From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Jan 12 13:46:40 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 40E1021AFF for ; Wed, 12 Jan 2000 13:46:40 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-8.essential.org [216.0.125.8]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA23421; Wed, 12 Jan 2000 13:46:38 -0500 Message-ID: <387CCBE6.E2365691@essential.org> Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 13:45:58 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Groups Criticize CBS News for Deliberate Falsification of News Images Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert January 12, 2000 The New York Times reported today that CBS News has deliberately falsified news images by inserting virtual ads into its newscasts. Commercial Alert and TV-Free America today called CBS News "fundamentally untrustworthy," urged its viewers to get their news elsewhere, and demanded that it stop using virtual ads. The New York Times article is available at We urge people to complain to CBS News President Andrew Heyward at (212) 975-2730, or send email to CBS News Executive Vice President Jonathan Klein at . Following is a news release from Commercial Alert and TV-Free America. NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release: For More Information Contact: Wednesday, January 12, 2000 Gary Ruskin (202) 296-2787 Frank Vespe (202) 887-0436 Groups Criticize CBS News for Deliberate Falsification of News Images Following a New York Times article documenting how CBS News has repeatedly inserted virtual advertisements into its newscasts, Commercial Alert and TV-Free America today called CBS News "fundamentally untrustworthy, " urged its viewers to get their news elsewhere, preferably from print sources, and demanded that it stop using virtual ads. According to today's New York Times, the virtual billboard technology, designed by Princeton Video Image, which is used to insert advertising, "has been used regularly on ‘The Early Show' and the news magazine ‘48 Hours' and was used on the Evening News on Dec. 30 and 31, according to CBS news executives." "CBS News crossed an important line by deliberately tampering with the content of news footage," said Gary Ruskin, Director of Commercial Alert, which opposes the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism. "It's obvious that you can't trust what you see on CBS News." "These virtual billboards demonstrate that nothing -- not even reality itself -- is safe from creeping commercialism," said Frank Vespe, Executive Director of TV-Free America. "Far from being a simple production technique, virtual billboards alter the actual content of the news. We will never again be certain that so-called live footage shows the real world or an advertising fantasy land." "Journalism relies on the trustworthiness of journalists and news outlets," Ruskin said. "CBS News has violated any reasonable standard of trust, and they are going to have to think long and hard about how to get it back. At a minimum, to regain public trust, they must agree to never intentionally falsify news footage again." "CBS' New Year's Eve broadcast marks a red letter day in news history: the day in which television news completely renounced any obligation to viewers to show the world as it really is," Vespe said. "If there was any remaining question, it is now clear that television news is no more serious or realistic than sitcoms or science fiction shows. All of them are about one thing and one thing only: generating maximum ad revenues." "This is just the latest example of how aggressive commercialism wrecks the newsroom," Ruskin said. "News which can be altered at will to serve the networks' interest stops being news and becomes simply another sitcom with different characters," Vespe said. "How could anyone ever take it seriously again?" -30- <-----------------news release ends here-----------------> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism. See for more information. The web address for TV-Free America is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed on the listserve . To subscribe to commercial-alert, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Jan 13 18:11:20 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0725821B12 for ; Thu, 13 Jan 2000 18:11:20 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-10.essential.org [216.0.125.10]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id SAA16820 for ; Thu, 13 Jan 2000 18:11:15 -0500 Message-ID: <387E5AC2.E8B57F97@essential.org> Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 18:07:46 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Rachel #681: TV VIEWED AS A PUBLIC HEALTH THREAT Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert January 13, 2000 Following is Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly. =======================Electronic Edition======================== . . . RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #681 . . ---January 6, 2000--- . . HEADLINES: . . TV VIEWED AS A PUBLIC HEALTH THREAT . . ========== . . Environmental Research Foundation . . P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403 . . Fax (410) 263-8944; E-mail: erf@rachel.org . . ========== . . All back issues are available by E-mail: send E-mail to . . info@rachel.org with the single word HELP in the message. . . Back issues are also available from http://www.rachel.org. . . To start your own free subscription, send E-mail to . . listserv@rachel.org with the words . . SUBSCRIBE RACHEL-WEEKLY YOUR NAME in the message. . . The Rachel newsletter is now also available in Spanish; . . to learn how to subscribe, send the word AYUDA in an . . E-mail message to info@rachel.org. . ================================================================= 1999 Wrap-Up, Part 2 TV VIEWED AS A PUBLIC HEALTH THREAT During 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that children younger than 2 should not be allowed to watch television for fear that it will stunt the development of their brains.[1] The intellectual and emotional development of young children depends upon interaction with adults, and children watching TV are unlikely to receive the active attention they need from adults, the Academy said. Specifically, the Academy said, "Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years. Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers (e.g., child care providers) for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills. Therefore, exposing such young children to television programs should be discouraged."[1] The Academy also urged parents, once again, to limit all children's exposure to TV to 1 to 2 hours of "quality programming" per day. (The Academy has issued a series of similar recommendations, based on its concern about youth violence and TV, since 1984.) The national average for all children is now more than 3 hours of TV per day, the Academy said.[1] In other words, children now spend about 20% of their waking hours glued to the tube. This does not include time spent watching movies on videotape, watching music videos, playing computer or video games, or surfing the internet for recreational purposes. "Time spent with media often displaces involvement in creative, active, or social pursuits," the Academy said. By age 70, typical American children will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching TV, the Academy said. The Academy published a short list of problems associated with children watching TV: ** Children are exposed to more than 14,000 sexual references in a year's time. If children are watching 21 hours of TV per week, this works out to one sexual reference every 5 minutes for the 1100 hours that the average child spends glued to the tube each year. ** The Academy blamed TV for some of the violence exhibited by some children. The Academy said, "More than 1000 scientific studies and reviews conclude that significant exposure to media violence increases the risk of aggressive behavior in certain children and adolescents, desensitizes them to violence, and makes them believe that the world is a 'meaner and scarier' place than it is."[1] In a 1995 statement, the Academy pointed out that by age 18 the average American child has viewed an estimated 200,000 acts of violence on TV alone. Video games increase that number. "Although media violence is not the only cause of violence in American society, it is the single most easily remediable contributing factor," the Academy said.[2] ** An American child has viewed about 360,000 advertisements before graduating from high school, the American Academy of Pediatrics pointed out in 1995.[3] At that time the Academy said, "In 1750 B.C. the Code of Hammurabi made it a crime, punishable by death, to sell anything to a child without first obtaining a power of attor- ney. In the 1990s, selling products to American children has become a standard business practice." The Academy went on to say, "The American Academy of Pediatrics believes advertising directed toward children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under 8 years of age" because children who are developmentally younger than 8 "are unable to understand the intent of advertisements and, in fact, accept advertising claims as true."3 ** But probably the most important information that the Academy published about TV, from a public health perspective, is that watching TV causes weight gain in children. The Academy said in 1999, "Increased television use is documented to be a significant factor leading to obesity...."[1] This is important for two reasons. First, excess weight is a significant, and worsening, problem among American children.[4] Roughly 25% of U.S. children are overweight or obese. Secondly, children who are overweight turn into adults who tend to be overweight as well, and the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION said in 1999 that excessive weight gain among American adults is an "epidemic" and a major cause of disease and death.[5] How is "overweight" defined? To find out if you are overweight, you need to know (accurately) your height in inches and your weight in pounds. (Most people overestimate their height and underestimate their weight.) Now convert your weight into kilograms by multiplying pounds times 0.45, and convert your height into meters by multiplying inches times 0.0254. Now square your height (in meters) by multiplying it by itself. Now divide the resulting number into your weight in kilograms. The final result is your Body Mass Index, or BMI. Put most simply, BMI=kg/m[2]. A BMI of 19 to 24.9 is considered "normal." A BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight, and a BMI of 30 or above is considered obese, according to the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization.[6] Among U.S. adults, the prevalence (occurrence) of obesity (BMI 30 or greater) has increased rapidly in recent years, according to a study based on telephone interviews with more than 100,000 randomly-selected individuals each year, 1991-1998, who reported their own height and weight. In 1991, 12% of the population was obese; by 1998 17.9% of the population was obese.[5] And these numbers are likely to underestimate the problem because overweight people tend to underestimate their true weight and everyone tends to overestimate his or her true height. Remarkably this study showed that, from 1991 to 1998, obesity increased in every state, in both sexes, and across all age groups, all races, all educational levels, and among both smokers and non-smokers. As the authors of the study said, "Rarely do chronic conditions such as obesity spread with the speed and dispersion characteristic of a communicable disease epidemic."[5] A different study, in which peoples' height and weight were actually measured, concluded that 21% of U.S. men and 27% of U.S. women are obese. When this study considered not only obesity but also overweight (a BMI of 25 or greater), then 63% of American men and 55% of American women qualified in 1998, an increase of more than 25% in the past 3 decades.[7] As noted above, at least 25% of U.S. children are overweight or obese.[8] The BMI of 25 was not chosen arbitrarily to define "overweight." It was chosen because that is the BMI at which weight-related diseases start to increase among the population. As BMI increases above 25, so do high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, gall bladder disease, and osteoarthritis.[7] About 80% of obese individuals have at least one of these disease conditions, and 40% have 2 or more of these conditions. A study published in 1999 estimated that in 1991, excess weight killed about 280,000 Americans. That is to say, 280,000 people who died in 1991 would not have died that year if they had not been overweight.[9] Excess weight shortens people lives by about 1 to 3 years.[9] The currently-accepted medical explanation for the rapidly-increasing epidemic of obesity in the U.S. (and, indeed, in other countries) is starkly simple: we are eating more calories while at the same time burning fewer calories at work and through exercise.[10,11] However, to us the occurrence of an uncontrollable epidemic of excess weight is somewhat perplexing in a society that is preoccupied with body weight, fitness, and diet. Nearly one-half of all U.S. women and one-third of all U.S. men report that they are attempting to lose weight.[10] Health clubs and fitness centers abound. Home exercise equipment is a booming business. Walkers, joggers, in-line skaters and bicyclists are visible in every city and town. Low-calorie, low-fat "health foods" are featured in supermarkets and restaurants. Why then are Americans of all ages, races, education levels, sexes, and geographical locations, unable to control their weight? A hypothesis worth considering has to do with hormones. Clever research this past decade has identified a family of hormones that control both appetite and the way in which the body turns food into fat.[12] One such hormone is called leptin, and leptin injections have recently been shown to reduce weight in humans in a dose-dependent fashion.[13] At least as interesting as leptin is melanocyte stimulating hormone (MSH), which caused such rapid weight loss in obese mice that it "prompted a double-take from the surprised scientists" who conducted the experiments.[14] We know from recent studies of wildlife, laboratory animals, and humans that some industrial chemicals, released into the environment, can interfere with hormones.[15] It is conceivable that something in the environment -- something widely dispersed -- is interfering with the hormones that control appetite and fat metabolism. But of course these hormone-disrupters would not be acting alone. No doubt fast foods and snack foods, and the barrage of advertisements that induce us to eat them, are having an effect on many of us. And a sedentary lifestyle is taking its toll, too. Just recently a study published in the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION showed that children lost weight, and lost inches around the midriff, if they simply watched less TV.[16] In sum, excess weight is a major public health problem, and television viewing is an important -- and preventable -- contributing factor. ============== [1] "Media Education," PEDIATRICS Vol. 104, No. 2 (August 1999), pgs. 341-343. Available at www.aap.org/policy/RE9911.html. [2] "Media Violence," PEDIATRICS Vol. 95, No. 6 (June 1995), pgs. 949-951. Available at www.aap.org/policy/00830.html. And see "Children, Adolescents, and Violence," PEDIATRICS Vol. 96, No. 4 (October 1995), pgs. 786-787. Available at www.aap.org/- policy/9538.html And see, "The National Television Violence Study: Key Findings and Recommendations," YOUNG CHILDREN Vol. 51, No. 3 (March 1996), pgs. 54-55. [3] "Children, Adolescents, and Advertising," PEDIATRICS Vol. 95, No. 2 (February 1995), pgs. 295-297. Available at www.aap.org/policy/00656.html. [4] Richard P. Troiano and others, "Overweight children and adolescents: description, epidemiology, and demographics," PEDIATRICS Vol. 101, No. 3 (March, 1998), pgs. 497-504. And: Richard P. Troiano, "Overweight Prevalence and Trends for Children and Adolescents," ARCHIVES OF PEDIATRIC AND ADOLESCENT MEDICINE Vol. 149 (October 1995), pgs. 1085-1091. [5] Ali H. Mokdad and others, "The Spread of the Obesity Epidemic in the United States, 1991-1998," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION Vol. 282, No. 16 (October 27, 1999), pgs. 1519-1522. [6] "Are You Obese?" JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION Vol. 282, No. 16 (October 27, 1999), pg. 1596. Also available at www.ama-assn.org/consumer.htm. [7] Aviva Must and others, "The Disease Burden Associated With Overweight and Obesity," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION Vol. 282, No. 16 (October 27, 1999), pgs. 1523-1529. [8] James O. Hill and John C. Peters, "Environmental Contributions to the Obesity Epidemic," SCIENCE Vol. 280 (May 29, 1998), pgs. 1371-1374. [9] David B. Allison and others, "Annual Deaths Attributable to Obesity in the United States," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION," Vol. 282, No. 16 (October 27, 1999), pgs. 1530-1538. [10] Phil B. Fontanarosa, "Patients, Physicians, and Weight Control," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION Vol. 282, No. 16 (October 27, 1999), pgs. 1581-1582. [11] Jeffrey P. Koplan and William H. Dietz, "Caloric Imbalance and Public Health Policy," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION Vol. 282, No. 16 (October 27, 1999), pgs. 1579-1581. [12] Jack A. Yanovski and Susan Z. Yanovski, "Recent Advances in Basic Obesity Research," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION Vol. 282, No. 16 (October 27, 1999), pgs. 1504-1506. [13] Steven B. Heymsfield and others, "Recombinant Leptin for Weight Loss in Obese and Lean Adults," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION Vol. 282, No. 16 (October 27, 1999), pgs. 1568-1575. [14] Joan Stephenson and others, "Knockout Science: Chubby Mice Provide New Insights Into Obesity," reporting on L. Yaswen and others, "Obesity in the mouse model of pro-opiomelanocortin deficiency responds to peripheral melanocortin," NATURE MEDICINE Vol. 5, No. 9 (September, 1999) pgs. 1066-1067, which was commented upon in G. Barsh, "From Agouti to Pomc--100 years of fat blonde mice," NATURE MEDICINE Vol 5, No. 9 (September, 1999), pgs. 984-985. [15] For example, see William R. Kelce and others, "Persistent DDT metabolite p,p'-DDE is a potent androgen receptor antagonist," NATURE Vol. 375 (June 15, 1995), pgs. 581-585, and Frederick S. vom Saal and others, "Prostate enlargement in mice due to fetal exposure to low doses of estradiol and diethylstilbestrol and opposite effects at high doses," PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Vol. 94 (March 1997), pgs. 2056-2061, and Jorma Toppari and others, "Male reproductive health and Environmental Xenoestrogens," ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES Vol. 104, Supplement 4 (August 1996), pgs. 741-803. [16] Thomas N. Robinson, "Reducing Children's Television Viewing to Prevent Obesity; A Randomized Controlled Trial," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION Vol. 282, No. 6 (October 27, 1999), pgs. 1561-1567. Descriptor terms: tv; obesity; overweight; weight; diabetes; osteoarthritis; gall bladder disease; violence; children; hormones; leptin; msh; melanocyte stimulating hormone; high blood pressure; ################################################################ NOTICE In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. Environmental Research Foundation provides this electronic version of RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY free of charge even though it costs the organization considerable time and money to produce it. We would like to continue to provide this service free. You could help by making a tax-deductible contribution (anything you can afford, whether $5.00 or $500.00). Please send your tax-deductible contribution to: Environmental Research Foundation, P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403-7036. Please do not send credit card information via E-mail. For further information about making tax-deductible contributions to E.R.F. by credit card please phone us toll free at 1-888-2RACHEL, or at (410) 263-1584, or fax us at (410) 263-8944. --Peter Montague, Editor ################################################################ Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism. See for more information. Commercial Alert's web page on television is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed on the listserve . To subscribe to commercial-alert, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Jan 19 10:18:09 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8344F21B0C for ; Wed, 19 Jan 2000 10:18:09 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-8.essential.org [216.0.125.8]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA02538; Wed, 19 Jan 2000 10:18:06 -0500 Message-ID: <3885D4EB.37B269E7@essential.org> Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 10:14:51 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Coalition Asks States to Protect Children from ZapMe! Corp. Privacy Invasion Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert January 19, 2000 Responding to the ZapMe! Corp.'s invasion of children's privacy in schools, a coalition of progressive, conservative and privacy organizations and scholars today urged all 50 governors and chairs of education committees in all 50 state legislatures to protect children from ZapMe! Corp., and asked corporations to break their partnerships with ZapMe!. There is an article in today's Wall Street Journal about the coalition: "ZapMe Is Targeted Over Student Data Collected on Web." Following is the text of the letter to Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. Dear Governor Ridge: We write to alert you to a new form of electronic privacy invasion that is taking root in the schools. The ZapMe! Corp. loans to schools a package of 15 computers, along with a satellite dish and an Internet server. ZapMe! then requires students to receive an electronic ID in order to use these computers. Schools may not install software on the computers without permission; they must pay the cost of insuring the computers; and they must use the computers for an average of four hours per schoolday. ZapMe! has designed these computers to serve as the front end of a sophisticated marketing and advertising scheme. • ZapMe's corporate sponsors may collect and distribute personal information about the children, including their names, addresses and telephone numbers. • ZapMe! itself monitors the activities of the children on the Web, for commercial purposes. According to Associated Press, ZapMe! breaks the data down "by age, sex and ZIP code. It delivers this information to advertisers and marketers, who use it to target students in school with laser-like precision." • ZapMe! directs advertising at schoolchildren via the ZapMe! Internet browser. • ZapMe! requires students three times a year to bring ZapMe! corporate sponsor marketing materials home to their parents. In essence, ZapMe! plants computers in the schools as advertising delivery, market research and surveillance machines. It turns the schools and the compulsory schooling laws into a means of gaining access to a captive audience of children in order to extract market research from them and to advertise to them. Parents entrust their children to the schools -- especially public schools -- for the purpose of learning and developing character, not to serve as guinea pigs for advertising and marketing firms. We oppose ZapMe's business operations in the schools. ZapMe violates the privacy of schoolchildren, misuses the schools and compulsory schooling laws to force children to watch ads during school time, and degrades the moral authority of schools and teachers by turning them into instruments of corporate advertising and marketing. At a minimum, the Pennsylvania State Board of Education should take steps to restore parents some control over the uses of their children for commercial gain. Specifically, the Pennsylvania State Board of Education should require ZapMe!, and any company like it, to • inform parents fully regarding the activities of the company in question, and to obtain written consent from parents before gathering any personal information from their children; and, • disclose fully to parents any and all uses of personal information and other data obtained from their children, including specific corporations that purchase or use this information, and the specific ways in which they use it. The basic issue here is the power of parents to control the influences upon their own children, and their children's personal information. While children are at school, parents are entitled to know who obtains information about their children, and precisely how that information is used. They would demand to know this if ZapMe! executives came to their door at night and sought it in person. These executives should not be permitted to cloak their activities from parents nor hide behind the bureaucracies of the schools. If you have any questions about ZapMe! Corp., or want more information, please feel free to contact Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert or Jim Metrock of Obligation, Inc. Sincerely, Joan Almon, U.S. Coordinator, Alliance for Childhood Robert Bulmash, President, Private Citizen, Inc. Bettye M. Caldwell, Past President, National Association for the Education of Young Children Jason Catlett, President, Junkbusters Corp. Gregg Davis, Director, Camphill Soltane Gloria DeGaetano, co-author, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill Mark A. Finser, President, Rudolf Steiner Foundation Roy F. Fox, Assoc. Prof. of Eng. Ed. & Lit., U. of MO-Columbia; author, Harvesting Minds Beth Givens, Director, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., author, Failure to Connect Michael F. Jacobson, co-author, Marketing Madness Jean Kilbourne, author, Deadly Persuasion Velma LaPoint, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Human Development, Howard University Diane Levin, Professor of Education, Wheelock College; author, Remote Control Childhood James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology Bob McCannon, Executive Director, Mew Mexico Media Literacy Project Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc. Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University Kathryn C. Montgomery, Ph.D., President, Center for Media Education Kate Moody, Ed.D., University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum Richard E. Sclove, Founder, The Loka Institute; author, Democracy & Technology Shari Steele, Director of Legal Services, Electronic Frontier Foundation Betsy Taylor, Executive Director, Center for a New American Dream David Walsh, Ph.D. President, National Institute on Media and the Family Donald E. Wildmon, President, American Family Association <-----------letter ends here-------------> Letters were also sent to ZapMe! corporate partners and sponsors, including Amazon.com, Ask Jeeves, Inc, Dell Computer Co., General Electric Co, Gilat Satellite Networks Ltd., Microsoft Co., NEC America, Inc., School Specialty, Inc., Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc., Toshiba America Inc. Xerox Co., and Yahoo! Inc. Following is the text of the letter to Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computer. Dear Mr. Dell: We are writing to urge you to reconsider your business partnership with the ZapMe! Corp. ZapMe! represents a commercial incursion into the school which bodes ill for both children and schools. As you know, ZapMe! loans to schools a package of 15 computers, along with a satellite dish and an Internet server. ZapMe! then requires students to receive an electronic ID in order to use these computers. Schools may not install software on the computers without permission; they must pay the cost of insuring the computers; and they must use the computers for an average of four hours per schoolday. ZapMe! has designed these computers to serve as the front end of a sophisticated marketing and advertising scheme. • ZapMe's corporate sponsors may collect and distribute personal information about the children, including their names, addresses and telephone numbers. • ZapMe! itself monitors the activities of the children on the Web, for commercial purposes. According to Associated Press, ZapMe! breaks the data down "by age, sex and ZIP code. It delivers this information to advertisers and marketers, who use it to target students in school with laser-like precision." • ZapMe! directs advertising at schoolchildren via the ZapMe! Internet browser. • ZapMe! requires students three times a year to bring ZapMe! corporate sponsor marketing materials home to their parents. ZapMe's business model is beyond redemption. In essence, it plants computers in the schools as advertising delivery, market research and surveillance machines. It turns the schools and the compulsory schooling laws into a means of gaining access to a captive audience of children in order to extract market research from them and to advertise to them. We find this utterly unacceptable. ZapMe! violates the privacy of schoolchildren, misuses the schools and compulsory schooling laws to force children to watch advertising during school time, and degrades the moral authority of schools and teachers by turning them into instruments of corporate advertising and marketing. We would be grateful for your earliest response indicating whether you intend to continue your partnership with ZapMe! Please address this to Gary Ruskin at Commercial Alert, or Jim Metrock of Obligation, Inc. Sincerely, Joan Almon, U.S. Coordinator, Alliance for Childhood Robert Bulmash, President, Private Citizen, Inc. Bettye M. Caldwell, Past President, National Association for the Education of Young Children Jason Catlett, President, Junkbusters Corp. Gregg Davis, Director, Camphill Soltane Gloria DeGaetano, co-author, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill Mark A. Finser, President, Rudolf Steiner Foundation Roy F. Fox, Assoc. Prof. of Eng. Ed. & Lit., U. of MO-Columbia; author, Harvesting Minds Beth Givens, Director, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., author, Failure to Connect Michael F. Jacobson, co-author, Marketing Madness Jean Kilbourne, author, Deadly Persuasion Velma LaPoint, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Human Development, Howard University Diane Levin, Professor of Education, Wheelock College; author, Remote Control Childhood James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology Bob McCannon, Executive Director, Mew Mexico Media Literacy Project Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc. Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University Kathryn C. Montgomery, Ph.D., President, Center for Media Education Kate Moody, Ed.D., University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum Richard E. Sclove, Founder, The Loka Institute; author, Democracy & Technology Shari Steele, Director of Legal Services, Electronic Frontier Foundation Betsy Taylor, Executive Director, Center for a New American Dream David Walsh, Ph.D. President, National Institute on Media and the Family Donald E. Wildmon, President, American Family Association <--------------letter ends here--------------> WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: 1) Make sure that ZapMe! Corp. is not allowed to enter your local schools, or if it is already in the schools, then make sure the ZapMe! computers are removed. 2) Ask your governor and state legislators to enact state legislation to protect children in your state from ZapMe! privacy invasions. 3) Support the Student Privacy Protection Act (HR 2915, S 1908), to protect schoolchildren from ZapMe! and other predatory corporations that invade children's privacy in the schools. For more information about the Student Privacy Protection Act, see . Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. For more information about ZapMe! Corp, see Commercial Alert's web page on ZapMe! at . Commercial Alert's main web page is Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Tue Feb 8 14:02:22 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A08A221AFF for ; Tue, 8 Feb 2000 14:02:21 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-1.essential.org [216.0.125.1]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA18802; Tue, 8 Feb 2000 14:02:02 -0500 Message-ID: <38A06700.10D463DF@essential.org> Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 13:57:04 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Coalition Criticizes President Clinton Over Support of Company That Invades Children's Privacy in Schools Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert February 8, 2000 A coalition that opposes the presence of the ZapMe! Corp. in the public schools sent President Bill Clinton a letter today to protest the appointment of ZapMe! Corp. CEO Rick Inatome to the Board of Directors of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence. The appointment of Mr. Inatome undercuts President Clinton's strong defense of privacy rights in his January 27 State of The Union Address. The President said that "First and foremost, we have to safeguard our citizens' privacy." The letter follows. Dear President Clinton: The ZapMe! Corp. issued a news release on February 7, announcing that you have appointed ZapMe! CEO Rick Inatome to the Board of Directors of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence. ZapMe! is a corporation that seeks to turn the public schools into little shopping malls and market research factories. It puts computers in the schools and then snoops on how schoolchildren use the web in order to gather market research data so that they can more effectively sell products to these children via the company's Internet "ZapMall." So doing, the company represents an egregious violation both of the privacy of unsuspecting schoolchildren, and of the purpose of schools in our society. Schools are for learning, Mr. President, not shopping or snooping. They should not be used to corral captive audiences of impressionable schoolchildren to force them to watch advertising or to extract market research from them. Yet that is what ZapMe does, and you have given this venture the imprimatur of your office with this appointment. You are helping this company use the problem of violence in the schools in order to give legitimacy to its highly questionable business plan. According to the ZapMe! news release, Jeff Bleich, Executive Director of the National Campaign stated that "Both the President [Clinton] and I are deeply grateful to have Rick [Inatome] as a member of the Campaign's Board. Rick Inatome brings with him not only the ability to reach out to middle schools and high schools around the country with ZapMe!'s Internet media network resources but also his intelligent leadership to this effort to prevent youth violence." We regret that you have made this appointment, and urge you to retract it immediately. Sincerely, Joan Almon, U.S. Coordinator, Alliance for Childhood Jason Catlett, President, Junkbusters Corp. Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., author, Failure to Connect Michael F. Jacobson, co-author, Marketing Madness Jean Kilbourne, author, Deadly Persuasion James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc. Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum Donald E. Wildmon, President, American Family Association <----------letter ends here---------> FOR MORE INFORMATION: The Wall Street Journal's article on ZapMe! ("Is ZapMe collecting data on school kids?,"1/19/00) is available at . The New York Times web article on ZapMe! ("Criticism for Company Offering Free Computers to Schools," 2/2/00) is at . ZapMe's news release is at . Commercial Alert's web page on ZapMe! is at . Commercial Alert's main web page is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Feb 10 14:44:39 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E7CDA21AFF for ; Thu, 10 Feb 2000 14:44:38 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-2.essential.org [216.0.125.2]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA12786; Thu, 10 Feb 2000 14:44:31 -0500 Message-ID: <38A314CE.FB832282@essential.org> Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 14:43:10 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Why They Whine: How Corporations Prey on Our Children Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert February 10, 2000 This is an article from the November/December 1999 issue of Mothering Magazine. http://www.mothering.com/SpecialArticles/Issue97/whine.htm Why They Whine: How Corporations Prey on Our Children by Gary Ruskin Cheryl Idell knows a lot about nagging. She has written reports for major corporations with such titles as the "Nag Factor" and "The Art of Fine Whining." She tells her clients that nagging spurs about a third of a family's trips to a fast-food restaurant, to buy children's clothing or a video. Idell, who is chief strategic officer for Western Initiative Media Worldwide, a major market research firm, speaks with the cold precision of a physicist. "Nagging falls into two categories," she explains. "There is persistent nagging, the fall-on-the-floor kind, and there is importance nagging, where a kid can talk about it."(1) Either is a good first step. But alone they are not enough. Idell advises Chuck E. Cheese and numerous other corporations, that getting kids to whine is even better. Better yet is to give them "a specific reason to ask for the product." In other words, Idell's job is to make your life miserable. She even rates brands according to their "nag factor" – that is, their capacity to make your children badger you – and companies toil mightily to rate high on her list. Some of the most successful are McDonald's, Levi's, Discovery Zone, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Disney, and OshKosh.(2) Like we couldn't have guessed. Now meet George Broussard. He is co-founder of 3D Realms, a company that makes a video game called Duke Nukem. An ultraviolent "first-person shooter" game, Duke Nukem comes complete with strip bars, porno theaters, and tons of gore. Even with the "mature" rating, and all the violence and sexual imagery, Broussard wants to sell this game to your kids. "Duke is a mass market character that can sell 2 million games," Broussard says. "It'd be suicide to make the game unplayable by younger people."(3) Idell and Broussard are typical of something endemic in America today. Thousands of the brightest minds in the country devote their great talent, and use sophisticated psychological techniques, to influence your children to purchase products – or rather, to want products – regardless of whether or not they are good for your kids. These minds do not work to solve the nation's real problems; they work to create new problems for you. Name something that you do not want your kids to have, and the chances are people like Cheryl Idell and George Broussard are trying to entice your kids into wanting it. They're selling Doom, Quake, Basketball Diaries, Marilyn Manson, Mortal Kombat, The Matrix, Jerry Springer, Small Soldiers, gangsta rap, World Wrestling Federation toys, South Park, and so forth. The big question is: How can we teach our children and ourselves to resist this commercial onslaught? What Are Children, Anyway? There's been a shift in the predominant way our society thinks of children. Not long ago we considered children vulnerable beings to be nurtured. However, today we increasingly see kids through an economic lens. In our business culture, children are viewed as an economic resource to be exploited, just like bauxite or timber. James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M, is perhaps the foremost expert on selling to children. He is the elder statesman advocating this shift in our thinking from viewing children as trusting, impressionable humans to be protected to seeing children "as economic resources to be mined." His emotional response to this contrast isn't the same as yours. McNeal sees the money in your kids, and helps corporations get access to it: "[C]hildren are the brightest star in the consumer constellation," he writes.(4) McNeal divides the booming kiddie market into three parts. There's the "primary" market–the $24.4 billion each year that kids directly control and spend. There's the "influence" market, perhaps as high as $300 billion, the amount of parental spending that children can directly or indirectly influence. And there's the "future" market, which is the purchasing that children will do for the rest of their lives. "Virtually every consumer-goods industry, from airlines to zinnia-seed sellers, targets kids," McNeal enthuses.(5) Johann Wachs, the vice president of Saatchi and Saatchi's Kid Connection unit, agrees: "Marketers are just waking up to the enormous possibility of kids-targeted products," he says. "As kids become more powerful as consumers, they are being targeted more directly."(6) Children aren't hard to take advantage of. They tend to trust adults even when they shouldn't–sometimes especially when they shouldn't. Marketers know this, while most children don't grasp the motives behind advertising or realize that the products advertised may not be good for them. However, none of this is troubling to the new breed of advertisers and marketers. If they have any qualms, they do a good job of repressing them. Like investors in prime real estate, they see children's minds as a kind of cash cow. "[I]f you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come," explained Mike Searles, president of Kids-R-Us, a major children's clothing store.(7) Companies are saying, ‘Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger.'" Wayne Chilicki, a General Mills executive, agrees: "When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills follow the Proctor & Gamble model of ‘cradle to grave,'" he says. "We believe in getting them early and having them for life."(8) Advertisers infuse their pitches with messages that prey upon the emotional weaknesses and insecurities of children. "Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you're a loser," explained Nancy Shalek, president of the Shalek Agency. "Kids are very sensitive to that. If you tell them to buy something, they are resistant. But if you tell them that they'll be a dork if they don't, you've got their attention. You open up emotional vulnerabilities, and it's very easy to do with kids because they're the most emotionally vulnerable."(9) Moreover, some marketers try to sell by tapping into destructive and antisocial urges. According to Rick Litman, a partner at Kid 2 Kid Market Research, the goal is "to use youth rebellion to more effectively target a product and sell a product."(10) More than anything, they want your children's minds. "Kids marketing in general is becoming more sophisticated," says Julie Halpin, CEO of Gepetto Group, which specializes in marketing to kids. It is a competition for what she calls "share of mind."(11) Corporations claim this "share of mind" from every possible angle. They seek to engulf your children with ads. "Imagine a child sitting in the middle of a large circle of train tracks," one market researcher explains. "Tracks, like the tentacles of an octopus, radiate to the child from the outside circle of tracks. The child can be reached from every angle. This is how the [corporate] marketing world is connected to the child's world."(12) It is a discomforting image. And what's on these tracks? To name a few things: The World Wrestling Federation's wrestling action figures like cigar-smoking Marlena, with her large breasts and low-cut gown. Spice Girls dolls, which play to the obsession young girls have with looks and fashion. Television shows such as South Park. Violent video games like Time Crisis, which is essentially a firearms training device. McDonald's "McLotto Meals," which teach young children how to gamble. And the Marlboro Man. Marketers Go to School Marketers are resorting to extreme measures to gain access to your children. They are invading sanctums that were previously off-limits, such as schools. For example, Channel One is a marketing company that uses TV "news" shows as a come-on. Its daily broadcast shows ten minutes of "news" and two minutes of ads to captive audiences of 8 million children in 12,000 schools across the country. While promoted as "education," the real appeal is to advertisers. "The biggest selling point to advertisers," says Joel Babbit, former president of Channel One, lies in "forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials." The atmosphere of the school is an advertiser's dream, Babbit says. "[T]he advertiser gets a group of kids who cannot go to the bathroom, who cannot change the station, who cannot listen to their mother yell in the background, who cannot be playing Nintendo, who cannot have their headsets on."(13) A new company called ZapMe! has extended this strategy to computers. Like Channel One, ZapMe! offers free equipment to schools – computers and Internet browsers. In return, it advertises to kids, plus it gets a market research gold mine. The company snoops on schoolchildren as they browse the Internet, and then delivers the information to advertisers and marketers. According to Associated Press, ZapMe! "breaks down the data by age, sex, and zip code. It delivers this information to advertisers and marketers, who use it to target students in school with laser-like precision."(14) Schools used to be a refuge from exploitive commercial influences. Parents expect that they send their kids to school to learn to read, write, add, and think. There is an implicit relationship of trust between school board members, administrators, and teachers on the one hand, and families on the other. But, increasingly, school officials are violating this trust and turning the schools into cash and carry operations for the advertisers and marketers of America. They are turning their classrooms into captive audiences for ads. The Lesson in the Ads Advertising is a type of curriculum–the most persuasive in America today. It is one curriculum kids are excelling in. The ads teach kids that buying is good and will make them happy. They teach that the solution to life's problems lies not in good values, hard work, or education, but in materialism and the purchasing of more and more things. Kids are eager learners. "Advertising targeted at elementary school children," Professor McNeal says, "on programs just for them works very effectively in the sense of implanting brand names in their minds and creating desires for the products."(15) Further, it is well known that RJR Nabisco's Joe Camel ads hooked hundreds of thousands of children into a lifetime of smoking. And Anheuser-Busch created Budweiser beer ads so captivating–with cartoons of frogs, penguins, and lizards–that they were kids' favorite ads last year. This is great news for ad agencies and for the corporations they work for. Business is booming. Some win kudos from their corporate peers. The owner of McFarlane Toys, Todd McFarlane, was recently given an award by Ernst & Young for creating a best-selling line of grotesque and violent "Spawn" toys and comic books. Would McFarlane let his own daughters have these toys or comic books? "Are you kidding?" he says. "I'm still a dad after five o'clock."(16) Are Video Games Teaching Children to Kill? Parents across the country have watched the school shootings and child funerals in Jonesboro, Pearl, Springfield, Paducah, and Littleton with alarm and worry. Some wonder about a link between this violence and the advertising and consumption of violent video games, movies, television, and toys. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a violence expert and author of On Killing, says that point-and-shoot video games–like Duke Nukem, Time Crisis, and Quake–are training children to be violent. The games result in kids "who kill reflexively and show no remorse. Our children are learning to kill, and learning to like it." Our children live in a culture that's drenched in media violence. It is hard to tally all of the effects of watching 40,000 dramatized murders before you are 18 years old, as the average American child does. Surely it causes desensitization to violence, as well as increased levels of aggression and violent behavior among children. Healthcare professionals have been warning about these effects for decades. In 1976, the American Medical Association passed a resolution declaring that "TV violence threatens the health and welfare of young Americans." Since then, media violence has only grown worse. "Is it alarmist or merely sensible," Sissela Bok writes in Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment, "to ask about what happens to the souls of children nurtured, as in no past society, on images of rape, torture, bombings, and massacre that are channeled into their homes from infancy?" Likely Health Effects of Advertising Despite all of the industry's market research and focus groups, some ads work better than others. But in ultimate effect, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. "[T]he reason that commercials are particularly insidious is because there is a cumulative, a sedimentary building up," states Professor Herbert Schiller, author of Culture, Inc. "There is a growing base of these kinds of images, impressions, and ways of looking at the world... [which] will not help kids when they become teens, and adults, to grow up healthy."(17) Moreover, advertising doesn't just sell products, but a worldview in which products are the means and ends of life. The effects are usually what the advertisers expect and hope for. Name a problem that affects young people today, and chances are that it relates to something that ads are telling them to do. For example, childhood obesity levels are skyrocketing. About 25 to 30 percent of American children fall into this category. According to childhood obesity expert Dr. Rebecca Moran, severe obesity among young children has almost doubled since the 1960s. Not coincidentally, childhood diabetes is also on the rise. Dr. Robin S. Goland, co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center, told the New York Times that "With the numbers we are starting to see, this could be the beginning of an epidemic."(18) Is any of this surprising, in light of the endless barrage of ads for Whoppers, Happy Meals, Coke, Pepsi, Snickers bars, M&Ms, and other junk foods to which our children are subjected? Pediatrician Dr. Don Shifrin says that when children "see ads for junk food, they want the junk food, and then they eat the junk food." McDonald's alone spends an estimated $600 million per year on ads in the US. One presumes advertisers like McDonald's know what they are doing. Gambling is also growing among teenagers. The National Research Council estimates that more than 1 million American teenagers are pathological gamblers. "This is the first generation of kids exposed to widespread gambling advertising and gambling opportunities," says Randy Stinchfield, who surveyed close to 200,000 Minnesota teenagers about their gambling practices. "Some kids are now seeing gambling as a rite of passage."(19) Smoking is also increasing among American kids. Each day another 3,000 kids start to smoke (20); about a third of them will die of illnesses related to smoking. Almost two-thirds of 12th graders who smoke choose Marlboro, which is not accidental.(21) The Marlboro Man plays to the cravings of young people for independence. This is an enormous triumph for Philip Morris and its ad campaign. Advertising Age called the Marlboro Man the "most successful ad symbol of all time."(22) These are likely some of the effects attributable in part to saturation advertising among young people. Other effects are more subtle, but perhaps even more serious. Foremost of these is the effect on children's values and life aims–in particular, the upsurge in materialism. Since 1966 researchers at UCLA have been polling incoming freshmen across the country on a broad range of issues. Last year they found the percent who valued keeping up with political events fell to an all-time low. Meanwhile, only two out of five said developing a "meaningful philosophy of life" was a goal, and three out of four–a new record–of incoming college freshmen say that "to be very well off financially" is an essential goal. The Rev. Tony Campolo, an evangelical minister and advisor to President Clinton, said last year that it is "evil to take a generation and convince it to buy goods for fun and love. This kind of manipulation is evil."(23) Other Countries Protect Children Several European nations have taken steps to help parents protect their children against this kind of aggressive psychological manipulation. Greece bans television advertising of toys to children between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. Sweden and Norway ban all advertising directed at children under the age of 12. When Sweden takes up the EU presidency in 2001, it will try to expand these protections throughout the EU. Axel Edling, the Swedish consumer ombudsman and chief of Sweden's consumer agency, explains why: "There were indications that children up to the age of seven were not fully aware of the distinction between TV ads and ordinary programmes. Even older children were not able to understand the commercial process. It is considered that it is not a fair way of dealing with very small consumers because they are being exploited."(24) Even some European ad agencies believe that it is unethical to advertise to children on TV. Ingrid Linstrom, managing director of a large Swedish ad agency, says that the advertising ban "is a good thing." TV advertising "could end up causing a conflict with the parents," he adds. "We should let children be children. We shouldn't make them into consumers too quickly."(25) It would be refreshing to hear an American ad executive say something like that. US Children Are Left Undefended While Europeans are starting to protect children, in the US the government protects corporate advertisers instead. Twenty years ago the staff of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) concluded in a long report that because of children's vulnerabilities, TV ads aimed at them are inherently unfair. They proposed a ban on such advertising because children are "too young to understand the selling purpose" of advertising.(26) In response, Congress prohibited the agency from issuing such rules, and revoked many of the ftc's powers. Children cannot vote or make the large campaign contributions needed to win political power in Washington. They have neither powerful lobbyists nor a powerful political organization. Advertisers do, and in Washington they win. Popular Culture Going from Bad to Worse What this has produced is a culture that parents feel they have to battle harder and harder all the time. Last year USA Today asked American parents whether they thought it was more difficult to raise children to be "good people" than it was 20 years ago. Almost nine out of ten said yes. Three out of four parents thought that materialism and the negative influences from TV, movies, and music were a "serious problem" in raising children.(27) In all likelihood, things are going to get worse before they get better. Perhaps much worse. As children (and adults) grow increasingly desensitized to violence and rudeness, it takes much more to grab their attention and make them go to the movies or purchase a video game. As a result, media companies may produce products that incorporate ever-increasing violence, sex, and superficiality. Similarly, since television is on a downward spiral, as cable TV opens up more stations, many TV networks and cable channels may decide that the way to compete for viewers' attention is with more extreme, violent programming: more Jerry Springers, Howard Sterns, South Parks, wrestling, and so forth, only worse. Moreover, the advent and spread of "virtual reality" may usher in even more graphically violent video games. This may well mean that our kids will get even better training to kill each another. And the generous profits that many media, marketing, and advertising companies enjoy will likely lure still more entrepreneurs who wish to get rich off peddling new images of violence, sex, and addiction to our children. Protecting Children from Corporations So what's a parent to do? This is the hard part. There are no easy answers. I think the first step is for parents to reflect upon just how hard corporations have made it to shield our kids from what author Bill McKibben calls "a culture purposefully damaging." It's up to parents and families to defend their chilldren. But it won't be easy. For what it's worth, here's a list of things that parents can do to protect their children. For starters, shield your own children from exposure to corporate influences. Get them out of harm's way. Turn your home into a refuge, a sanctuary from the advertisers, marketers, and media companies. • Watch less television. Put your TV in the closet. That's perhaps the single best way to limit children's exposure to advertising and the dregs of popular culture. The people who make TV programs and advertising are not the kind of people to invite into your home. The less of this stuff kids watch, the better. • Listen to Surgeon General David Satcher, who says: "We have the most sedentary generation of young people in American history. Reducing the amount of television our children watch is one way to encourage more healthful activity." Satcher recommends that kids (and their parents) should "Go bicycling, play soccer, jump rope, fly a kite, dance, start a garden, wash the dog, swim laps, clean your room, do gymnastics, throw a frisbee, walk around the block, learn to rollerskate, build a fort."(28) For more information about watching less television, contact TV-Free America. • Throw away the video game machine and try to keep your kids away from arcades. Kids have much better things to play than violent video games. • Don't take your kids to movies that promote values you don't believe in. Kids need wholesome entertainment–make sure that is what they get. • That may be enough to protect your kids from much of what the advertisers and media companies beam at them. The problem is that it only helps your own kids. But all parents face the same hostile culture. So parents need to join together and protect children everywhere. Here are some actions that will help your own kids, as well as the neighbor's kids: • Kick the advertisers out of school. Your school board and your state should enact policies against commercialism in the schools, to make sure companies like Channel One and ZapMe! are not permitted to advertise to captive audiences of schoolchildren. Concerned parents, acting together, can make this happen. For more information about how to get commercial influences out of the schools, contact the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education or Commercial Alert. • Start a parents' group devoted to protecting kids. We need to build communities of people who want to create a better environment for our children. These groups can do two kinds of things. First, they can organize and advocate for children, around coffee tables and in dining rooms across the country, in support of ideas like convincing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and expose precisely how corporations market to children. And they can write letters criticizing corporations that harm children. They can also function as informal groups of families who loosely work together to provide their children (and themselves) with wholesome activities not corporate ones. These support networks are critical to giving children the safe places and spaces they need to learn and grow–without corporate influences. • Get active in politics. Ask candidates for elective office–from local school board members up to the president of the US–what they will do to protect children from advertising, marketing, and media executives. Make this an issue in all of the 2000 election campaigns. If a candidate doesn't give you an answer that you're satisfied with, then vote for someone else. Kids can't vote, so they need you to be their voice in electoral politics. And if your local elected officials aren't doing what needs to be done to protect kids, maybe it's time for you to run for office. We need to shape a new politics and culture to protect children. Children are mostly powerless to defend themselves against advertising, marketing, and media companies, and their hostility or total disregard for children's health, happiness, and well-being. There is almost nothing that parents could do together that is more important than to make America safe for childhood again. Notes 1. Judith Schoolman, "‘Nag Factor' Plays Role in What Parents Buy: Only 31 Percent of Parents Are Immune to Their Kids' Whining," Toronto Star, August 24, 1998. 