direct censorship was the ultimatum of America's leading advertiser, Procter & Gamble, ¹²⁹ that its products could not appear in any print medium which included "any material on gun control, abortion, the occult, cults, or the disparagement of religion." ¹³⁰ An equally telling example of indirect or self­censorship is revealed in the editorial policy of the Arkansas Democrat (now the Democrat­Gazette): editorial content must not be critical of advertisers. In a blunt and unusually candid explanation of the paper's policy, managing editor John Robert Starr said: "Our policy is no different from every other paper I know about: People hired as columnists by the paper do not trash the advertisers." ¹³¹ Other examples of direct and indirect economic censorship ¹³² involve reporters' attempts to cover topics ranging from prescription drugs ¹³³ to tobacco ¹³⁴ and alcohol, ¹³⁵ from car dealers ¹³⁶ to real­estate agencies, ¹³⁷ and from cosmetics ¹³⁸ to fast foods. ¹³⁹ Even nonlibelous political dissent, when critical of advertisers, is subject to outright suppression. ¹⁴⁰

Commercial speech represents commercial power. That is, advertisers can influence and dictate the content of communication because mass media rely heavily upon advertising revenues. Competition for the marketing dollar is rife. With the multitude of media options ¹⁴¹ and the tightening of recessionary advertising budgets, ¹⁴² media managers elect increasingly to please advertisers at almost any cost. This coddling of advertisers' interests is turning the fourth estate into the corporate estate.