2. Western Initiative Media World Wide Web site: www.wimc.com/ html/nag_1.html 3. Joseph Gelmis, "Shoot to Thrill or Shoot to Kill?: The Littleton Massacre Has Reopened the Debate about Violent Video Games. A Video Age," Newsday, May 11, 1999. 4. James U. McNeal, "Tapping the Three Kids' Markets," American Demographics, April 1998. 5. Ibid. 6. Judann Pollack, "Foods Targeting Children Aren't Just Child's Play: Shape-shifting Foods, ‘Interactive' Products Chase Young Consumers," Advertising Age, March 1, 1999. 7. Brian Bennett, "Uniforms Aid Student Performance, Academics: Not Only Do Uniforms Eliminate Status Wars, They Help Students Concentrate on Schoolwork," Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1989. 8. "Directing the Pitch: Do Smart Marketers to Children Target Kids or Their Parents?" Youth Markets Alert, July 1, 1998. 9. Ron Harris, "Children Who Dress for Excess: Today's Youngsters Have Become Fixated with Fashion. The Right Look Isn't Enough–It Also Has to Be Expensive," Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1989. 10. "Les Enfants and La Pub," made for French Television, Channel 2, recorded December 1995, aired February 1996. Quoted in Children First: A Parent's Guide to Fighting Corporate Predators (Washington, DC: Children First, 1996), 104. 11. See Note 6. 12. Comment by a market researcher at the Seventh Annual Consumer Kids Conference, Scottsdale, Arizona, May 24—25, 1995. Quoted in Children First. See Note 10, viii. 13. Joel Babbit, "Channel One Vision," paper presented at the On the Youth Market Conference, Boston, May 5—6, 1994. Quoted in Children First, 64. 14. Chris Albritton, "Free Computers Blur Line ‘Between Student and Shopper,' Critics Say," Deseret News, Associated Press, December 6, 1998. 15. Richard Tomkins, "Selling to a Captivated Market," Financial Times, April 20, 1999. 16. David Kaplan, "Caped Crusader," Newsweek, August 4, 1997. 17. Children First. See Note 10, xi. 18. Ginger Thompson, "With Obesity in Children Rising, More Get Adult Type of Diabetes," New York Times, December 14, 1998. 19. Andrew Quinn, "Teen Gambling Rising; Survey Calls It the ‘Silent Addiction,'" Chicago Tribune, August 16, 1998. 20. Kelly Light, "Youth Market Trends Indicators Summary Report," American Cancer Society, 1996. 21. News Release, "Department of Health and Human Services Study Shows Three Cigarette Brands Dominate Youth Smoking," April 14, 1999. 22. Bob Garfield, "Top 100 Advertising Campaigns: Whether Discovering Our Humanity or Playing to Our Excesses, the Best Advertising Edges into the Vernacular–and Enriches Our Lives." Advertising Age, March 29, 1999. 23. Isadore Barmash, "Teens Pressured by Advertising, Panel Finds," Reuters, December 4, 1998. 24. Harriet Green, "Children's Ads under Threat of EU Ban," Campaign, May 7, 1999. 25. Ibid. 26. Carole Shifrin, "Ban on TV Ads to Children Is Proposed," Washington Post, February 25, 1978. 27. Deirdre Donahue, "Is Innocence Evaporating in an Open-door Society?" USA Today, October 1, 1998. 28. News Release, "U.S. Surgeon General Satcher and Agriculture Under Secretary Watkins Encourage Participation in National TV Turnoff Week," April 21, 1999. FOR MORE INFORMATION Organizations Commercial Alert helps families protect their children from predatory advertising and marketing practices: 202-296-2787; www.essential.org/alert TV-Free America encourages parents and children to watch less television: 202-887-0436; www.tvfa.org Center for Science in the Public Interest opposes the harmful advertising practices of the junk food and alcohol industries: 202-332-9110; www.cspinet.org Center for Commercial-Free Public Education opposes the commercialization of schools: 510-268-1100; www.commercialfree.org Obligation, Inc. helps parents to remove Channel One from schools: 215-822-0080; www.obligation.org Books Children First: A Parent's Guide to Corporate Predators. Excellent primer on protecting your children from harmful corporate influences. Researched by Linda Coco and associates, with an introduction by Ralph Nader (1996). Available for $12.00 from Children First, PO Box 19312, Washington, DC 20036, or call 202-387-8030. Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of America's Schools by Alex Molnar. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Useful study of corporate exploitation of American schoolchildren. Marketing Madness: A Survival Guide for a Consumer Society by Michael Jacobson and Laurie Ann Mazur. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Splendid overview of invasive advertising and marketing practices. Gary Ruskin is the director of Commercial Alert. <-------------------article ends here----------------------> Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Mon Feb 14 08:25:47 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9EBB021AFF for ; Mon, 14 Feb 2000 08:25:47 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-8.essential.org [216.0.125.8]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id IAA03417 for ; Mon, 14 Feb 2000 08:25:45 -0500 Message-ID: <38A7FD2D.BD990D00@essential.org> Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 08:03:41 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Nader Asks PBS, CTW to Withdraw from "Commercial Child Molestation" Conference Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert February 14, 2000 Ralph Nader and Commercial Alert sent letters today to the presidents of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) asking their organizations to withdraw from a marketing conference on how to target preschoolers with commercial advertising. The letter to CTW President Gary Knell follows. Dear Mr. Knell: On March 13-14, 2000, the Institute for International Research is sponsoring a marketing conference in New York City called "Play-Time, Snack-Time, Tot-Time: Targeting Preschoolers and Their Parents." The purpose of this conference is to advise advertisers on how to worm their way into the psyches of young children. The sponsors are not interested in the mental or emotional development of children, but rather in making them nag their parents for products. According to conference literature, staff of the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) is scheduled to appear on workshops and panels. The purpose of this conference is contrary to the stated aims of CTW and of the public broadcasting stations on which its productions appear. It would be a betrayal of your audience of thousands of vulnerable and unsuspecting children, for CTW to participate in this conference, and we ask you not to do so. This conference is a form of commercial child molestation. Its purpose is to teach corporate marketers how to "create brand recognition and consumer loyalty" in children as young as two years of age. It seeks to manipulate innocent and impressionable toddlers for commercial gain. Among the "tot experts" scheduled to teach "toddler marketing" executives at the conference are Susan Royer, Vice President of Sesame Street Research, and Rosemarie T. Truglio, Vice President of Research Strategy, Children's Television Workshop. If the Children's Television Workshop actually believes its own "commitment to the betterment of children," it cannot possibly assist corporate advertisers in their efforts to get children to nag their parents, sow intra-family strife, or sell junk food to American children who already suffer skyrocketing levels of childhood obesity, etc. There was a time when parents respected the Children's Television Workshop because it produced Sesame Street, which taught and provided entertainment for children for more than a generation. It is increasingly clear that CTW has lost its public philosophy, that it has drifted into abetting corporations that exploit children. CTW must decide whether it will work for the "betterment of children" or promote the enrichment of corporations that prey upon children. Which will you choose? Sincerely, Ralph Nader Gary Ruskin Director <----------------letter ends here--------------> FOR MORE INFORMATION: Information about the conference "Play-Time, Snack-Time, Tot-Time: Targeting Preschoolers and Their Parents," is at . WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: Please send email to CTW President Gary Knell and PBS President John Swope asking their organizations not to participate in this marketing conference, or any other similar conference in the future. Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising, and works to protect children from commercial exploitation. Commercial Alert's web address is: . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Mar 2 09:43:12 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4ED9B21B21 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 09:43:12 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-4.essential.org [216.0.125.4]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA05677 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 09:43:09 -0500 Message-ID: <38BE7B22.19574B19@essential.org> Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 09:30:58 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Coalition Launches Campaign to Protect Schoolchildren From Channel One Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert March 2, 2000 A broad coalition of progressive and conservative organizations and scholars asked Members of Congress, governors and others to protect children from Channel One, an in-school marketing company. The coalition aims to cut off advertising revenues for Channel One and to remove it from the nation's public schools. The coalition sent letters to: * Members of the U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees, asking them to eliminate all federal funding for Channel One; * Governors, asking them to take all steps within their powers to remove Channel One from their state's public schools; * Channel One's advertisers, asking them to stop advertising on Channel One; * Members of the House Education Committee, asking them to hold hearings on Channel One; and, * Channel One's partners, asking them to sever their partnership with Channel One. Following is the letter to U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens: Dear Chairman Stevens: We ask that the Senate Committee on Appropriations stop all federal funding of the controversial in-school marketing company called Channel One. Channel One, under the guise of a news show, delivers two minutes of advertising each schoolday to a captive audience of approximately eight million children in 12,000 schools. The U.S. Government is a major advertiser on Channel One. The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Marines advertise on Channel One. Channel One is a big step in the wrong direction for children, schools and taxpayers. It is deserving of your committee's attention for the following reasons: 1. Channel One uses the compulsory attendance laws to force children to watch ads. Joel Babbit, then-president of Channel One, explained in 1994 why advertisers like Channel One: "The biggest selling point to advertisers [is] . . . we are forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials." 2. Channel One wastes precious school time. Channel One consumes the equivalent of one instructional week of school time each school year, including one full day watching ads. 3. Channel One helps advertisers bypass parents to promote products which parents may not approve of, such as exorbitantly expensive athletic sneakers and violent movies. 4. Channel One wastes tax dollars spent on schools. A 1998 study by Max Sawicky and Alex Molnar, titled "The Hidden Costs of Channel One," concluded that Channel One's cost to taxpayers in lost class time is $1.8 billion per year. 5. Channel One may harm children's health. Channel One advertises Snickers, Twix, M&M's, Pepsi and other junk food to children in classrooms. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that "Obesity is epidemic in the United States." Obesity is a major public health problem. Given skyrocketing levels of childhood obesity and diabetes, it is insanity for schools to encourage children to develop poor eating habits. 6. Channel One -- not parents or school boards -- decides its ads and program content. Channel One violates the principle of local control of education. Parents should be able to choose who may affect their children's lives, not Channel One. 7. Channel One undermines parents' efforts to teach positive values to their children. Channel One teaches a curriculum of materialism, that buying is good, and will solve your problems, and that consumption and self-gratification are the goals and ends of life. 8. Channel One corrupts the integrity of public education and diminishes the moral authority of schools and teachers. In effect, Channel One appropriates the authority of schools and teachers and transfers it to advertisers for these controversial products. Schools implicitly endorse the products that Channel One advertises. The opposition to Channel One is large and growing. For example, in June, 1999, the Southern Baptist Convention, which represents the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, passed a resolution urging community leaders to remove Channel One from the schools. We urge you to include provisions in the relevant appropriations bills prohibiting ONDCP, the Navy, Air Force, Marines and all other federal government entities from advertising on Channel One. We are grateful for your kind attention to this matter and look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience. Please direct your response to Mr. Jim Metrock of Obligation, Inc. at (205) 822-0080 or Mr. Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert at (202) 296-2787. Sincerely, Patricia Aufderheide, Professor, American University Charles W.F. Bell, Programs Director, Consumers Union Dr. Brita Butler-Wall, Assistant Professor of Education, Seattle University; author, A Parent Guide to Commercialism in Schools Coral Ridge Ministries Gloria DeGaetano, Director, GrowSmartBrains.com; co-author, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill Roy F. Fox, Assoc. Prof. of Eng. Ed. & Lit., U. of MO-Columbia; author, Harvesting Minds Thomas C. Frank, author, The Conquest of Cool George Gerbner, President and Founder, Cultural Environment Movement; Dean Emeritus, Annenberg School of Communication Todd Gitlin, Professor of Culture, Journalism and Sociology, New York University; author, The Twilight of Common Dreams Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., author, Failure to Connect Michael F. Jacobson, co-author, Marketing Madness Sut Jhally, Founder and Executive Director, The Media Education Foundation Timothy J. Kasser, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Knox College Jean Kilbourne, author, Deadly Persuasion Diane Levin, Professor of Education, Wheelock College; author, Remote Control Childhood Jane & Laurence Levine, Co-founders, Kids Can Make A Difference Bob McCannon, Executive Director, New Mexico Media Literacy Project Robert McChesney, Research Associate Professor, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy Bernard McGrane, Associate Professor of Sociology, Chapman University; author, The Un-TV and the 10 Mph Car Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc. Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University Tom Minnery, Vice President, Focus on the Family Alex Molnar, author, Giving Kids the Business Neil Postman, Chairman, Department of Culture and Communication, New York University; author, Amusing Ourselves to Death Hugh Rank, Professor Emeritus, Governors State University; author, The Pitch David Reynolds, M.D., President, Alabama Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert Juliet Schor, Senior Lecturer on Women's Studies, Harvard University; author, The Overspent American Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum Betsy Taylor, Executive Director, Center for a New American Dream Frank Vespe, Executive Director, TV-Free America David Walsh, Ph.D., President, National Institute on Media and the Family; author, Selling Out America's Children Donald E. Wildmon, President, American Family Association <---------------letter ends here-------------> During a 12-month period of 1998-99, Channel One spent over $1 million in an expensive, failed lobbying effort to prevent a congressional hearing on how Channel One harms children, schools and taxpayers. The Channel One hearing took place on May 20, 1999, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions. Testimony from that hearing is available at . WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: 1) Ask Members of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees who represent you to stop all federal funding of Channel One. To find the phone numbers, fax numbers and e-mail addresses of Members of Congress, see . Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee are: Republicans: Ted Stevens, Chairman, Alaska Thad Cochran, Mississippi Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Pete V. Domenici, New Mexico Christopher S. Bond, Missouri Slade Gorton, Washington Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Conrad Burns, Montana Richard C. Shelby, Alabama Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Robert Bennett, Utah Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Colorado Larry Craig, Idaho Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas Jon Kyl, Arizona Democrats: Robert Byrd, Ranking Member, West Virginia Daniel K. Inouye, Hawaii Ernest F. Hollings, South Carolina Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Frank R. Lautenberg, New Jersey Tom Harkin, Iowa Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland Harry Reid, Nevada Herb Kohl, Wisconsin Patty Murray, Washington Byron Dorgan, North Dakota Dianne Feinstein, California Richard Durbin, Illinois Members of the House Appropriations Committee are: Republicans: C.W. Bill Young, Florida, Chairman Ralph Regula, Ohio Jerry Lewis, California John Edward Porter, Illinois Harold Rogers, Kentucky Joe Skeen, New Mexico Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Tom DeLay, Texas Jim Kolbe, Arizona Ron Packard, California Sonny Callahan, Alabama James Walsh, New York Charles H. Taylor, North Carolina David L. Hobson, Ohio Ernest J. Istook, Jr., Oklahoma Henry Bonilla, Texas Joe Knollenberg, Michigan Ed Pastor, Arizona Dan Miller, Florida Jay Dickey, Arkansas Jack Kingston, Georgia Rodney P. Frelinghuysen, New Jersey Roger F. Wicker, Mississippi George R. Nethercutt, Jr., Washington Randy "Duke" Cunningham, California Todd Tiahrt, Kansas Zach Wamp, Tennessee Tom Latham, Iowa Anne Northup, Kentucky Robert Aderholt, Alabama Jo Ann Emerson, Missouri John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Kay Granger, Texas John E. Peterson, Pennsylvania Virgil H. Goode, Jr., Virginia Democrats: David R. Obey, Wisconsin John P. Murtha, Pennsylvania Norman D. Dicks, Washington Martin Olav Sabo, Minnesota Julian C. Dixon, California Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Alan B. Mollohan, West Virginia Marcy Kaptur, Ohio Nancy Pelosi, California Peter J. Visclosky, Indiana Nita M. Lowey, New York José E. Serrano, New York Rosa L. DeLauro, Connecticut James P. Moran, Virginia John W. Olver, Massachusetts Carrie P. Meek, Florida David E. Price, North Carolina Michael P. Forbes, New York Chet Edwards, Texas Robert E. "Bud" Cramer, Jr., Alabama Maurice D. Hinchey, New York Lucille Roybal-Allard, California Sam Farr, California Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Illinois Carolyn C. Kilpatrick, Michigan Allen Boyd, Florida 2) Ask your governor to take all steps within his or her power to remove Channel One from the schools in your state. Governors addresses and phone numbers are available at: . 3) Send copies of the Channel One coalition letters to members of your local school board (letters are at ) Ask them to remove Channel One from your local schools immediately. For help in removing Channel One from your local schools, call Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert at (202) 296-2787 or Jim Metrock of Obligation, Inc. at (205) 612-3376. FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CHANNEL ONE: See Commercial Alert's web page on Channel One . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Tue Mar 7 10:42:10 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4FA7D21AFF for ; Tue, 7 Mar 2000 10:42:10 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-3.essential.org [216.0.125.3]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA04436; Tue, 7 Mar 2000 10:42:08 -0500 Message-ID: <38C522C3.6C67DAD3@essential.org> Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 10:39:47 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Pediatricians against advertising in schools Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert March 7, 2000 Following is a news release from the Alabama Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. PRESS RELEASE Pediatricians against advertising in schools The Alabama Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics opposes contractually obligating children to observe advertising during publicly funded school time. A recently passed resolution states that equipment, supplies and other materials should not be accepted for exchange of student classroom time. The pediatricians oppose a tax funded state organization obligating children to watch commercials for several reasons. The Alabama Chapter will present this resolution to pediatricians in other states and will work with them to have this resolution adopted nationally by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Meanwhile, a copy of the resolution has been sent to Governor Siegelman and State Superintendent of Education, Ed Richardson. The resolution follows: Whereas, commercial advertisements have no educational value, and Whereas, commercial advertisements shown during classrooms imply school system endorsement, and Whereas, contractually obligating children to observe commercials exploits children's time, and Whereas, presenting advertisements during publicly funded classroom time period produces contradictory and conflicting goals, Be it resolved, the Alabama Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics ethically opposes contractually obligating Alabama school children to observe commercials during classroom time in exchange for or loan of equipment, supplies or other materials. For more information contact: David Reynolds, MD, FAAP, President, Alabama Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics 205-979-2999 Carden Johnston, MD, FAAP, Chairperson, Task Force on Commercialism in Schools, Alabama Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics 205-934-2116 Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc. 205-822-0080 Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert 202-296-2787 <--------------release ends here------------> Channel One, ZapMe! Corp. and other companies use the compulsory education laws to force children to watch commercial advertising in school. For more information about these companies, and how they harm children, see Commercial Alert's web site at . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children, and the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Mar 16 10:05:44 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D651B21B07 for ; Thu, 16 Mar 2000 10:05:43 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-3.essential.org [216.0.125.3]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA32742; Thu, 16 Mar 2000 10:05:40 -0500 Message-ID: <38D0F7A6.B80DF428@essential.org> Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 10:03:02 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: [Fwd: [FAIR-L] ACTION ALERT: The Commercialization of Children's Public TV] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert March 16, 2000 Following is an action alert from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting . > > FAIR-L > Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting > Media analysis, critiques and news reports > > ACTION ALERT: > The Commercialization of Children's Public Television > > March 15, 2000 > > At the end of Sesame Street, the show traditionally announces that that the > episode has been brought to you by, say, "the letter Z and the number 2"--a > daily reminder of the show's commitment to non-commercial educational > programming. But these days, the tradition has been co-opted for profit: > Today after the show, you might hear an announcement that "Pfizer brings > parents the letter Z--as in Zithromax." > > Zithromax is an antibiotic promoted by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for > treating ear infections and other ailments. "More information about > Zithromax is just a click away," the spot promises, accompanied by images of > a zebra and children playing with a giant toy block. > > As illustrated by the Pfizer spot, the 15-second announcements that bracket > PBS kids' shows are growing increasingly commercial. These "enhanced > underwriter acknowledgments"-- PBS's euphemism for commercials-- are public > broadcasters' solution to funding problems in the wake of reduced government > support. But are they legal? Many underwriter advertisements may be in > violation of communications law, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) > regulations, and even PBS's own guidelines. > > The Communications Act of 1934 flatly forbids non-commercial broadcasters > from airing any kind of advertisements, defined as messages that "promote > any service, facility or product" for profit. But the FCC, charged with > enforcing this law, has found a loophole in this straightforward ban > (Extra!, 9-10/93), giving an OK to donor acknowledgements that include > location information, logos or slogans "which identify and do not promote." > The FCC allows "value neutral descriptions of a product line or service," > but emphasizes that "such announcements may not include qualitative or > comparative language." > > While the idea that a for-profit company can "identify" its product without > "promoting" it is dubious in itself, PBS's guidelines for underwriters > (found on the PBS website) water down these weakened rules even further, > turning prohibitions into suggestions: "If an announcement involves brands > or products especially appealing to young viewers, the message should avoid > depicting the products or using mascots and other elements that encourage > children to ask for the products. Ideally, announcements should contain a > value-neutral identification and a message of support for PBS, public > television, or education." > > Unfortunately, PBS chooses to air commercials that fall far short of this > "ideal." The Zithromax ad's exotic animal and outsized toy, meant to evoke > the product's logo, also serve to make a prescription-only drug appealing to > preschool viewers. > > The Pfizer ad is followed by one for Looksmart.com, a family-oriented > Internet portal, informing viewers that "we help families discover the > fascinating possibilities of the Internet." "Fascinating possibilities" is > "value-neutral" language? > > Similarly, another Sesame Street underwriter credit featuring the shopping > website Toysmart.com calls on parents to "Click on your child's potential," > touting the benefits of the product while actively urging parents to use it. > > The widespread use of company slogans on public television inevitably > crosses into commercial territory, in violation of both FCC rules and > communications law. A spot for Arthur sponsor Juicy Juice identifies the > product with the tag "100% juice for 100% kids." An ad for Healthtex > (Zoboomafoo) markets its "playclothes for life's little lessons." Since > phrases like "for 100% kids" and "life's little lessons" have no objective > meaning, they are not value-neutral descriptions of products, but > promotional slogans. > > Some of the more insidious commercials on PBS masquerade as announcements in > support of educational values, portraying corporate underwriters in a > positive light as advocates of children's welfare--what's known as "image > advertising." This practice is illustrated by spots for Wishbone > underwriters, who incorporate their well-known slogans into messages of > support for education. > > In one ad, "Chuck E. Cheese proudly supports PBS kids' television, where a > kid can be a kid." Coupled with the pizza chain's unmistakable jingle, the > effect is deliberately ambiguous: Is it PBS where a kid can be a kid, or > Chuck E. Cheese? > > In another Wishbone announcement, we hear from "Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, > reminding you that thinking and creating are more than good, they're great!" > The familiar catchphrase calls to mind Frosted Flakes' cartoon mascot Tony > the Tiger--linking the sugary cereal to educational and creative play. > > Some underwriters go even further, blatantly featuring their products as > encouraging kids to learn. In a commercial for another Arthur sponsor, a > child's excited voice tells us about "Post Alpha-Bits Cereal: 26 little > letters that make up a million words, that tell billions of stories--and it > all starts with ABC." It's hard to miss the implication that Alpha-Bits must > be a great way to get kids excited about reading. > > This pseudo-educational theme can be seen on New York's Channel 13 (WNET), > when an animated Ronald McDonald opens a book--and out flies a red Happy > Meal box with familiar golden arches, transforming the bare surroundings > into an animated wonderland. A voiceover tells viewers that McDonald's is > "happy" to support children's television. This commercial blatantly uses > the cartoon Ronald McDonald to create an animated visual link between > McDonald's Happy Meals and fun. > > Good thing PBS's guideline against underwriters using products and mascots > to appeal to children is only a suggestion. > > ACTION: PBS's website maintains that its children's programs "are > commercial-free and do not seek to sell anything to young viewers except the > fun and excitement of learning." The network is failing to live up to this > claim. Urge PBS to take a stand against marketing to children, and ask the > FCC to enforce--and strengthen--its rulings against the commercialization of > public television. > > Contact: > PBS Headquarters: > mailto:viewer@pbs.org > > FCC: > Chairman William Kennard > mailto:bkennard@fcc.gov > > As always, please remember that letters are taken more seriously if they > maintain a calm, professional tone. Please cc-copies of your correspondence > to fair@fair.org. > > ---------- > > You can subscribe to FAIR-L at our web site: > http://www.fair.org/emaillist.html > Or, you can send a "subscribe FAIR-L enter your full name" > command to LISTSERV@AMERICAN.EDU. <------END OF FAIR'S ACTION ALERT------> FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF CHILDREN'S PROGRAMMING ON PBS: See Commercial Alert's web page on Sesame Street, Children's Television Workshop and the Public Broadcasting System: . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Mar 22 09:56:01 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8763E21B07 for ; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 09:56:01 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-3.essential.org [216.0.125.3]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA26758; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 09:55:52 -0500 Message-ID: <38D8DE4E.BD3972A8@essential.org> Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 09:53:02 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: PBS Should Protect Children by Taking Teletubbies Off the Air Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert March 22, 2000 A coalition of child advocates today asked Public Broadcasting System (PBS) President Pat Mitchell to stop broadcasting the Teletubbies, a television program marketed to children as young as twelve months, because young children should play instead of watching television, and fast food companies use the Teletubbies to market junk food. The letter to PBS President Pat Mitchell follows. Dear Ms. Mitchell: Last year, the Burger King Corp. executed a licensing agreement with the itsy bitsy Entertainment Co. to promote Teletubbies, a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television series for toddlers. According to news accounts, the McDonald's Corp. will soon conduct a similar promotion. McDonalds and Burger King produce food laden with excess calories, fat and sodium, such as hamburgers, french fries and soda pop. When PBS allows Teletubbies -- one of its "Ready to Learn" programs for preschoolers -- to partner with these companies, it is helping to market junk food to very young children. According to Burger King, this partnership was a magnificent success. "Teletubbies was a great promo partner," says Cindy Syracuse, Burger King's manager for youth and family marketing. That is good news for Burger King. It is not good news for the toddlers who are manipulated into eating unhealthy food. Childhood obesity has become a major problem in the United States. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that the "United States has experienced alarming increases in obesity among children and adolescents." A report from the American Academy of Pediatrics notes that "[I]ncreased television use is documented to be a significant factor leading to obesity." The AAP report also states that increased TV viewing may lead to decreased achievement in school. It observes that "[T]ime spent with media often displaces involvement in creative, active, or social pursuits." By marketing Teletubbies as educational for children as young as one, PBS is leading parents to believe, mistakenly, that watching TV is good for babies. In fact, the AAP recommends that children under two should not watch TV at all. According to the AAP, "Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years....research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers (eg, child care providers) for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills. Therefore, exposing such young children to television programs should be discouraged." Many parents trust PBS to provide high-quality educational programing. But Teletubbies was created for our youngest children, for whom watching TV provides no known benefits and may cause harm. PBS is abusing parents' trust by encouraging children under two to become viewers. This is a bonanza for TV advertisers. "If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come," explained Mike Searles, then-president of Kids-R-Us, a major children's clothing store. "Companies are saying, ‘Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger.'" It is troubling in the extreme that PBS would assist advertisers in this exploitation. Teletubbies appears to be a lucrative investment for PBS. But the cost -- to children and to PBS -- is too high. By continuing to broadcast Teletubbies in light of its partnership with the fast food industry and the AAP's recommendation to keep young children away from TV, PBS is compromising its educational mission, and violating the public trust. If PBS cares about the health and well-being of American children, it should take Teletubbies off the air immediately. We urge you to do so. Sincerely, William R. Beardslee, MD, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, Children's Hospital Gardner Monks Professor of Child Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School Thomas J. Cottle, PhD, Professor of Education, Boston University Leon Eisenberg, MD, Presley Professor of Social Medicine Emeritus, Harvard Medical School Roy Fox, Associate Professor of English Education & Literature, U. of Missouri-Columbia; author, Harvesting Minds George Gerbner, President and Founder, Cultural Environment Movement; Dean Emeritus, Annenberg School of Communication Michael F. Jacobson, co-author, Marketing Madness Allen Kanner, PhD, Associate Faculty, Wright Institute Jean Kilbourne, author, Deadly Persuasion Diane Levin, PhD, Professor of Education, Wheelock College; author, Remote Control Childhood Jane Levine, Co-founder, Kids Can Make A Difference Susan Linn, EdD, Associate Director, Media Center of the Judge Baker Children's Center Robert McChesney, Research Associate Professor, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc. Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University Alvin Poussaint, MD, Director, Media Center of the Judge Baker Children's Center Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert Juliet Schor, Senior Lecturer on Women's Studies, Harvard University; author, The Overspent American Frank Vespe, Executive Director, TV-Free America <----------letter ends here----------> BACKGROUND: For more information about the Teletubbies, see Commercial Alert's web page on the Teletubbies at . WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: Urge PBS President Pat Mitchell to take the Teletubbies off the air. Mitchell's phone is (703) 739-5015, fax is (703) 739-7500 and email is . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Tue Mar 28 10:35:12 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0FC4A21B06 for ; Tue, 28 Mar 2000 10:35:12 -0500 (EST) Received: from essential.org (ppp-4.essential.org [216.0.125.4]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA29874; Tue, 28 Mar 2000 10:35:07 -0500 Message-ID: <38E0D071.39D1A3E7@essential.org> Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 10:32:01 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org, Mark Oesterle Subject: Post-Dispatch on Channel One Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert March 28, 2000 Following is an editorial from the March 25 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It is distributed as a fair use. CAPTIVE CLASSROOMS CHANNEL ONE FOR cash-strapped classrooms and struggling teachers, the deal that Channel One struck with 400 public and private schools in 1990 looked win-win. The company pledged to put wiring, satellite dishes, videocassette recorders and television sets into each classroom. In return, the schools agreed to air a 12-minute broadcast every day that featured 10 minutes of teen-tailored "news" and two minutes of advertising. Channel One advertisers enjoyed exclusive access to a captive audience that has grown to more than 8 million students nationwide. And schools enjoyed valuable equipment for free. Well, almost free. From the beginning, critics have warned that this deal has a hidden expense. A growing tide of critics from all ends of the political spectrum say the costs of Channel One -- to our children, our schools and our culture -- are too high. Last year, Phyllis Schlafly joined Ralph Nader to denounce Channel One at a Senate hearing. This month, a coalition of liberals and conservatives launched a letter campaign to urge governors and Congress to push Channel One out of public schools. The most obvious argument against Channel One is lost instruction time. Twelve minutes of viewing time each day may not sound like much, but an hour a week and three dozen hours a year is a high price to pay for a few new television sets. Based on Missouri's average instructional cost, that adds up to more than $ 2,000 worth of lost time -- more when local taxes are figured in -- for a class of 30. Missouri says schools are supposed to add to the school day if they broadcast Channel One during class, but state officials do not monitor them to make sure that happens. More troubling than the practical pitfalls of Channel One -- and similar corporate forays into public education, from cola deals to corporate sponsorships -- are the philosophical problems. Unlike the textbooks and teachers that educators, parents and politicians scrutinize so closely, these broadcasts come into about 12,000 schools unfiltered and unexamined. Channel One force feeds middle and high school students nearly six hours of advertisements each school year. The station's commercials -- for everything from cosmetics to colas -- take aim squarely at teen-agers, selling them on the promise that popularity and perpetual happiness lie only one purchase away. Channel One is not the only vehicle for rampant consumerism and shallow values targeted at teen-agers. But school isn't the place for consumerism. Some critics have successfully purged their schools of Channel One. New York state, for instance, has banned the broadcasts from public schools. But the company boasts a 99 percent renewal rate on its contracts with schools, and many parents do not even know how their children are spending their class time. Do we really want to reinforce the materialistic and superficial messages that already inundate our youth? Do we really want to tempt teachers to substitute a generic, commercial-laden broadcast for a lively classroom discussion about current affairs? Do we really want to sell access to our classrooms -- and our children -- to the highest bidder? It's time for educators, legislators and parents to recognize that the short-term benefits of a few television sets and videocassette recorders cannot justify the long-term costs of Channel One. <-------------editorial ends here------------> FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT HOW TO GET CHANNEL ONE OUT OF THE SCHOOLS: See Commercial Alert's web page on Channel One . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Mon Apr 3 19:38:32 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4EE4121AFF for ; Mon, 3 Apr 2000 19:38:32 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-2.essential.org [216.0.125.2]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id TAA15505 for ; Mon, 3 Apr 2000 19:38:30 -0400 Message-ID: <38E92BC5.EB63ABCB@essential.org> Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2000 19:39:49 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Support the Student Privacy Protection Act Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert April 3, 2000 -- Please support the Student Privacy Protection Act to protect schoolchildren from corporate marketers that use the schools to extract children's personal information without parental consent. The ZapMe! Corp plants computers in the schools as advertising delivery and market research devices. Through these school-based computers, ZapMe's corporate sponsors may collect and distribute schoolchildren's personal information -- including their names, addresses and telephone numbers -- without parental consent. This is a gross violation of the trust of parents who send their children to school each day. ZapMe! itself monitors the activities of the children on the Web, for commercial purposes. According to Associated Press, ZapMe! breaks the data down "by age, sex and ZIP code. It delivers this information to advertisers and marketers, who use it to target students in school with laser-like precision." On April 5, The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is expected to vote on Student Privacy Protection Act (HR 2915), which would require schools to obtain a parent's consent before any corporation could gather market research from their child in the public schools. The Student Privacy Protection Act will be offered as an amendment to the Education Options Act (HR 4141). Please tell the Members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to support the Student Privacy Protection Act. The Congressional switchboard phone is (202) 224-3121. To find the fax numbers and e-mail addresses of Members of Congress, see . The Membership of the House Education Committee is available at . Following is a Dear Colleague letter from Rep. George Miller, the sponsor of the Student Privacy Protection Act. March 21, 2000 Dear Colleague: I am writing to provide background and summary information on my bill, the Student Privacy Protection Act (HR 2915). I plan to offer a modified version of this legislation when the Committee takes up the remainder of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Increasingly, classrooms are being used by market researchers to try and get kids to reveal valuable information about themselves. This information is used to target students with laser like precision and may be sold or transferred to other companies. Many of these commercial activities during the school day are disruptive and compromise student privacy as well as the parent-child relationship. For example: Students in a Massachusetts elementary school spent parts of two days tasting cereal and answering an opinion poll. Kids in a New Jersey elementary school filled out a 27 page booklet called "My All About Me Journal" as part of a marketing survey for a cable televison channel. The ZapMe! Corporation provides schools with free computers but then monitors students' web browsing habits. While the costs and benefits of these arrangements can argued, parents should know when their children are being used for this purpose and have a right to say no. My bill gives parents that right. The Student Privacy Protection Act would require that parents give their informed consent before schools allow companies into classrooms to collect information on their children. This will allow parents to retain more control over how the school day is spent and to make a more informed decision as to whether they want their children to reveal personal information that private companies otherwise might not be able to obtain. The amendment I plan to offer will apply to information that is collected in school for commercial purposes. College recruiting and educational testing are specifically exempted. Polls consistently demonstrate that the public is worried about invasions of their privacy, with over three quarters of adults supporting restrictions on the release of information for marketing purposes, according to a ABC poll conducted in January. Some people have argued that the bill unfairly targets information collected by for-profit companies. That is incorrect. In fact, current federal law requires academic researchers to obtain parental consent before they collect information from children, whether or not the information collected is personally identifiable. My bill essentially puts research done for commercial purposes on par with that done for academic purposes. In addition, beware of companies that say they don't collect personally identifiable information. For example, the ZapMe! corporation told Education Daily, "We do not take any individual data. We absolutely will not let anybody track an individual child." However, ZapMe's SEC filings state that, "we may in the future collect names and other personal information." I look forward to working with you to protect children's privacy and the parent-child relationship. If you have comments or concerns, please contact me or my legislative assistant David Madland at 5-2095. Sincerely, GEORGE MILLER Member of Congress, 7th District <--------dear colleague letter ends here-------> BACKGROUND: For more information about the ZapMe! Corp. or the broad coalition or progressive, conservative and privacy organizations that opposes ZapMe's presence in schools, see . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Tue Apr 4 09:38:28 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9AAE421B02 for ; Tue, 4 Apr 2000 09:38:28 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-5.essential.org [216.0.125.5]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA27424 for ; Tue, 4 Apr 2000 09:38:26 -0400 Message-ID: <38E9F081.67F731D6@essential.org> Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2000 09:39:13 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: How to support the Student Privacy Protection Act Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit If you only have time to send one email in support of the Student Privacy Protection Act, please send it to Kevin Talley, Chief of Staff of the House Education Committee. His email address is . Thanks. Commercial Alert April 3, 2000 -- Please support the Student Privacy Protection Act to protect schoolchildren from corporate marketers that use the schools to extract children's personal information without parental consent. The ZapMe! Corp plants computers in the schools as advertising delivery and market research devices. Through these school-based computers, ZapMe's corporate sponsors may collect and distribute schoolchildren's personal information -- including their names, addresses and telephone numbers -- without parental consent. This is a gross violation of the trust of parents who send their children to school each day. ZapMe! itself monitors the activities of the children on the Web, for commercial purposes. According to Associated Press, ZapMe! breaks the data down "by age, sex and ZIP code. It delivers this information to advertisers and marketers, who use it to target students in school with laser-like precision." On April 5, The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is expected to vote on Student Privacy Protection Act (HR 2915), which would require schools to obtain a parent's consent before any corporation could gather market research from their child in the public schools. The Student Privacy Protection Act will be offered as an amendment to the Education Options Act (HR 4141). Please tell the Members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to support the Student Privacy Protection Act. The Congressional switchboard phone is (202) 224-3121. To find the fax numbers and e-mail addresses of Members of Congress, see . The Membership of the House Education Committee is available at . Following is a Dear Colleague letter from Rep. George Miller, the sponsor of the Student Privacy Protection Act. March 21, 2000 Dear Colleague: I am writing to provide background and summary information on my bill, the Student Privacy Protection Act (HR 2915). I plan to offer a modified version of this legislation when the Committee takes up the remainder of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Increasingly, classrooms are being used by market researchers to try and get kids to reveal valuable information about themselves. This information is used to target students with laser like precision and may be sold or transferred to other companies. Many of these commercial activities during the school day are disruptive and compromise student privacy as well as the parent-child relationship. For example: Students in a Massachusetts elementary school spent parts of two days tasting cereal and answering an opinion poll. Kids in a New Jersey elementary school filled out a 27 page booklet called "My All About Me Journal" as part of a marketing survey for a cable televison channel. The ZapMe! Corporation provides schools with free computers but then monitors students' web browsing habits. While the costs and benefits of these arrangements can argued, parents should know when their children are being used for this purpose and have a right to say no. My bill gives parents that right. The Student Privacy Protection Act would require that parents give their informed consent before schools allow companies into classrooms to collect information on their children. This will allow parents to retain more control over how the school day is spent and to make a more informed decision as to whether they want their children to reveal personal information that private companies otherwise might not be able to obtain. The amendment I plan to offer will apply to information that is collected in school for commercial purposes. College recruiting and educational testing are specifically exempted. Polls consistently demonstrate that the public is worried about invasions of their privacy, with over three quarters of adults supporting restrictions on the release of information for marketing purposes, according to a ABC poll conducted in January. Some people have argued that the bill unfairly targets information collected by for-profit companies. That is incorrect. In fact, current federal law requires academic researchers to obtain parental consent before they collect information from children, whether or not the information collected is personally identifiable. My bill essentially puts research done for commercial purposes on par with that done for academic purposes. In addition, beware of companies that say they don't collect personally identifiable information. For example, the ZapMe! corporation told Education Daily, "We do not take any individual data. We absolutely will not let anybody track an individual child." However, ZapMe's SEC filings state that, "we may in the future collect names and other personal information." I look forward to working with you to protect children's privacy and the parent-child relationship. If you have comments or concerns, please contact me or my legislative assistant David Madland at 5-2095. Sincerely, GEORGE MILLER Member of Congress, 7th District <--------dear colleague letter ends here-------> BACKGROUND: For more information about the ZapMe! Corp. or the broad coalition or progressive, conservative and privacy organizations that opposes ZapMe's presence in schools, see . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Apr 6 17:44:44 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 29A2821B09 for ; Thu, 6 Apr 2000 17:44:44 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-8.essential.org [216.0.125.8]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id RAA29585; Thu, 6 Apr 2000 17:44:17 -0400 Message-ID: <38ED056F.374B5D2@essential.org> Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2000 17:45:19 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Senate vote tomorrow on privacy of schoolchildren, commercialism in public schools Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert April 6, 2000 -- Support U.S. Senate measure regarding corporations that violate the privacy of schoolchildren and commercialize the public schools. The U. S. Senate is expected to vote tomorrow (Friday) on an amendment to the Senate budget resolution, introduced by Senator Richard Shelby, that opposes privacy invasion of schoolchildren and in-school marketing. The Shelby amendment urges educators to "protect the privacy of school-aged children in our nation's classrooms" against the privacy invasion of corporations like the ZapMe! Corp, and states that federal funds should not be used "to purchase advertisements from entities that market to school children or violate student privacy during the school day" such as Channel One or ZapMe. The federal government is currently a major advertiser on Channel One. Please contact your Senators as soon as you can in support of Sen. Shelby's amendment (S. Amdt. #2927). The Congressional switchboard phone is (202) 224-3121. To find the fax numbers and e-mail addresses of Members of Congress, see . Following is the (amended) text of Senator Shelby's resolution: SHELBY AMENDMENT NO. 2927 (Senate - April 05, 2000) (Ordered to lie on the table.) Mr. SHELBY submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to the concurrent resolution, S. Con. Res. 101, supra; as follows: At the end of title III, insert the following: SEC. XX. SENSE OF THE SENATE. (a) Findings: The Senate makes the following findings: (1) Our Nation's children have become the ever increasing targets of marketing activity. (2) Such marketing activity, which includes Internet sales pitches, commercials broadcast via in-classroom television programming, product placements, contests, and giveaways, is taking place every day during class time in our Nation's public schools. (3) Many State and local entities enter into arrangements allowing marketing activity in schools in an effort to make up budgetary shortfalls or to gain access to expensive technology or equipment. (4) These marketing efforts take advantage of the time and captive audiences provided by taxpayer-funded schools. (5) These marketing efforts involve activities that compromise the privacy of our Nation's children. (b) Sense of the Senate: It is the sense of the Senate that the levels in this resolution assume that-- (1) in-school marketing and information-gathering activities-- (A) are a waste of student class time and taxpayer money; (B) exploit captive student audiences for commercial gain; and (C) compromise the privacy rights of our Nation's school children and are a violation of the public trust Americans place in the public education system; (2) State and local educators should remove commercial distractions from our Nation's public schools and should protect the privacy of school-aged children in our Nation's classrooms; (3) Federal funds should not be used in any way to support the commercialization of our Nation's classrooms or the exploitation of student privacy, nor to purchase advertisements from entities that market to school children or violate student privacy during the school day; and (4) Federal funds should be made available to State and local entities in order to provide the entities with the financial flexibility to avoid the necessity of having to enter into relationships with third parties that involve violations of student privacy or the introduction of commercialization into our Nation's classrooms. <-------amendment text ends here-------> For more information about privacy invasion of schoolchildren, in-school marketing and commercialization of the schools, see Commercial Alert's website at . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Mon Apr 10 12:25:48 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1F15E21B02 for ; Mon, 10 Apr 2000 12:25:48 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-4.essential.org [216.0.125.4]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA32304 for ; Mon, 10 Apr 2000 12:25:45 -0400 Message-ID: <38F200DE.287C1075@essential.org> Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 12:27:10 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Online profiling gets mixed marks in the classroom Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert April 10, 2000 Following is a good article on the ZapMe! Corp. from the April 17 issue of U.S. News & World Report. . Online profiling gets mixed marks in the classroom By Dana Hawkins Adolescent energy fills the air in the Margaret Buerkle Middle School library. Research projects on slavery are due tomorrow -- the last day before spring break for the students in suburban St. Louis. After a briefing by their social studies teacher, the seventh graders dart across the room to claim one of 15 fully loaded computers with jumbo monitors and high-speed Internet access. "This is a miracle," says Donna Unterreiner, the school's librarian. The divinely outfitted technology lab was funded not by taxpayers but by ZapMe! Corp. of San Ramon, Calif. "ZapMe! is cool," says 12-year-old Amy Steward, who is finishing her project: a board game with stops on the Underground Railroad. "I use it mostly for Internet searches." Last spring, after voters in the middle-class Mehlville school district nixed the third school bond issue in as many years, administrators turned to the broadband Internet media network specializing in education. School district officials say they understood the shiny new technology, which they value at over $172,000, would come at a price: Flashy, MTV-esque commercials and public-service announcements run continuously in a corner of each computer screen. But administrators eagerly endorsed the tradeoff and signed deal to set up computer labs in the district's five secondary schools. What school officials say they did not realize Zap Me! could do is track students' Web-surfing and tie that to such information as names, addresses, and perhaps even their parents' credit card numbers. "ZapMe! only mentioned the ads. I wasn't aware they could gather personal data," says Yvonne Morris, the district's instructional technology director. Where the kids are. Increasingly, cash-strapped schools are penning agreements with companies that may collect data from students. ZapMe! computers are installed in 1,784 schools in 45 states, according to corporate officials, who expect the program to be operating in 4,000 schools by year's end. Why are marketers targeting schools? "Because that's where the kids are," says James McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, who says children spent $28 billion of their own money last year. While ZapMe! is leading this effort, other companies are also trading on technology in schools. The pioneer is Channel One Network, which over the past decade has equipped schools with televisions and cable access to carry its commercial-filled news programs. Channel One is said to be piloting an ad-driven Internet-access program for schools. Technology coordinators like Morris say they're bombarded by come-ons from companies offering computers, E-mail accounts, and database and Web-page maintenance. Yet few of these companies take pains to keep sensitive information out of the wrong hands. ZapMe!, for instance, reports in its financial filings that it tracks users by age, gender, and ZIP code. Its contract, however, goes a step further: "We understand that during the assignment of E-mail addresses, user participation in contests, promotions, or programs on the network, it may be necessary for students to give out personal information to ZapMe! or one of the network's sponsors." Rick Inatome, CEO since October, insists: "I can guarantee that we never tracked individual surfing habits. We had the contractual right to do it, but we never did." Inatome says the original corporate vision was to sell products in schools through the "ZapMall"; reward schools and students for online use with "ZapPoints," which could be traded in for CDs and other items; and share students' surfing and buying habits with sponsors. "But I've changed all that," says Inatome. "I've redefined the mission from Internet marketing to education." Inatome says these changes will be reflected in new school contracts this fall. Surfing for dollars. Yet ZapMe! has not altered its current contracts to reflect this new focus. And there are no significant changes in company philosophy in its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "It doesn't look like they've changed their business model," says Chris Nerney, an analyst who follows ZapMe! for the Internet Stock Report. "The bottom line is that ZapMe! is still making most of its money through sponsorship fees." Like any Internet service provider, ZapMe! has the capability to monitor data that pass through its network. What's different is how it treats the information. "ZapMe! does intend to monitor the network and compile statistics and demographics with regard to the habits, viewing preferences, and other nonpersonal information about the network's users," reads its contract. "It's worrisome when an ISP says it's going to monitor Web-surfing activity, particularly if its customers are kids," says Richard Smith, a Boston computer consultant who helped expose how DoubleClick linked Web-surfing activity to personal user data. The online ad firm later dropped the plan. "After the DoubleClick controversy, I'm surprised ZapMe! planned on profiling students to show them personalized ads." Cresencio Torres says he knows firsthand what can happen when schools trade student data for technology. Last fall, an independent contractor working as a salesman for BrainstormUSA asked teachers at San Bernardino's Kendall Elementary School to send contest entry forms home with students. In exchange, the company promised educational CD-ROMs to the school. Teachers, in turn, promised licorice to students who, like Torres's two sons, returned forms the following day. Torres says that the BrainstormUSA salesman's pitch included high-pressure tactics. "He said if I didn't buy my kids a computer, they'd never amount to anything," recalls Torres. "That Hispanics would rather spend their money on barbecue and beer than to help their children." Torres, who says he thought the salesman was sent by the school, signed a contract agreeing to pay $2,721 for a computer and CD-ROMs–at a 21 percent annual interest rate. BrainstormUSA responds: "It's true we generate leads through schools," says Joe Galluccio, the company's president. "But we don't hard-sell, and we terminate anyone who violates our policy." Parental consent. Opposition to data digging at schools is creating strange bedfellows. Commercial Alert, a Ralph Nader-backed public-interest group, calls ZapMe! a "Trojan horse" for record collection. Some conservative organizations, including Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, agree. New regulations provide protections for children (box), but these groups want more. They say parents need to act on behalf of children who may not yet understand the value of privacy, and they have endorsed legislation that would require parental consent for students under 18 to give information to marketers. However, some groups, such as the National School Boards Association, want to continue what they view as "productive collaboration." Says Dan Fuller, director of federal programs for the NSBA, "Besides, it takes school time and expense to compile parental permission slips." That stance doesn't sit well with some parents, though. "Schools are brokering the privacy of our kids for corporate profit and hoping to hide it from parents," says Larry Scott, a parent who unsuccessfully fought ZapMe!'s contract with the Hernando County, Fla., school district. "That stinks." Yet the controversy surrounding Zap Me! hasn't dimmed Kristi Johnson's enthusiasm for the computer lab at El Dorado Middle School in Concord, Calif. "If we are a capitalist economy, why shouldn't schools benefit from capitalism?" asks the technology coordinator, who recently traded in her school's "ZapPoints" for such necessities as a stapler and light bulbs. But she hesitates a moment and adds: "If kids weren't tracked so much, that would be good, too." © U.S.News & World Report Inc. All rights reserved. ------------------------- For more information about the ZapMe! Corp, see Commercial Alert's web page on ZapMe! at . Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Tue Apr 11 12:24:17 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A8A6B21AFF for ; Tue, 11 Apr 2000 12:24:11 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-6.essential.org [216.0.125.6]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA26007 for ; Tue, 11 Apr 2000 12:24:07 -0400 Message-ID: <38F351FB.46F916C6@essential.org> Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 12:25:31 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: save low-power FM radio Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert April 11, 2000 -- Please call your House Member to save low-power FM radio. The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on legislation (HR 3439) to effectively block the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from issuing rules to authorize low-power FM (LPFM) radio stations. Under the FCC plan, some community groups, churches and other non-profit organizations would be allowed to set up small, non-commercial FM radio stations. These stations are a promising way to bring new voices to the radio, strengthen democracy, enliven public discourse and enrich local culture. HR 3439 is being pushed by the National Association of Broadcasters, which is afraid of competition on the radio dial. The broadcasters say they are worried about interference these small new stations would supposedly produce, and have been handing out a CD to Members of Congress about this. The FCC issued a statement last month that "Members of Congress have received misleading engineering information about alleged interference from low power FM radio stations. One particularly misleading disinformation effort involves a compact disc being distributed by NAB that purports to demonstrate the type of interference to existing radio stations that NAB claims will occur from new low power FM radio stations. This CD demonstration is misleading and is simply wrong." Please contact your House Member to oppose to HR 3439. The Congressional switchboard phone is (202) 225-3121. To find the fax numbers and e-mail addresses of Members of Congress, see . Background: Following is an editorial from the March 31 edition of The New York Times. Static Over Low-Powered Radio A House committee, egged on by the nation's broadcasters, passed regrettable legislation this week that would largely undermine the Federal Communications Commission's plan to give schools, churches and other community groups the right to set up low-powered FM radio stations. These stations would broadcast local ball games, municipal meetings or anything else they think their communities wanted to hear. The idea is a good one. The commission wants to let non-commercial groups cater to audiences living within a few miles of the radio station, providing a powerful antidote to the increasing concentration of radio broadcasters. In recent years the number of radio station owners has fallen by about a fifth. The broadcasters, including National Public Radio, do not like the commission's plan for creating hundreds of competitors, each needing only inexpensive equipment to give listeners local fare. The broadcasters do not say they want to stop competition. Instead they charge that the low-powered stations will interfere with existing broadcast signals by creating hissing noises or worse. The broadcasters filed a suit in federal court to stop the commission's plan and distributed a compact disk on Capitol Hill that offered a computer-simulated example of interference. The commission says the evidence provided by the broadcasters is bogus and a scare tactic to mislead politicians. Exhaustive engineering studies and the experience of actual low-powered radio stations, the commission says, prove that there will be minimal interference at worst. The chairman, William Kennard, notes that the commission was careful to keep the power of the new stations low and to space them far enough apart on the broadcast spectrum. With these protections, he says, there will be no significant interference. If he is wrong and the signals of existing radio stations are degraded, Mr. Kennard says, he will move in quickly to eliminate the problems. To fulfill that promise the commission needs to require low-powered stations that interfere with existing broadcasters to eliminate the interference or shut down. Then the broadcasters would have nothing to fear from the commission's plan other than healthy competition from local groups who think they have something neighbors want to hear. ------------------ Following are comments of Ralph Nader and Commercial Alert to the Federal Communications Commission in support of noncommercial low-power FM radio. We urge the Commission to promulgate rules for noncommercial low-power FM (LPFM) radio stations of up to 100 watts. It would be a modest but important step toward a stronger democracy in America, more cohesive communities, a renewed public discourse, hope for depressed inner city neighborhoods, and a richer and more diverse culture. Such action fits squarely within the Commission's statutory public interest mandate. It is not often that a federal agency could achieve so much with so little. We applaud the Commission for this rule making. We agree with its stated goals: "to address unmet needs for community-oriented radio broadcasting, foster opportunities for new radio broadcast ownership, and promote additional diversity in radio voices and program services." The goals are just right; there is a crying need for public space where ideas, art and public discourse can flourish. The public owns the airwaves, and radio must serve the ends and purposes of the First Amendment: to protect public discourse, which is essential to our form of self-government. Yet the hard fact remains: the current regulatory regime for radio serves to thwart the First Amendment rights and interests of most Americans. With the very limited exception of talk radio, listeners are excluded on their own airwaves, while the wealthy may speak through radio by controlling who uses their stations and for what purposes. What good is freedom of speech if nobody can afford it? Is speech truly free if only the wealthy can buy it? The Commission's rule-making comes in the wake of narrowing developments in radio broadcasting. These include the increased concentration of radio ownership, and the prevalence of paid political and commercial advertising (even on "public" radio). Let's look at them briefly. They help explain why noncommercial low-power FM is so important. Diversity in radio station ownership is collapsing. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 raised the number of radio outlets that any single corporation may own in any market, which loosed a flood of radio company mergers. The result has been that radio station ownership has been concentrated in fewer hands. Chancellor Media Corp. is purchasing CapStar Broadcasting Partners Inc. for $4.1 billion, giving Chancellor about 465 radio stations. Now Chancellor wants to get even larger. In June, Chancellor Chairman Thomas O. Hicks said that the company would like "to grow our radio assets....There are a couple of larger transactions we'd be interested in..." Another notable combination was Clear Channel Communications Inc.'s $3.8 billion acquisition of Jacor Communications Inc. This gave Clear Channel about 450 stations in the United States. (One woman complained about the sameness of Cleveland radio, following the Chancellor and Clear Channel deals: "It's as though McDonald's bought every restaurant in town and all you could get was a Big Mac.") The purpose of these corporate-owned radio stations is to maximize profits -- not to enrich public discourse or culture. They do this by corralling the largest possible audience, and then selling it to advertisers. Market forces have not led to vibrant public discourse on the radio, or a vigorous radio culture, or diverse programming, or programming that protects and respects children and families. In fact, they have brought the opposite. In their quest for larger audiences, more advertising and greater profits, commercial broadcasters cater to the basest standards, with ever more blatant effusions of crassness, sex talk and nihilism. Commercial rewards drive the creation, production and marketing of ever more Howard Sterns, Greasemans, shock jocks and the rest. They inevitably leads to a coarsening of our culture, which has particularly harmful effects on children. The early history of radio was filled with promise for democracy and public service. At the First National Radio Conference in 1922, Herbert Hoover, who was then Secretary of Commerce, said that it was inconceivable that "we should allow so great a possibility for service...to be drowned in advertising chatter...'' Hoover was prescient. When we turn on the radio today, what we hear is mostly mercantile values, commercialism and junk. Radio stations are cutting reporters from their staffs and reducing local coverage. Shouldn't there be choices, in a nation that purports to be based on the principle of choice? The citizenry is drowning in a sea of commercialism. Americans are inundated by advertisements, junk mail, junk faxes, tv and radio ads, telemarketing, billboards and more. There are ads in schools, beach sand, airport lounges, doctors offices, hospitals, convenience stores, floors of supermarkets, toilet stalls, on the Internet, and countless other places. Advertisers even tried (but have not succeeded yet) to put ads in space and on postage stamps. Tom Vanderbilt, author of The Sneaker Book, writes of advertisers' efforts to "hang a jingle in front of America's every waking moment." Even "public" radio has become commercialized. National Public Radio now carries many "underwriting messages" -- which are a form of advertisement. Can't we have just a few spaces -- niches really -- that are free from advertising -- sanctuaries, in effect? Is that too much to ask? There is a profound need in America today for public spaces in which people can talk to one another. We don't need more advertising talking at us. The Commission has a rare opportunity to use its authority over the radio spectrum to help bring these public spaces into being, through LPFM. It can open up the radio spectrum to the ideas, projects, information, arguments, art and initiatives of citizens, grass-roots organizations, foundations, associations, and religious and neighborhood groups. So doing, it can enrich the public's understanding of civic issues and social problems. It can set aside a small corner of the public airwaves for civic educational programming to help citizens discharge their civic responsibilities. Micropower radio could help those people working to revive and empower economically depressed areas, particularly inner cities and poor rural areas. Community stations could provide valuable job training for youth, who would learn how to operate radio equipment and manage radio stations. It could provide new avenues for exposure for up-and-coming artists, who may have a difficult time breaking into the "play lists" of large commercial stations. This is especially hard with play lists and even programming centrally produced in corporate offices. And LPFM would provide forums for local residents to work at improving the communities in which they live. The best ownership structures for LPFM are unincorporated not-for-profit associations, or 501(c)(3) charitable organizations. Non-commercial radio holds, by far, the best promise for placing thousands of new voices on the radio. It would have the freedom to avoid the flattened, homogenized, canned, low quality programming so widespread on commercial radio. Imagine the new voices that could flourish on LPFM -- service and advocacy groups, universities, community and civic organizations, ethnic groups, arts organizations and others. This was part of the vision for radio during its early history in the 1920's. It is not enough merely to authorize LPFM service. The Commission should allocate more spectrum for low power radio broadcasting, and introduce it when radio switches from analog to digital signals. If it does so, then the new digital receivers will be designed to receive the new frequencies. Media companies were freely given as much as $70 billion dollars worth of spectrum as a result of the Telecommunications Act. Allocating some additional spectrum for future low power radio broadcasting is the very least that the Commission can do. By legalizing LPFM, the Commission will win greater popular support for other public interest measures. Increasing support from grassroots America can only help the Commission withstand the powerful influence of the commercial media. Nearly fifty years ago, the Commission declared that the main purpose of broadcasting is "the development of an informed public opinion through the dissemination of news and ideas concerning the vital public issues of the day." Congress has given the Commission explicit statutory authority to ensure that the public's airwaves are used to serve the public interest. We strongly urge the Commission to use its authority to establish non-commercial LPFM stations -- to build a stronger democracy in America, and serve a vision grander than the profit-driven trivialization of the airwaves by most of the broadcasting and advertising industries. The Commission was not intended to merely protect the speech rights of broadcasters, advertisers and the wealthy. We urge the Commission to uphold and protect the public's First Amendment interests in radio, to rededicate radio to the service of democracy in America. Non-commercial LPFM radio is one modest step toward that goal. Sincerely, Ralph Nader Gary Ruskin Director Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A Washington, DC 20009 http://www.essential.org/alert/ gary@essential.org phone: (202) 296-2787 fax: (202) 833-2406 July 12, 1999 -------------------------------------- For more information see Commercial Alert's web page on low-power FM radio stations at . The Federal Communications Commission's web page on low-power FM radio is at . Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web site is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Apr 12 13:37:08 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2219321B14 for ; Wed, 12 Apr 2000 13:37:07 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-1.essential.org [216.0.125.1]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA16221 for ; Wed, 12 Apr 2000 09:39:08 -0400 Message-ID: <38F47CCE.E6DA5561@essential.org> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 09:40:30 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Commercial Alert queries ad agencies about "ad creep" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert April 12, 2000 Commercial Alert sent letters today to the top 10 advertising agencies in the United States to inquire where -- if anywhere -- they would decline to place ads. Following is the letter to Keith Reinhard, Chief Executive Officer of DDB Needham Worldwide. April 12, 2000 Keith Reinhard Chief Executive Officer DDB Needham Worldwide 437 Madison Ave, 8th Floor New York, NY 10022-7001 RE: Ad Creep Dear Mr. Reinhard: Americans feel assaulted by ads. There are ads in schools, airport lounges, doctors offices, movie theaters, hospitals, gas stations, elevators, convenience stores, on the Internet, on fruit, on ATM's, on garbage cans and countless other places. There are ads on beach sand and restroom walls. "I don't know if anything is sacred anymore," Mike Swanson, who directs ad placement for the ad agency Carmichael Lynch, told the Associated Press. This assault intensifies virtually every day. The advertising industry will spend an estimated $233 billion in the United States this year producing and delivering ads to adults and children. With ad budgets skyrocketing, advertising techniques inevitably become more invasive and coercive. Advertisers are engaged in a relentless battle to claim every waking moment, and what one executive called, with chilling candor, "mind share." We want to know if you agree that nothing is sacred anymore. The advertising industry used to recognize boundaries beyond which it would not go. It did not try to lay claim to every waking moment and every inch of space. Are those days long gone? Do you recognize any place to be off-limits to advertising? In your view, where should your industry draw the line? What should be off-limits to ads? For example: * Places of worship, such as churches, synagogues and mosques * The flag of the United States of America * Schools * Hospitals * Body parts, including the body parts of infants and children * National parks, such as the Grand Canyon or Yosemite * National monuments, such as the Lincoln Memorial, or the Arlington National Cemetery * Religious ceremonies, such as weddings and funerals * Outer space Thank you in advance for your response. Sincerely, Gary Ruskin Director <----------- letter ends here-------------> Commercial Alert's web page on ad creep is at . Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Apr 12 14:42:15 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3D10421B05 for ; Wed, 12 Apr 2000 14:42:15 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-8.essential.org [216.0.125.8]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA24665 for ; Wed, 12 Apr 2000 14:42:13 -0400 Message-ID: <38F4C3D3.3D09DFEE@essential.org> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 14:43:31 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: House committee approves student privacy amendment Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert April 12, 2000 The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce today approved Rep. George Miller's amendment to protect schoolchildren from privacy invasion by corporate marketers. Many thanks to all who worked hard on this. Following is Rep. Miller's news release. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, April 12, 2000 CONTACT: Daniel Weiss 202/225-2095 HOUSE COMMITTEE APPROVES REP. MILLER'S STUDENT PRIVACY AMENDMENT WASHINGTON - In an important victory for student privacy, a congressional committee voted early this afternoon in favor of requiring schools to obtain parental consent before students can participate in market research. The 26-20 vote had the support of all Democratic members of the committee, as well as five Republicans. The measure was offered by U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), a senior committee member. Miller said he offered the amendment in response to a rising number of commercial contracts with public schools that involve divulging personal information about students. The amendment requires a parent's written consent before a student can participate in commercial marketing and research. It is supported by the National PTA and Consumers Union and was modeled on the Student Privacy Protection Act, legislation introduced last year by Miller. "Today's vote is an important step toward protecting student privacy and the parent-child relationship," said Miller. "My bill simply makes it clear that if students are going to be asked to divulge personal information to people who plan to profit from it, parents should be involved in that decision, since it affects their children and themselves as well. If parents do not want their children to be objects of market research firms while in school, they should have the right to say 'No'. My bill gives parents that right." Rep. Miller noted several examples of the growing trend of using the classroom for market research that would be covered by his amendment: kids in a New Jersey elementary school filled out a 27-page booklet called "My All About Me Journal" as part of a marketing survey for a cable televison channel; students in a Massachusetts elementary school spent two days tasting cereal and answering a survey; the ZapMe! Corporation of San Ramon, California provides schools with free computers but then monitors students' web browsing habits, breaking the data down by age, sex and ZIP code and with the potential to break it down by individual as well. Miller's bill was added to a larger education bill, H.R. 4141, making changes to federal programs that assist elementary and secondary schools. That bill is expected to go before the full House later this year. ### <--------release ends here---------> BACKGROUND: For more information about the ZapMe! Corp. or the broad coalition or progressive, conservative and privacy organizations that opposes ZapMe's presence in schools, see . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Apr 12 15:53:51 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 82B8A21B05 for ; Wed, 12 Apr 2000 15:53:51 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-9.essential.org [216.0.125.9]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA26663; Wed, 12 Apr 2000 15:53:48 -0400 Message-ID: <38F4D498.D876E0CD@essential.org> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 15:55:04 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Please call Chairman Goodling Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert April 12, 2000 Anti-privacy lobbyists appear to be trying to weaken or strip Rep. Miller's student privacy amendment out of the Education Options Act (HR 4141). House Education Committee Chairman Goodling is very important right now. Chairman Goodling voted against the student privacy amendment. He needs to hear from those of us who want to protect children from privacy invasion by corporate marketers. Please contact Chairman Goodling as soon as possible. Please ask him not to weaken or strip Rep. Miller's student privacy amendment from the Education Options Act. Chairman Goodling's phone is (202) 225-5836, or send email to the House Education Committee's chief of staff, Kevin Talley, at . Thanks. BACKGROUND: For more information about the ZapMe! Corp. or the broad coalition or progressive, conservative and privacy organizations that opposes ZapMe's presence in schools, see . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Tue Apr 18 12:04:24 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from genoa.essential.org (genoa.essential.org [216.0.124.11]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 872CC21B02 for ; Tue, 18 Apr 2000 12:04:24 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-6.essential.org [216.0.125.6]) by genoa.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA13692; Tue, 18 Apr 2000 12:04:18 -0400 Message-ID: <38FC870A.DE991CDB@essential.org> Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 12:02:18 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Let's keep advertising -- and market research -- out of the classroom Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert April 18, 2000 Following is an article from the April 18 issue of School Board News. Guest Viewpoint: Let's keep advertising -- and market research -- out of the classroom By Gary Ruskin 4/18/00 -- Corporate marketers have kids in their cross-hairs. "Virtually every consumer-goods industry, from airlines to zinnia-seed sellers, targets kids," says child marketing expert James U. McNeal. Increasingly, these marketers see children as an economic resource to be exploited, much like iron ore or raw timber. "If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come," explains Mike Searles, ex-president of Kids-R-Us, a major children's clothing store. "Companies are saying, 'Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger.'" In the battle for what ad agencies call "mind share," marketers want to deploy ads where kids will see them. Because children are required by law to attend school, marketers want their ads to appear in schools, too. The corporate conscription of the compulsory education laws is now commonplace. Take Channel One, for example, a marketing company that shows a 12-minute "lite news" program with two minutes of ads to about 8 million children each school day. It brags to advertisers about how it harnesses the coercive power of the state to compel schoolchildren to watch ads. Joel Babbit, former president of Channel One, said the program provides a means of "forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials." The atmosphere in school is splendid for selling, Babbit says. "The advertiser gets a group of kids who cannot go to the bathroom, who cannot change the station, who cannot listen to their mother yell in the background, who cannot be playing Nintendo, who cannot have their headsets on." The same is true for the ZapMe! Corp., which puts computers in schools as educational tools but which also function as sophisticated advertising delivery, market research, and surveillance machines. A Wit Capital financial analysis of the ZapMe! Corp. notes that ZapMe! helps marketers "looking to capture the 'eyeballs' and 'e-wallets' of a captive and attractive demographic" -- that is, schoolchildren. These ads in the classroom consume perhaps the most precious resource of the school day -- time. In schools that show Channel One, students spend the equivalent of one full week each school year watching it, including nearly one class day watching ads. A 1998 study by Max Sawicky and Alex Molnar, The Hidden Costs of Channel One, concluded that Channel One's cost to taxpayers in lost class time is $1.8 billion per year. There's something seriously out of whack here. Taxpayers pay to construct public classrooms. They pay to maintain them and provide staff. Yet now companies like Channel One and ZapMe! have figured out how to use those taxpayer-funded classrooms as amphitheaters for their ad campaigns aimed at innocent and impressionable kids. These companies promote products to which many parents object. Take violent entertainment, for example. Channel One advertises violent movies such as "Supernova," "The Mummy," and "The World is Not Enough." Many parents (and teachers) are rightly worried about school violence. They certainly don't want schools to promote entertainment that glamorizes violence and gore. Another example is junk food. Childhood obesity is a major public health problem. An article in the Oct. 27, 1999, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association states, "The United States has experienced alarming increases in obesity among children and adolescents." An accompanying editorial notes the role of the "marketing of snack foods" in the obesity epidemic. Yet guess who's marketing those junk foods? The public schools. Channel One promotes a parade of junk food and fast food to impressionable children. Coke and Pepsi, which have a major presence in many schools, are laden with sugar, excess calories, caffeine, and other additives that can contribute to obesity, tooth decay, and many other health problems. Is this why taxpayers support public schools -- to promote unhealthy eating habits that lead to diseases like these? On top of all this is the question of values. There is growing concern about the moral atmosphere of the classroom. Channel One imposes a moral atmosphere of materialism. It promotes the message that buying is good and will make you happy and that consumption and self-gratification are the goals and ends of life. Advertisers also degrade the moral authority of schools and teachers. Schools that show corporate ads implicitly endorse the products advertised -- including violent or sexualized entertainment and junk food. In effect, school boards let advertisers rent the moral authority of the school for the purpose of selling. So doing, they cheapen the school and undercut the painstaking efforts of teachers and administrators who strive to keep up a high standard of integrity. Perhaps worst of all, the marketing invasion of the classroom opens children to the prying eyes of self-interested adults. It totally violates the trust of parents when they send their kids off to school each day. The ZapMe! Corp actually conducts electronic surveillance of children in school. It monitors the activities of the children on the Web for commercial purposes. According to The Associated Press, ZapMe! breaks the data down "by age, sex, and zip code. It delivers this information to advertisers and marketers, who use it to target students in school with laser-like precision." And ZapMe! allows its advertisers to collect the personal information of schoolchildren, including their names, addresses, and telephone numbers. Compulsory education laws are for teaching. We ought not let corporations use them to force a captive audience of schoolchildren to watch ads or to secretly extract market research from them. It is not the function of the public schools to deliver impressionable children to those who would use them for economic gain. Some things just shouldn't be for sale. Children are one of them. <---------article ends here---------> Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Fri May 26 14:45:44 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from milan.essential.org (milan.essential.org [216.0.124.12]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D78212A31B for ; Fri, 26 May 2000 14:45:44 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-6.essential.org [216.0.125.6]) by milan.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA32209 for ; Fri, 26 May 2000 14:45:37 -0400 Message-ID: <392EC494.47D2A4C9@essential.org> Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 14:38:12 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Is Academic Medicine for Sale? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert May 26, 2000 Following is an editorial from the May 18, 2000 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The editorial, written by Marcia Angell M.D., discusses the problem of commercialism in academic medicine, but can be read more generally regarding how commercial incentives corrupt public, non-profit, academic, educational, governmental and other non-commercial institutions. http://www.nejm.org/content/2000/0342/0020/1516.asp Is Academic Medicine for Sale? In 1984 the Journal became the first of the major medical journals to require authors of original research articles to disclose any financial ties with companies that make products discussed in papers submitted to us. (1) We were aware that such ties were becoming fairly common, and we thought it reasonable to disclose them to readers. Although we came to this issue early, no one could have foreseen at the time just how ubiquitous and manifold such financial associations would become. The article by Keller et al. (2) in this issue of the Journal provides a striking example. The authors' ties with companies that make antidepressant drugs were so extensive that it would have used too much space to disclose them fully in the Journal. We decided merely to summarize them and to provide the details on our Web site. Finding an editorialist to write about the article presented another problem. Our conflict-of-interest policy for editorialists, established in 1990, (3) is stricter than that for authors of original research papers. Since editorialists do not provide data, but instead selectively review the literature and offer their judgments, we require that they have no important financial ties to companies that make products related to the issues they discuss. We do not believe disclosure is enough to deal with the problem of possible bias. This policy is analogous to the requirement that judges recuse themselves from hearing cases if they have financial ties to a litigant. Just as a judge's disclosure would not be sufficiently reassuring to the other side in a court case, so we believe that a policy of caveat emptor is not enough for readers who depend on the opinion of editorialists. But as we spoke with research psychiatrists about writing an editorial on the treatment of depression, we found very few who did not have financial ties to drug companies that make antidepressants. (Fortunately, Dr. Jan Scott, who is eminently qualified to write the editorial, (4) met our standards with respect to conflicts of interest.) The problem is by no means unique to psychiatry. We routinely encounter similar difficulties in finding editorialists in other specialties, particularly those that involve the heavy use of expensive drugs and devices. In this editorial, I wish to discuss the extent to which academic medicine has become intertwined with the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, and the benefits and risks of this state of affairs. Bodenheimer, in his Health Policy Report elsewhere in this issue of the Journal, (5) provides a detailed view of an overlapping issue -- the relations between clinical investigators and the pharmaceutical industry. The ties between clinical researchers and industry include not only grant support, but also a host of other financial arrangements. Researchers serve as consultants to companies whose products they are studying, join advisory boards and speakers' bureaus, enter into patent and royalty arrangements, agree to be the listed authors of articles ghostwritten by interested companies, promote drugs and devices at company-sponsored symposiums, and allow themselves to be plied with expensive gifts and trips to luxurious settings. Many also have equity interest in the companies. Although most medical schools have guidelines to regulate financial ties between their faculty members and industry, the rules are generally quite relaxed and are likely to become even more so. For some years, Harvard Medical School prided itself on having unusually strict guidelines. For example, Harvard has prohibited researchers from having more than $20,000 worth of stock in companies whose products they are studying. (6) But now the medical school is in the process of softening its guidelines. Those reviewing the Harvard policy claim that the guidelines need to be modified to prevent the loss of star faculty members to other schools. The executive dean for academic programs was reported to say, "I'm not sure what will come of the proposal. But the impetus is to make sure our faculty has reasonable opportunities." (7) Academic medical institutions are themselves growing increasingly beholden to industry. How can they justify rigorous conflict-of-interest policies for individual researchers when their own ties are so extensive? Some academic institutions have entered into partnerships with drug companies to set up research centers and teaching programs in which students and faculty members essentially carry out industry research. Both sides see great benefit in this arrangement. For financially struggling medical centers, it means cash. For the companies that make the drugs and devices, it means access to research talent, as well as affiliation with a prestigious "brand." The time-honored custom of drug companies' gaining entry into teaching hospitals by bestowing small gifts on house officers has reached new levels of munificence. Trainees now receive free meals and other substantial favors from drug companies virtually daily, and they are often invited to opulent dinners and other quasi-social events to hear lectures on various medical topics. All of this is done with the acquiescence of the teaching hospitals. What is the justification for this large-scale breaching of the boundaries between academic medicine and for-profit industry? Two reasons are usually offered, one emphasized more than the other. The first is that ties to industry are necessary to facilitate technology transfer -- that is, the movement of new drugs and devices from the laboratory to the marketplace. The term "technology transfer" entered the lexicon in 1980, with the passage of federal legislation, called the Bayh-Dole Act, (8) that encouraged academic institutions supported by federal grants to patent and license new products developed by their faculty members and to share royalties with the researchers. The Bayh-Dole Act is now frequently invoked to justify the ubiquitous ties between academia and industry. It is argued that the more contacts there are between academia and industry, the better it is for clinical medicine; the fact that money changes hands is considered merely the way of the world. A second rationale, less often invoked explicitly, is simply that academic medical centers need the money. Many of the most prestigious institutions in the country are bleeding red ink as a result of the reductions in Medicare reimbursements contained in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act and the hard bargaining of other third-party payers to keep hospital costs down. Deals with drug companies can help make up for the shortfall, so that academic medical centers can continue to carry out their crucial missions of education, research, and the provision of clinical care for the sickest and neediest. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that institutions feel justified in accepting help from any source. I believe the claim that extensive ties between academic researchers and industry are necessary for technology transfer is greatly exaggerated, particularly with regard to clinical research. There may be some merit to the claim for basic research, but in most clinical research, including clinical trials, the "technology" is essentially already developed. Researchers are simply testing it. Furthermore, whether financial arrangements facilitate technology transfer depends crucially on what those arrangements are. Certainly grant support is constructive, if administered properly. But it is highly doubtful whether many of the other financial arrangements facilitate technology transfer or confer any other social benefit. For example, there is no conceivable social benefit in researchers' having equity interest in companies whose products they are studying. Traveling around the world to appear at industry-sponsored symposiums has much more to do with marketing than with technology transfer. Consulting arrangements may be more likely to further the development of useful products, but even this is arguable. Industry may ask clinical researchers to become consultants more to obtain their goodwill than to benefit from their expertise. The goodwill of academic researchers is a very valuable commodity for drug and device manufacturers. Finally, it is by no means necessary for technology transfer that researchers be personally rewarded. One could imagine a different system for accomplishing the same purpose. For example, income from consulting might go to a pool earmarked to support research or any other mission of the medical center. What is wrong with the current situation? Why shouldn't clinical researchers have close ties to industry? One obvious concern is that these ties will bias research, both the kind of work that is done and the way it is reported. Researchers might undertake studies on the basis of whether they can get industry funding, not whether the studies are scientifically important. That would mean more research on drugs and devices and less designed to gain insights into the causes and mechanisms of disease. It would also skew research toward finding trivial differences between drugs, because those differences can be exploited for marketing. Of even greater concern is the possibility that financial ties may influence the outcome of research studies. As summarized by Bodenheimer, (5) there is now considerable evidence that researchers with ties to drug companies are indeed more likely to report results that are favorable to the products of those companies than researchers without such ties. That does not conclusively prove that researchers are influenced by their financial ties to industry. Conceivably, drug companies seek out researchers who happen to be getting positive results. But I believe bias is the most likely explanation, and in either case, it is clear that the more enthusiastic researchers are, the more assured they can be of industry funding. Many researchers profess that they are outraged by the very notion that their financial ties to industry could affect their work. They insist that, as scientists, they can remain objective, no matter what the blandishments. In short, they cannot be bought. What is at issue is not whether researchers can be "bought," in the sense of a quid pro quo. It is that close and remunerative collaboration with a company naturally creates goodwill on the part of researchers and the hope that the largesse will continue. This attitude can subtly influence scientific judgment in ways that may be difficult to discern. Can we really believe that clinical researchers are more immune to self-interest than other people? When the boundaries between industry and academic medicine become as blurred as they now are, the business goals of industry influence the mission of the medical schools in multiple ways. In terms of education, medical students and house officers, under the constant tutelage of industry representatives, learn to rely on drugs and devices more than they probably should. As the critics of medicine so often charge, young physicians learn that for every problem, there is a pill (and a drug company representative to explain it). They also become accustomed to receiving gifts and favors from an industry that uses these courtesies to influence their continuing education. The academic medical centers, in allowing themselves to become research outposts for industry, contribute to the overemphasis on drugs and devices. Finally, there is the issue of conflicts of commitment. Faculty members who do extensive work for industry may be distracted from their commitment to the school's educational mission. All of this is not to gainsay the importance of the spectacular advances in therapy and diagnosis made possible by new drugs and devices. Nor is it to deny the value of cooperation between academia and industry. But that cooperation should be at arm's length, with both sides maintaining their own standards and ethical norms. The incentives of the marketplace should not become woven into the fabric of academic medicine. We need to remember that for-profit businesses are pledged to increase the value of their investors' stock. That is a very different goal from the mission of medical schools. What needs to be done -- or undone? Softening its conflict-of-interest guidelines is exactly the wrong thing for Harvard Medical School to do. Instead, it should seek to encourage other institutions to adopt stronger ones. If there were general agreement among the major medical schools on uniform and rigorous rules, the concern about losing faculty to more lax schools -- and the consequent race to the bottom -- would end. Certain financial ties should be prohibited altogether, including equity interest and many of the writing and speaking arrangements. Rules regarding conflicts of commitment should also be enforced. It is difficult to believe that full-time faculty members can generate outside income greater than their salaries without shortchanging their institutions and students. As Rothman urges, teaching hospitals should forbid drug-company representatives from coming into the hospital to promote their wares and offer gifts to students and house officers. (9) House officers should buy their own pizza, and hospitals should pay them enough to do so. To the argument that these gifts are too inconsequential to constitute bribes, the answer is that the drug companies are not engaging in charity. These gifts are intended to buy the goodwill of young physicians with long prescribing lives ahead of them. Similarly, academic medical centers should be wary of partnerships in which they make available their precious resources of talent and prestige to carry out research that serves primarily the interests of the companies. That is ultimately a Faustian bargain. It is well to remember that the costs of the industry-sponsored trips, meals, gifts, conferences, and symposiums and the honorariums, consulting fees, and research grants are simply added to the prices of drugs and devices. The Clinton administration and Congress are now grappling with the serious problem of escalating drug prices in this country. In these difficult times, academic medicine depends more than ever on the public's trust and goodwill. If the public begins to perceive academic medical institutions and clinical researchers as gaining inappropriately from cozy relations with industry -- relations that create conflicts of interest and contribute to rising drug prices -- there will be little sympathy for their difficulties. Academic institutions and their clinical faculty members must take care not to be open to the charge that they are for sale. Marcia Angell, M.D. <------editorial ends here--------> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed May 31 13:51:31 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from milan.essential.org (milan.essential.org [216.0.124.12]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7A1602A05E for ; Wed, 31 May 2000 13:51:31 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-1.essential.org [216.0.125.1]) by milan.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA13809 for ; Wed, 31 May 2000 13:51:28 -0400 Message-ID: <39355117.6549E627@essential.org> Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 13:51:19 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: coalition queries newspapers on secret agreements to limit coverage Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert May 31, 2000 Commercial Alert, media scholars and activists sent letters today to The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post to ask about their policies regarding secret agreements to exclude certain perspectives from articles about corporations. The letter to New York Times Managing Editor Bill Keller follows. Dear Mr. Keller: We want to inquire about your newspaper's policies regarding secret agreements to exclude certain points of view from articles in exchange for a news scoop about corporations. On May 29, The Washington Post reported a most troubling example of this trend. It said "a publicist hired by United Airlines and US Airways offered three major newspapers a deal that none of them could refuse. The pitch: We'll give you the exclusive details of a $5 billion merger if you promise not to call any outsiders for comment." According to the Post article, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post all agreed, but the deal fell apart because the Financial Times broke the story on its website. These secret exclusion agreements with corporations or their PR firms limit the scope of discussion of a news story about corporate conduct. They block out voices that offer perspective on corporations, such as consumer, citizen, public health, or environmental groups. For example, the deal with the airlines' PR firm excluded comment from anyone who might have questioned whether the airline merger was good for citizens, consumers or the nation's free enterprise ideals. Even worse, these secret agreements betray readers' trust. By failing to disclose the nature and extent of these agreements, readers do not know what information newspapers -- which are supposed to provide news and analysis -- are purposely hiding from them. By adopting such secret agreements, your newspaper basically tells the story the corporate subject wants you to tell, while pretending to be an objective news source. Other voices are excluded entirely from the discussion and debate, even thought the corporate conduct in question may affect them personally and deeply. This in turn sends an implicit message that these other voices aren't worth hearing, and so they may not get heard at all. Your readers deserve to know the answers to these questions: 1. What is your policy regarding the disclosure of agreements to exclude perspectives, in exchange for a news scoop about a corporation? 2. Would your newspaper agree to running a box under a news story disclosing any secret exclusion agreements, indicating what points of view have been intentionally omitted? Sincerely, George Gerbner, President and Founder, Cultural Environment Movement; Dean Emeritus, Annenberg School of Communication Janine Jackson, Program Director, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) Robert McChesney, Research Associate Professor, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert John Stauber, Executive Director, Center for Media and Democracy <----------letter ends here--------> Following is Howard Kurtz's May 29 article in the Washington Post. Rules and Restrictions Apply By Howard Kurtz http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23859-2000May28.html Last Tuesday, a publicist hired by United Airlines and US Airways offered three major newspapers a deal that none of them could refuse. The pitch: We'll give you the exclusive details of a $5 billion merger if you promise not to call any outsiders for comment. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the New York Times all signed on for the ride, even though this would essentially enable the two airlines to guide the story to a soft landing by bumping potential critics. In the end, the deal fell apart. The Financial Times Web site broke the story about 6:30 p.m., and the three American papers -- which had agreed not to report the news before midnight -- were free to run their pieces and seek other comments. But the effort underscored the degree to which corporate executives, like politicians, are increasingly determined to shape coverage of their exploits. "It's a disservice to readers," says Dave Kansas, editor of TheStreet.com. "If you're not allowed to talk to anyone, you have to get all your information from the company and past information, and that puts you in a pretty tough spot." Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor, concedes that "we hate those kind of arrangements. Often we're able to talk news sources out of it. Sometimes we just say no." But, says Steiger, "if the news is big enough, we'd rather give it to our readers with whatever caveats are appropriate." Jill Dutt, The Post's assistant managing editor for financial news, says she agreed to the deal--without knowing it involved Arlington-based US Airways and United--because "it does a better job for readers to have the story on the first day than not to have the story. The Washington Post, regardless if no one is called, can give much better background and context for the significant issues involved in the deal." Besides, she says, "I don't want to get beat." "Admittedly," says Glenn Kramon, the Times's business editor, "you do feel constrained in not being able to call other people, important people, because you can't give it away. But it's better than finding out at 7 at night or midnight and having to scramble. We've been serious about business news for too long to be cut out of big stories like this, and it's about time we were included." Steiger says corporate executives often ask the Journal not to call anyone when they are about to launch a takeover attempt and "they don't want the target company to know until the last possible moment." In Dutt's view, executives want "a clear shot at giving investors your side of the deal before you get all the naysayers." And what did the two airlines have in mind? "I really don't have any comment on that," says Joelle Frank, their New York publicist. [snip] <--------excerpt of article ends here----------> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Jun 1 16:55:21 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from milan.essential.org (milan.essential.org [216.0.124.12]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E83CE2A3A4 for ; Thu, 1 Jun 2000 16:55:20 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-7.essential.org [216.0.125.7]) by milan.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA16262 for ; Thu, 1 Jun 2000 16:55:18 -0400 Message-ID: <3936CD73.80637B6@essential.org> Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2000 16:54:11 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Raffi quits festival over advertising Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert June 1, 2000 Following is an article from today's National Post (Toronto). http://www.nationalpost.com/news.asp?f=000601/305185 Raffi quits festival over advertising; Children's performer objects to corporate presence at event he has attended since '79 by Richard Foot Raffi, the acclaimed West Coast children's singer and entertainer, withdrew from this week's Vancouver Children's Festival yesterday to protest the pageant's decision to allow commercial advertising. "It is with great regret that I am today announcing the cancellation of all my concerts at this year's festival," he said yesterday. "This was not an easy decision, but it is one that I feel compelled to make." Raffi, who has appeared as a feature attraction at the week-long festival of musicians, clowns and jugglers since its inception in 1979, says he was dismayed this year to see the products of a major corporate sponsor displayed throughout the site. He said Kia Motors, a car company, has been allowed to place more than a dozen automobiles as advertisements on the festival grounds. Smaller sponsors -- including The Vancouver Sun and Alcan -- also have signs up around the site, he said. "What has developed here is overt commercialization of the site and the festival which is truly regrettable," he said yesterday. "It's wrong to expose children to corporate advertising." Raffi, a Juno Award winner and recipient of the Order of Canada, said he understands the importance of corporate funding for arts events, even children's festivals. However, he said that in previous years, festival sponsors were not permitted to display large advertisements and were more discreetly acknowledged inside festival booklets and programs. That has all changed now, he said, with no warning given to festival performers. "Corporations should do this for the community, not for the advertising payback," he said. "Supporters of this festival can be acknowledged tastefully and gratefully, but signage must be either zero or so limited that you hardly see it." Raffi, who said this is the only children's festival he takes part in, was due to perform from tomorrow to Sunday. "I would like to apologize in advance to those families and fans who have purchased tickets to my concerts at the festival," he said. "I love this festival and want more than anything to preserve its distinctive spirit." Festival organizers declined to comment yesterday on Raffi's withdrawal or on the advertising issue. A spokesman said only that he was "delighted" to announce that Fred Penner, another children's entertainer, had agreed to step in to fill Raffi's performance spots. <---------article ends here---------> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Fri Jun 2 16:07:56 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from milan.essential.org (milan.essential.org [216.0.124.12]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E2D8A2A066 for ; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 16:07:55 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-2.essential.org [216.0.125.2]) by milan.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA08363; Fri, 2 Jun 2000 16:07:46 -0400 Message-ID: <393812DD.802B88A6@essential.org> Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 16:02:37 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: The Lost Village Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert June 2, 2000 Following is a fine, sprawling article about how commercialism affects Congress, politics and Washington DC, from the June issue of the Washington Monthly. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0006.woll.html The Lost Village How the suits took over the last small town in America: Washington, DC. By Tom Woll Washington is the city that people scrape and claw to get to, and then make a career of disparaging. In no other city that I know of, do people---important people at least---feel so superior to the place that they themselves comprise. Members of Congress conduct a nonstop beg-a-thon for campaign funds so that they can stay in this awful place that they revile. Southern drawls deepen, and regional costuming becomes more pronounced the longer they are here. Beltway pundits meanwhile sneer about the Beltway pundits, as if they weren't just such pundits themselves. The major players here accuse one another of being that which they themselves are; and this Dostoevskyian undertone reached its peak, or nadir, in the Clinton impeachment farce, when one after another of the President's accusers turned out to be accusing him of things that they themselves had done---or were doing still. Dan Burton, the Republican of Indiana who called Clinton a "sleaze," had been the Lothario of the Indiana state legislature with a secret illegitimate offspring. Newt Gingrich, of course, was doing it with a young lady in the church choir. They all feel a need to attack some part of what they are---to separate themselves from the city that they crave to be a part of. At one level they say to the public, "See, I'm not like the others in this degenerate place." At another level, perhaps, they chastise themselves for the knowledge that they are. But before the rest of us get too huffy, we might pause and consider whether we all aren't implicated to some degree. The Washington that Americans love to disparage bears more than a little resemblance to the America that they inhabit. There's a certain pandering quality to the Beltway bashing, after all. The politician does not just say, "I'm not like the shmucks." He or she also says, "You voters aren't like them either." Yes, Washington has peculiarities and tics aplenty. Yet in the end, it's the way it is because America is the way it is. It is a distillate of a trait that DeToqueville noted long ago---the narrow self-seeking, and the commercial culture that amplifies and reinforces this quality at every turn. You've read that Washington today is dominated by money, obsessed with media and image, driven by manipulative and intrusive advertising, in the thrall of self-interest and the short-term view. Gee, does that sound a little like a country that I know---like a "New Economy" that I know? In fact, the best aspects of Washington---the ones that are disappearing---were a form of resistance to the dominant trends in the U.S. today, rather than an acquiescence to them. In some respects, the more Washington comes to resemble the rest of America, the worse it gets. Suit City My friend says it started with the suits. He was back in D.C. after four years in San Francisco, where he had worn dungarees every day, and could have been taken for an IPO millionaire. Now he was on an errand to the Hart Senate Office Building, the new one with the big mobile in the atrium. He was wearing khaki pants and a blazer, which for him is dressed up. But here on Capitol Hill he felt like a schlepp. Everyone was wearing suits---not just suits, but power suits, the kind the majority of men in the Bay Area probably don't even own. He expected a Capitol police officer to nab him for insufficient attire. I've noticed this too. There have been suits on Capitol Hill---in both senses of the word---ever since there has been a Capitol Hill. What's different now, I think, is how pervasive they have become. Not that long ago, clothing served to reinforce the Congressional caste system. Dark suits for senators, lighter ones for chiefs of staff, jackets and flannel slacks for legislative assistants, the khaki and blue blazer uniform for interns. Now, it seems that dress up has moved down the scale. You see interns wearing suits and white shirts as they sort the mail. (Whether by acculturation or good sense, female interns still sometimes show up in dungarees.) It's as though everyone is going to interviews, which in a sense they are. This is typically the cue for a pundit rant. Washington is dressing up at a time when the real producers in the economy, the hearty yeomen with the IPO rakings and nonexistent profits, are dressing down. How out of touch. How Beltway. It is true that the Washington power corridor can feel like a college campus on which everyone is trying to impress one another. Yet the power centers in most major cities are besuited too. And anyway, the question is not what they are wearing in Washington, but why. Follow Bill Gates or other high tech billionaires through the halls of Congress these days and you get a clue. Those voices you hear are the sounds of powerful people fawning. Redmond and Mountain View may be a continent from Washington, but they revolve upon the same axis: the money culture that affects us all. Politics follows commerce at virtually every turn. TV ads, demographic targeting, focus groups, and polls---most of the scummy apparatus of modern politics started in the business world. As commerce has engulfed the culture---as just about every state and stage of human experience has turned into something to buy---it should not be surprising that it has engulfed politics too. As commerce panders to an ever-lower denominator of self-absorption and desire, it should not be surprising that politics does too. Washington is where we permit ourselves to see these things most clearly, because we say that it is not ourselves. Who dresses down, if not people who want to show that they are not the kind of people who dress up? Besides, whom do you think the suits are representing, anyway? The End of Time Not long ago I had occasion to peruse the record of Congressional hearings from the early 1930s. The committee chairman was Senator Robert LaFollette Jr., the Republican of Wisconsin, and the subject was the senator's proposal for a National Economic Commission to map a path out of the Depression. LaFollette sought comment from leading economic experts, captains of industry, labor leaders, and the like. The thing that is impressive today---staggering is a better word---is the depth of the discussion, and how thoroughly the senator knew the subject at hand. With virtually no staff, LaFollette led the representative of the Federal Reserve through testimony that alone occupies more than forty small-print pages in the hearing record. It was a virtuoso performance, and he repeats it over and over. The entire Senate staff fit into one building back then (now there are three, plus the Capitol itself). The hot new information technology in town was the telephone. Yet it is hard to envision hearings like that today---probing basic economic questions, with little regard to ideological boundaries or the clock. Partly that's because of the ideological repression of these more prosperous times. But partly too it is the paradox of the information age. Amidst a deluge of fact we seem less able to ask good questions. With a proliferation of "knowledge workers" in the form of staff, no one seems to know enough. Or have enough time. In theory, more staff should mean more time in Congress---just as more labor saving devices should give us more time in our homes. Yet members of Congress, like the rest of us, have practically none, and the reason comes back to money. Time and money in Washington are like time and space in physics: different dimensions of the same thing. If you want to know why no one has any time in Congress, the first place to look is at the money that flows in. The money question is more nuanced, and therefore interesting, than the media generally portray. Campaign money buys different things in different contexts. Speaking generally, corporate money still buys less from Democrats than from Republicans---though the gap has been closing. From Republicans it buys marriage, from Democrats perhaps an off-and-on affair. Sometimes it buys little more than time on a crowded schedule; almost always there's a built-in caveat that compelling home state interests come first. But the basic thing that money buys is time. A campaign contribution may not always swing a vote. But it always occupies time---time in which something else isn't getting done. It starts of course with the fund raising itself. Dick Gephardt, the House minority leader, spends two hours a day on the telephone asking for cash, and you can be sure that his Republican counterparts are spending at least as much. Practically all of them do, to some degree at least. They also spend a lot of time at receptions and access-fests for donors, strategizing with consultants, and the rest. The time a LaFollette might have spent reading, today's representative must spend raising money. If the congressional speeches on C-SPAN often seem like the calcified shells of old ideas, wrapped in hectoring polemic, it's partly because these people have so little time in which to reflect on new ones. Then there is the time spent meeting with the people who gave the money. This is more important than it might appear. Time I spend with you is time I don't spend with someone else, including the people on the other side of you. It is time I don't spend trying to check the truth of what you've said. I once was involved in an obscure trade issue that involved many of the largest corporations in the U.S. and abroad. It was the kind of vote that liberal Democrats would use to make amends to business lobbies because they usually faced no organized opposition from the other side. This time they did however---from a tiny group whose marginality was evident in that I was among the Washington advocates. The congressional waters did not exactly part at my approach. It would take weeks to get a meeting with a lowly staffer. On one such occasion, I was sitting in the reception area waiting for my audience, when a group of men, with power suits and briefcases, emerged from the senator's office. There was a jocular familiarity about the scene. These were lobbyists for the group I was opposing. Such experiences send a message, one that is reinforced on Capitol Hill continually. It's the kind of Washington tableau that reporters forget how to see. I once heard a veteran (too veteran, perhaps) Washington reporter dismiss the role of money in politics on the grounds that PACs don't always get what they want. This is true. PACs often create stalemate; the prolixity of competing interests causes the process to grind to a halt. For years, commercial banks, S&Ls, insurance companies, and brokers fought to a standstill on banking reform. (The eventual resolution showed that stalemate isn't always the worst thing.) They all give a lot of money, but they don't all get what they want. Yet neither do they have to swallow much they can't abide. The key questions are whose agendas are on the table to begin with and who gets the congressional time. If you look at your bank charges today---the ATM fees, the fees for using a teller or even receiving a bad check---you just might get the impression that the main concerns of the congressional majority on banking legislation were not yours. You would be right. The official term for the clogged congressional arteries is "gridlock." Typically it is cited as a Washington disease. Yet Washington is not the only place in this country where time has shrunk, and where competing demands strain the system both individually and collectively. Members of Congress, like the rest of us, are subject to the nonstop barrage of the "information" economy. They, like us, have lost the quiet of the home at night thanks to TV, the telephone, and the Web; and have lost the wonderful enforced leisure of travel too. Sen. LaFollette rode the train between Washington and Wisconsin. There were no cell phones or remote e-mail. There was nothing to do but read, talk, or think. (In Washington, the air conditioner has destroyed the enforced leisure of summer as well.) Washington isn't the only place in America where money drives the agenda, nor where the gathering and spending of it consumes people's time. In Silicon Valley, time has just about disappeared. In this seed bed of the nation's supposed wealth, no one has any of that which wealth is supposed to signify---free time. Regis McKenna, a consultant-guru in the Valley, has hailed this development as the bright future of us all: "Imagine a world," he wrote in his book Real Time, "in which time seems to vanish and space seems completely malleable. Where the gap between need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero. Where distance equals a microsecond in lapsed connection time. A virtual world created at your command." This may sound scary. Regis thinks it's way cool. Two hundred and seventy million of us in the U.S. alone, seeking instantaneous fulfillment---that is not a promising recipe for democracy, which requires process and compromise. It could easily jam the circuits, which it has, in the form of noise, traffic, pollution, and sprawl. It could speed up the day to the point where there is no time at all. Our experience of time arises from a sense of space between events. McKenna lays out a hypothetical daily schedule for the person of tomorrow, in which space has ceased to exist. At fifteen and thirty minute intervals, it lists such events as "awakened by CD music, e-mail monitor, security appliance controller," "go to office online," "keep appointment with ŒWeight Watchers'," and "get lunch at Burger King drive through." The day ends with: "Take two melatonin to get to sleep fast." McKenna calls this person, without irony, the "Twenty-Four Hour Consumer." The schedule helps explain why stress is unlikely to diminish any time soon. And anyone who has worked on Capitol Hill will recognize something about this schedule. The tasks are different, but the manic tempo, the sense of entrapment in a movie that's running too fast, is much the same as what our representatives endure. The people who are creating the future have created it for Washington as well. Washington lags behind the culture at large, but this does not speak in the capital's disfavor. Spaced Out Washington is composed of at least three cities. There is the official Washington of government and lobbyists; the black Washington that covers most of the city's expanse; and the far Northwest quadrant in which reside most of the white and influential. For years, Dupont Circle has been a buffer zone between the first and the third---between the government enclave that people come to work in, and the neighborhoods in which people actually live. South of the Circle, along Connecticut Avenue, are the graceless modern boxes of lobby and trade association land, where rents run in the vicinity of $48 a square foot and where the uniform is suit and tie even on sweltering summer days. North of the Circle people wear t-shirts and there are still, miraculously, low-rent buildings where operations like this magazine survive with fingers crossed. Sam Smith, the local essayist, calls the Circle the "border checkpoint through which you pass to go from community to facility." Through the '70s and '80s, the forces of improvement marched up the avenue, routing the eccentric and impecunious in their path. This magazine occupied a suite near the Mayflower Hotel in the '70s, with seven individual offices for $500 a month. That building has given way to a high-end office emporium. The Dupont Circle Building, once owned by the Machinists Union and a rabbit warren of quixotic causes, has gone the same sad way. But the movement to eradicate low-rent contrariness from the nation's capitol---a movement which Smith calls "demographic cleansing"---somehow stopped at the Circle, more or less. In recent months the line has fallen. A company by the name of Starwood Realty has purchased a row of buildings north of the Circle, and has evicted the freelance writers and the community-minded architecture firm. The Newsroom, the District's best out-of-town newspaper store, had to move, as did a second-hand-book store. The new tenants, whoever they are, most likely will represent "improvement" only in the narrow sense in which developers and economists use that term. I mention this because that bursting of the geographic dam is suggestive of something larger that has happened in Washington---and in the culture generally---over the last generation or so. It is a form of enclosure, the colonizing of human space on behalf of moneyed interest. Much as the Enclosure Acts of 18th century England redefined the commons as real estate and forced small farmers from their land, so the hyper-commoditized real estate of Washington has re-rendered the city in the image of those who pay the higher rents. Square foot by square foot, it has forced out those who speak from different values and seek different ends. To put this another way, money defines not just time in Washington. It defines space as well; and this steers people in the direction in which money flows. In the '60s and '70s, it was possible to get by on very little. There were cheap apartments in Adams Morgan, group houses in Dupont Circle and Glover Park, and furnished rooms in the old West End. A book of 10 tickets at the Circle Theater, on Pennsylvania Avenue, cost 20 dollars. A plate of spanakopeta at the Astor restaurant at 18th and M was $1.95---with salad and roll. Power to the Shoppers The good old days weren't always so good. But they were less expensive, which meant more space, psychological as well as physical, and thus a greater sense of possibility. The future begins in low-rent zones; they are the kitchens of the next thing. The original Apple computers came from a garage; Microsoft manages its monopoly from a sprawling office campus. In Washington, where the business is policy and (occasionally) ideas, cheap office space is the equivalent of Steve Jobs' family garage. When it disappears, so does thinking that challenges the dominion of the moneyed. What's left are amply-funded opinion-tanks that provide intellectual justification for the providers of those funds. (The term "think" tank implies a mental destination that is not predetermined, which is not the case. Name any such institution in town---Heritage, for example, or CATO---and an issue, and most people in political Washington could tell you exactly where the place stands.) We get old ideas packaged as new ones, the old political economy pretending to be new. We get the enclosure of political and intellectual space, and it all starts with rent. Rents here aren't yet as bad as in San Francisco or New York. But they are starting up the same steep ramp, and this turns the inner compass needle toward the paycheck, even in people who'd rather think of something else. It produces a constant state of worry that some slicked-back sharpie in a t-shirt and Armani shades could drive up and put you on the street. Housing is just the start. The cheap repertory movie theaters like the Circle and the Biograph are gone---the former thanks to George Washington University's real estate empire, the latter to a CVS drug store. Budget restaurants like the Astor are gone too. North of the Circle, there's just one cheap pizza parlor left. If you live in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, then you know the scene. In a thousand different ways, the city now says to newcomers: If you can't pay, you don't play. This is on top of the heavy load of financial obligation that young people now bring with them. One of the most clever and insidious acts of the Reagan Administration was to cut student aid and replace it with loans. The Reaganites knew that young people carrying major debt would be less likely to become low-paid trouble-makers. Such changes have taken place largely beneath the radar of the established media, in large part because media salaries have increased with the rents. (George Will does not worry about Mr. Hippo-Sleazo driving up with an eviction notice.) But they have altered the context of politics here in a fundamental way. Since time and space are different dimensions of the same thing, it's not surprising that the same forces that have taken over time in Washington, have claimed its space as well---legislative as well as geographic. Nader's Vaders When the first wave of activists came to D.C. in the '60s they found a sleepy capital of gray men of the kind pictured in the Time and Newsweek magazines of the day. The power axis was defined largely by the Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, the Congress, and the president. The deals were done in quiet; media was a secondary consideration. Trade associations were in New York; the lobbyists were in D.C. A Ralph Nader could feel a little like a kid who finds an empty playground basketball court with a new rim and net. There was political space to claim, and the media, still chafing from the repression of the McCarthy years, was eager to take on the status quo. Operating out of phone booths and from a tiny office in the old National Press Building, a Nader could vault over the back-room deals and speak directly to the public. For a number of years, in opinion polls, he ranked up with the president and the chief justice of the Supreme Court as the most influential people in America. But Nader et al. spawned their own antithesis. The story has been told many times: how the trade associations swarmed into Washington, corporations expanded their lobby ranks, the opinion tanks cast their spell on the reportorial class, and so-called astro-turf campaigns stirred up a facsimile of grassroots support to undercut the advocates who could not afford such tactics. The result is evident today. Washington's legislative space has become as crowded as its office space---with equally high rent. The campaign-finance system is the DOS of this machine---and I'm talking in part about the supposed reforms of the 1970s, which in some ways made the problem worse. Before those reforms put a limit on individual contributions, a member of Congress could load up on money from a handful of interests, and thus be free to take on the rest. They might even have a benevolent angel who wanted them in office to do the right thing. This effect was evident especially in rural states, where corporate interests were not strong, campaigns were relatively cheap, and the major interest groups---family farmers for example---were benign. The so-called Common Cause reforms changed all that. With a tight cap on individual donations, members had to spread their nets more broadly. They had to subject themselves to many smaller strings as opposed to fewer big ones; and this turned Congress into a dense thicket of interest in which there is little space to move. Thus the beating up on government---it's about the only institution left in town that doesn't give money to campaigns. The enclosure of political space also has upped the ante on contentiousness and rancor. Congress has never been a place where the lions lie down gently with the lambs. But the kind of gang-war mentality that prevails today is over the top. Newt Gingrich had a lot to do with this; as a minority-party bomb thrower he turned the place into a Beirut---and easier in than out. But money has a lot to do with this too (and is not unrelated to Gingrich of course). Things get tense when there is big money on the table. When that money is stirring up trouble for you in your district, they get more tense still. Awful Washington again. Yet, in this too, Congress is a mirror of the country at large. The enclosure of political space in Washington is not unlike the commoditizing of social space generally. Trying to get through a day in the U.S. without being assaulted by ads is about as hard as trying to move legislation in Washington without running into the thicket of PACs. The efforts to patent and bio-engineer life for monetary gain are the commercial equivalent of the effort to re-engineer the political process for commercial ends. This applies to the media as well. The disinclination of Congress to upset big donors is much like the reluctance of the big-shot media to upset big advertisers or their corporate bosses. When journalists at the major outlets say Congress is a captive of moneyed interests, they too are pointing the finger at another version of themselves. All Over America The enclosure of political space in Washington has been much like the invasion of Wal-Mart into small town America. It has undermined the political Main Street---the traditional relationships of the political village---and left the impersonal calculus of the market in its place. As Washington has embraced the mantras of the market, it has shown by its own example the shortcomings of the market as a social model. Congress itself has participated in these changes, largely through a vast increase in staff. Not that long ago, House and Senate offices had a small and intimate feel, like a family business. There was little bureaucracy or specialization, few buffers between the staff and the boss. The informality could take you by surprise. As a young public interest intern, I once helped a Senate subcommittee prepare for hearings involving the predations of the Penn Central Railroad. The day before the hearings, late in the afternoon, the staff attorney realized that no one had drafted an opening statement for the chairman. He was busy, and there was no one else to do it. So the task fell to me. I sat down at a Selectric, a bit dazed to be assigned such an important task, and proceeded to write a statement I was sure would bring the assemblage to its feet. I was also sure that someone would revise it before morning, so I really cut loose. The next morning I took a seat in the hearing room, full of anticipation. Some of my own words might be uttered, in the Senate of the United States. The chairman started reading, and I was thrilled, and then horrified, as my sophomoric prose came back at me from the dais, word for hyperventilating word. This was a useful lesson on the hazards of cheesy polemic. But more importantly, it showed how Congress was not a model of professional management in those less bureaucratic days. But professional management is a corporate ideal, not a democratic one. What the Senate lacked in management, it made up for in tradition, and ties of loyalty and trust. People called it a "club," which they generally did not mean as a compliment, and with good reason. Yet a club has a good side too---just as a traditional ethnic neighborhood has a good side too, Archie Bunker bigotry and all. This was most apparent at the staff level, where employees felt like personal assistants, like clerks for a judge. As staffs expanded in the '70s and '80s, that world came apart. There were good reasons for the expansion, or what seemed like good reasons at the time. Congress wanted to keep closer tabs on the bureaucracy it had created; and, after Watergate, on the imperial presidency as well. There was a need to deal with the new legions of lobbyists, and with the constituent mail that was pouring in as never before. There was also the worthy cause of decentralization. The so-called Watergate Class of 1974 insisted on tempering the power of chairmen by giving subcommittees more autonomy and staff. Justified and beneficial to some extent, the staff increases nevertheless came at a price. More staff meant more points of contact for lobbyists and more memos for the member to read at night. It meant more data and technocracy and less time for big questions. Daily schedules came to resemble the departure screens at LaGuardia. There was also a large shift in the relationships between members and staff. Where once offices were a little like family grocery stores, with all the makeshift informality, they began to feel more like corporate operations, with rigid hierarchies and strict separation of functions. In this setting, employment became more fungible---more a labor market. After elections, resumés start appearing in congressional offices from the staffs of the defeated or retired---a migrant labor-force with issue expertise and knowledge of the Hill to sell. Liberal Democrats find resumés from former Republican staff. They know the issues and the players. What difference does it make where the boss stands? Meat Market Washington has always been a magnet for people on the make. Back in the Gilded Age, one enterprising congressional staff member also worked as a newspaper correspondent and lobbyist at the same time. Today the hustle is more buttoned-down, and hedged by ethics rules that provide an aura of legitimacy to what might otherwise be unseemly. Build the resumé in Congress for a few years, or at the Securities and Exchange Commission, or at the tax division of the Justice Department, and you are ready to sell your human capital at the law firms and lobby operations across town. The migration down Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street seems to be increasing. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, which studies the operations of Congress, the typical staff tenure has been diminishing. People get their visas stamped more quickly; and the more stamps the better the caché. The day I write this, the "In the Loop" column in The Washington Post, includes this item: "Going private Š Bill O'Neill, legislative director to former representative Robert A. Roe (D-N.J.) and more recently senior policy advisor to the House Government Reform Committee under Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), is off to Sprint's Washington office to be a director of government affairs." I don't know Mr. O'Neill. His work for a mainstream Democrat and then a right-wing Republican might have reflected deeply-held ideals. But there is little question that such work on both sides of the partisan aisle positions one nicely for a corporate job in "government affairs." There was a time when the culture of the institution could provide a bit of counterweight to such moves. Someone who had worked closely with the late Congressman Wright Patman, a legendary populist on banking issues and chairman of the House Banking Committee, might feel uncomfortable about trying to lobby the congressman on behalf of Chase Manhattan Bank. But the increased liquidity of human capital in the capital---the absence of what economists call transactional "friction" and others call principle, or loyalty, or moral scruple---has diminished this effect. Thus the increased scale of Congress has meshed neatly with the commoditizing of space and time in Washington. Market economics is the study of transactions between strangers for money. The implicit thrust is to drive more of life into an arena in which people deal with one another in this way. Thus, work in the nation's capital has come closer to the market ideal, just like everything else. Life becomes a continuing audition---thus the suits, which serve as a kind of modem connection, an announcement that yes, I'm the kind of person you would want to have. That's not entirely fair, of course. There are dedicated servants of the public interest who wear suits every day, just as there are members of Congress who have striven mightily to resist these trends. I have worked with both, and that is one reason I am a little fed up with people who obsess over the mote in Washington's eye but don't consider the beam in their own. Before the grumbling starts again over the wicked ways of Washington, pause just one second please. An overheated housing market, a rapacious grasp for money, a manic drive to commoditize---and make money from---every moment of conscious experience, an itinerant work force that is forever on the prowl---this does sound a little like a New Economy that I know. The old Washington was pre-modern, in ways both good and bad. It was defined by folkways, tradition and personal loyalties, as well as by the transaction of money. It had space for the contrary and eccentric. It had time in which people could think about these things. As technology and commerce have uprooted the last vestiges of the pre-modern from our lives, it is little wonder that politics have followed suit. Sometimes what we see is what we are. If Washington seems out of touch, then we all might look around and ask whether this might be connected just a bit to what our country has become. Research assistance provided by Ramona Buehler and Patrick Esposito. Tom Woll is a writer who lives in Washington. He generally exists under another name. <---------article ends here---------> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Tue Jun 13 09:09:24 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from milan.essential.org (milan.essential.org [216.0.124.12]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D6BBB2A30E for ; Tue, 13 Jun 2000 09:09:24 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-1.essential.org [216.0.125.1]) by milan.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA20455 for ; Tue, 13 Jun 2000 09:09:22 -0400 Message-ID: <39463258.6E4F8792@essential.org> Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 09:08:40 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Commercial Alert asks sportswriters to call sports stadiums by nicknames, not corporate names Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert June 13, 2000 Responding to the rise of sports stadiums with corporate naming rights agreements, Commercial Alert sent letters today to sportswriters at the fifty largest U.S. and Canadian newspapers to encourage them to call stadiums by nicknames instead of corporate names, such as the FleetCenter, Enron Field, Staples Center, and FedEx Field. The letter follows. * * * * * There comes a time when all of us must stand up and be counted, sportswriters not excepted. They too must come to the proverbial plate on occasion, with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and the team down by three. Now is one of those times, and the question is the names of the locations of the sports events which they cover. Ball parks and stadiums are part of sports lore and legend. Can one recount Willie Mays' back-to-the-plate catch off Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series, without mention of the spacious center field of the old Polo Grounds? Would Reggie Jackson's October heroics have loomed quite as large in any stadium besides the House that Ruth Built? Could Havlicek have stolen the ball anyplace besides the Garden? Those stadium names -- Polo Grounds, Fenway, Forbes Field, Tiger Stadium, and on and on -- are part of the poetry of sports. They cast their spell on us throughout our lives. They serve to connect professional sports in locality and place, and provide a thread of connection between parents and kids, one generation and another. How many fathers have taken their kids to Yankee Stadium or Fenway and pointed out where they were sitting at some momentous game of yore? In times of turmoil and change these threads become precious. Yet they are being ripped from our lives, and the reason is that corporations are seizing the names of our beloved parks and stadiums, and replacing these with their own. It was a sad, sad day when Boston's Garden became the Fleet Center, and San Francisco's Candlestick became 3Com Park. Even the name Meadowlands Arena provided a touch of grace to that maligned venue that the new name -- Continental Airlines Arena -- does not. This change represents a flattening of our culture, the emotional equivalent of a Soviet marriage. It uproots sports from local culture and tradition, and wraps them in the pecuniary legalism of commerce instead. It is yet another instance of the chilling and Orwellian corporate takeover of our civic and cultural life. Sports writers are our last line of defense. You are the keepers of the language of sports. You have the power to name, which is the power to define. You wield this power each time you sit down to write; and I urge you to wield it on behalf of our memories, our local cultures, and the bonds between parents and kids. I urge you to write as a keeper of the magic that draws us to sports, rather than as -- I must say this -- a corporate shill. There is no law that says that you have to call a sports venue what a big corporation wants you to call it. Nicknames are another rich sports tradition, from Bronco and the Babe to Magic and Dr. J. Today most of you call the manager of the San Francisco Giants by a name (Dusty) other than the one his mother gave him. If you can do that, then why can't you call the stadium where he manages by a name other than the one its corporate sponsor gave it? There is no reason. There is no reason why 3Com cannot have an affectionate local nickname in your columns and stories -- the New Candlestick perhaps. There is no reason why the Fleet Center cannot become the New Garden (pronounced without the "r" of course), and why the United Center cannot become New Chicago Stadium, or perhaps something better. This would be a service to sports fans -- at the most simple level they would know where you are talking about. How many of us can keep straight the corporate names that have no grounding in place in our minds. 3Com, Qualcomm -- who knows which is which? But more important is the role you can play in reclaiming this one vestige of sports tradition and memory from the marauders with deep pockets and shallow hearts. You can do this. No one can stop you. What good is freedom of speech if you are not willing to exercise it? The bases are loaded. It is the bottom of the ninth. Will you show the courage you expect of the players of whom you write? Sincerely, Gary Ruskin Director <-----------letter ends here----------> WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: 1) Call or email your favorite sportswriters and sportscasters. Ask them to call stadiums by their nicknames, not corporate names. 2) Call or email the sports editor of your favorite local newspaper, radio and tv stations. Ask them to castadium nicknames, not corporate names. 3) Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper encouraging them to use nicknames not corporate names. 4) Ask your friends and colleagues to call sports stadiums by their nicknames, not corporate names. Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Mon Jun 19 11:06:53 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from milan.essential.org (milan.essential.org [216.0.124.12]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2A7492A060 for ; Mon, 19 Jun 2000 11:06:53 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-7.essential.org [216.0.125.7]) by milan.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA29974 for ; Mon, 19 Jun 2000 11:06:51 -0400 Message-ID: <394E36E4.5380611A@essential.org> Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 11:06:12 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Raffi on advertising to children Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert June 19, 2000 Following is an op-ed by Raffi in the June 9 edition of the Toronto Globe & Mail. YES, WE HAVE NO ADVERTISING Efforts by big business to target youngsters as consumers must stop, says children's entertainer Raffi By Raffi Cavoukian Throughout my 20-plus years of making music for children, the core value at the heart of my work has been respect for the young child as a whole person. I have not accepted any offers to do commercial endorsements because I believe it's wrong to use one's popularity to sell products to a vulnerable audience. Last week, I made the difficult decision to cancel my concerts at the Vancouver International Children's Festival -- where I've often performed since 1979 -- to protest the overt commercialization of a festival once staunchly opposed to that idea. Festival organizers knew of my feeling that arts for the young and advertising don't mix. In recent years, when corporate logos crept onto the grounds, I continued to express my growing concern. This year, on the first day of the week-long event, I was stunned to discover that, for the very first time, there was a "presenting sponsor" -- an automobile company that was allowed to turn a portion of the festival site into an outdoor car lot with over a dozen vehicles and several large banners. I felt sick at seeing this and knew that I could not be a part of this blatant display of corporate sponsorship. I realized how disappointed my fans would be to learn we would not be singing together. However, there was an important principle to uphold on behalf of all children, and I trusted that parents would understand. In my public statements to explain my position I have said that corporate support of public events is fine, when necessary, provided it is done with sensitivity and acknowledged quietly. While bowing out of this year's festival was very painful, my spirits have been lifted by the strong positive support I have received. Perhaps the "branding" of this beloved children's festival in Vancouver -- unthinkable a few years ago -- is best understood as part of the multinational, global gold rush that currently draws waves of resistance worldwide. The fast-food hype, the celebrity-driven advertising, and the reach of corporate branding even into our kids' schools have pushed logos into every corner of our consciousness. It's getting on people's nerves. Is there a silver lining? This may be an issue that lights a fire with big smoke signals: Pervasive, bottom-line marketing demeans public spaces and diminishes community, and this is most visible in its impact on children. Advertising aimed at children is so prevalent in our lives that many people think it's okay. But child-development experts for years have said that ads on kids' TV shows, for example, constitute an unfair assault on impressionable minds that aren't old enough to appraise the sales pitch. And yet, every day, with the help of psychologists, big businesses wage media campaigns that target children from birth as consumers. We need to understand that this serves no one. It's wrong, and it must stop. Who will look after the children? Is it really so difficult for economists and legislators to envision a business ethic that favours the many? Do we lack the imagination to conceive of a society that respects its young, one that would therefore embrace an honourable protocol for commerce? We live in a time that many of the world's brightest minds regard as "condition critical" for the Earth and the life-support systems that sustain us. Now is the hour to put children first, to safeguard their lives (and ours) by creating a new code for commerce, and to fundamentally redesign relations between society's public and private sectors. It's a time for corporate humility and compassion. Corporate shareholders and CEOs must realize that all of us hold shares in a much greater venture -- our collective future on Earth -- and that the economic values we choose to support will largely determine the legacy we leave for generations to come. Let socially responsible businesses with "multiple bottom lines" deepen the dialogue. How do we reverse the corporate takeover of public spaces? How do we protect children from commercial exploitation? What's fair play between a company's right to do business and a young child's right to breathe freely? Do we have the courage to change the rules? Whether it's transforming corporate charters into rights-with-responsibilities covenants, or embracing an ecologically intelligent "Quality of Life Index" to replace the GDP, we can engage our duty to our children and create something new. We can take unprecedented steps toward a child-honouring society that enriches everyone. A member of the Order of Canada, Raffi Cavoukian is an internationally acclaimed singer, composer, performer and author. His autobiography, The Life of a Children's Troubadour, is published by Homeland Press. <----------article ends here-----------> If you want to thank Raffi for his efforts to protect children from commercial advertising, you can send him email at . Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Jun 28 14:51:33 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from milan.essential.org (milan.essential.org [216.0.124.12]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9478A2A05E for ; Wed, 28 Jun 2000 14:51:33 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-6.essential.org [216.0.125.6]) by milan.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA11633; Wed, 28 Jun 2000 14:51:28 -0400 Message-ID: <395A48EB.21D2119A@essential.org> Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 14:50:19 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Breaking The News: Do Media Mergers Really Undermine America's Democracy? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert June 28, 2000 Following is an excellent book review on media mergers in the June 25 edition of the Los Angeles Times. Breaking The News: Do Media Mergers Really Undermine America's Democracy? by Russ Baker http://www.calendarlive.com/calendarlive/books/lat_0625baker.htm These days, consumed with our own hectic lives, we seem able to apprehend only discrete events, not the big picture. Score: Trees 1, Forest 0. Take corporate mergers. Once they were big news, harbingers of powerful societal realignments to come. Lately, these organizational swallowings, hitch-ups and disembowelings have become so routine -- except as they relate to our investments -- that we scarcely consider their cumulative effect. Is this proof that we have become a nation of bookkeepers, with our eyes increasingly trained down at the bottom line or up at the clock? Or is our inability to focus on so serious a problem itself a symptom of the problem? Have we lost sight of what really matters in the stampede for personal and corporate gain, or are we merely buying the self-serving spin placed on mergers by the corporate interests behind them? While real democracy -- active participation in civic life and self-government by an informed, substantial part of the populace--may stand in real danger, the very institutions we traditionally count on to shout warnings from the ramparts have themselves become increasingly compromised. Anyone interested in understanding the consequences of this trend can turn to several recent books. Foremost among them is Robert McChesney's "Rich Media, Poor Democracy," which ranges broadly over the macrocosm of the information age. Three other books -- Michael Janeway's "Republic of Denial"; "The Business of Journalism," edited by William Serrin; and Jay Rosen's "What Are Journalists For?" -- fit inside like Russian nesting dolls, taking on narrower aspects of the nexus of commerce, politics and journalism. Together these books remind us that journalism can serve a greater purpose than offering tips on hard abs, hot stocks and summer blockbusters. McChesney explores what is unquestionably an ongoing assault on the reliability and independence of the media we count on to explain the world to us. He walks us through the increasingly complex relationship between music, movie, cable, telephone, radio, TV, newspaper, advertising, Internet providers and software companies, which together determine what we learn and how it is presented to us. As technologies converge and media companies merge, as information is sliced, diced, injected with ads and plumped for entertainment value, it becomes increasingly turned into a commodity, so that what is being sold subsumes what is being told. Thirty years after Marshall McLuhan became famous for saying it, the medium -- farther reaching than ever -- is more and more the message. McChesney also spotlights the federal government's rush to shed its role as guardian of public resources and guarantor of a vigorous and diverse press. Since 1934, when it officially opened up the airwaves to commerce while in the same breath declaring them public property, Washington has stood by as commercial media steadily advances upon the public sphere. The forward march turned into a mad dash in 1996, after the government deregulated cable and telecommunications industries and significantly relaxed broadcast cross-ownership rules. McChesney amply chronicles this long sorry history of abdication, which has left "We, the People" with virtually no say in three areas central to a modern functioning democracy: We are denied the right to choose what goes over limited "publicly owned" cables and airwaves. We do not determine who profits from technology developed with taxpayer funds. We have no part in deciding how much control of the media any one player gets. Recent events have corroborated his analysis. AOL swallowed Time Warner, Viacom devoured CBS and AT&T consumed MediaOne. Each deal took advantage of relaxed government regulations to aggrandize an existing media megalith. If all goes as planned, AT&T will control one third of the nation's cable network; four of the most mammoth media conglomerates will own six major TV networks; CBS-Viacom will reach (and surpass, if lobbying efforts are successful) the recently elevated government cap of 35% of the national audience; and the old-media giant Time Warner will emerge a more powerful new-media giant. While everyone was busy contemplating Los Angeles Times' then-publisher Mark Willes' emphasis on the bottom line at all costs--and the related, controversial profit-sharing pact between the Staples Center and The Times' Sunday magazine -- the paper's parent company, Times Mirror, got swallowed up by the Chicago-based Tribune Co. (That move, ironically, almost came as a relief after the ex-cereal executive's mercantile reign.) Tribune Co. adds The Times to a local empire that includes KTLA-TV Channel 5 and could conceivably include -- if the company chooses to purchase it--the Daily News of Los Angeles. (If anything bears out McChesney on the retreat of competition-minded government action, it is the fact that Tribune actually owned the Daily News until 1986, when it was forced to divest the paper to get KTLA. Now, pretty much anything goes.) McChesney, a communications professor and media historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is not a journalist, which may partly explain why he sees journalism as but an inseparable strand in an ever-more-tightly woven cloth of commerce. As such, he says, it is run according to the market-driven imperative of capitalism: more profit with less risk. The best way is to grow as large as possible. And not just big but tall, or "vertically integrated." The most powerful media companies not only produce content but also own the channels that distribute it. The excitement surrounding new technologies and the propagandistic rhetoric of "free trade" and the "marketplace of ideas" drown out concern about the meaning of "free media" in an oligopoly. This concentration in ownership, says McChesney, exacerbates the worst in existing media trends -- commercial exchange at the expense of public dialogue, advertising instead of education, entertainment rather than analysis -- making it no less than "a poison pill for democracy." Most journalists would resist McChesney's argument, saying their "objectivity" shields them from corporatization and conglomeration of the news business. But McChesney points out that journalism's much-acclaimed professionalization was part and parcel of these trends, rather than an enlightened in-house effort to protect and improve the craft by applying internal standards. "To the contrary," he says, "professional journalism emerged as a pragmatic response to the commercial limitations of partisan journalism in the new era of chain newspapers, advertising support, and one-newspaper towns." His conclusion: Reporters, however unbiased, cannot protect themselves from profit pressures or commercialization of the news. McChesney views modern journalism as an essential part of the corporate mechanism, whose owners rely on it to legitimize their product and, especially, to yield ripe synergistic opportunities. For McChesney, the only way journalism might become the independent and public-minded profession it should be is through drastic economic reform in media. He urges expansion of noncommercial and nonprofit media, establishment of an integrated public broadcasting network and strengthening of antitrust, cross-ownership and advertising restrictions on commercial media. These steps are necessary because our media system does not merely suffer the decline in representative democracy but has itself become "a significant anti-democratic force." Maybe his is not such a lonely cry in the dark. The government's lawsuit against Microsoft and the recent court ruling that the company must split into two will undoubtedly have significant consequences and they raise the question of whether a new will exists to put a halt to monopolistic practices. Besides the general antitrust implications, it is important to remember that Microsoft is not just a software company anymore: Its holdings of MSNBC and several of the world's largest photo archives, as well as its online magazine Slate, make it a prominent player in the world of journalism. The shadow of the media oligopoly extends beyond what were once largely in-house discussions of what's good and bad about contemporary journalism. Richard Reeves, a syndicated columnist and faculty member at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, argues in "What the People Know" that we are practically in a post-news era. Real news, he says, is that which "you and I need to keep our freedom--accurate and timely information on laws and wars, police and politicians, taxes and toxics." Classic good journalism, says Reeves, is anathema to media kingpins because it is controversial, expensive and not necessarily advantageous to the bottom line. Among his evidence: A quarter century ago, more than half the stories in major news outlets -- including The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times -- were straight news accounts; now only one in three is a hard news story. Over the same period, celebrity coverage tripled. From 1977 to 1987, Newsweek and Time reduced their public policy-oriented covers from one in five to one in 20. At the same time, real news is often relegated to the fringes of mainstream media. Recently thumbing through the Wall Street Journal, I spotted a two-inch news agency dispatch, squirreled away at the bottom of the business section's second page. Headlined "Groups Ask Agency to Reject AOL Deal," it contained a rare note of criticism -- a consumer coalition's warning that the buy-out should be rejected unless anti-monopolistic safeguards are imposed. Then came AOL's boilerplate response: The deal "would deliver tremendous benefits to consumers." The benefits were not mentioned, but we know what the company likes to tout: one-stop shopping; faster download time; all-in-one Internet, cable and phone service; and the convenience of, say, CNN viewable 24-7 over AOL. Apparently, not all consumers are convinced that these benefits outweigh the negative consequences to democratic media, but their voices have been so marginalized that hardly anyone will know it. Although the press is commonly characterized as a collection of bleeding heart liberals, McChesney argues persuasively that whatever journalists' personal politics, the media's dominant ideology is pro-market and business class-biased and rests on the assumption that the news business works just fine or, at most, requires only minor tinkering. Rosen, chair of the New York University graduate journalism department, is one of those with a plan for modest adjustment. Rosen is a founding member of the reform movement he calls "public journalism." His thrust is that standards of objectivity, accuracy and fairness are not the end of reporters' obligations. Journalists not only give the news but also craft a world. Rosen says they must encourage the public to engage in that world by reclaiming from corporate interests, campaign managers and PR spin-meisters the right to say what is important. If only journalism could get beyond horse race-style campaign coverage, spend less time investigating private foibles and more time reporting on public issues. Then, the thinking goes, faith in the profession might be restored and representative democracy rejuvenated to boot. Rosen describes the movement's high hopes: "Politics and public life, journalism and its professional identity, could be renewed along civic lines. . . . If citizens joined in the action where possible, kept an ear tuned to current debate, found a place for themselves in the drama of politics, got to exercise their skills and voice their concerns, then maybe democracy didn't have to be the desultory affair it seemed to have become." In "Republic of Denial," Janeway, director of Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Program and former Boston Globe editor, takes up where Rosen leaves off. He is more interested in the larger forces -- economic, social and, especially, political--that influence both journalism and civic life. Janeway sees the press as orbiting the political planet, roiling its waters yet forever in its pull. Both revolve around, and depend for their existence on, a lively public body. "The real problem, the very devil, is the fragmentation of society and the disintegration of political culture," he declares. And the bottom-line imperative of the corporate news business leaves no room for exploring ways to exorcise it. On the contrary, says Janeway, it "demands of the press that instead of considering the argument for combating social fragmentation, it figure out how to profit from it." Janeway holds little hope that good journalism alone can revive debate among an atomized public of individuals who, although greatly optimistic about their own futures, are surprisingly less so about that of their nation. (Perhaps not so surprisingly: Isn't this a foreseeable condition in a country with tens of millions of impoverished children for every Ted Turner? Maybe, but we don't see it that way.) We belong to a republic of denial, says Janeway, unlikely to awaken to the imperiled state of our so-called representative democracy, never mind mobilize for the political reforms--party, campaign, electoral and Constitutional--that might help save it. In William Serrin's "The Business of Journalism," the former New York Times labor reporter and ex-chair of the New York University graduate journalism department assembled a collection of essays that illustrate the wretched unwritten rules of the contemporary newsroom. These say, essentially, tread lightly on corporate interests (in-house and out), don't be too generous with time or money and stay within the ideological limits of the news business. Although Rosen argues that "journalism is neither a science nor a business," the first line of Serrin's introduction challenges that notion: "A nasty, unreported truth about journalism is this: Journalism is a business." Serrin knows it better than anyone: His former beat has shriveled in the blinding light of a booming economy fueled by dot-com fever and merger mania. As McChesney points out, our nation's daily newspapers today have hordes of business scribes but collectively employ fewer than 10 labor reporters. Cynics like Jack Shafer, writing for Slate (the ultimate in new media hybridization), like to accuse reformers of yearning for a golden age of journalism that never existed. All of the authors discussed here would agree there was no golden age. But, as Serrin's collection shows, that doesn't mean the business hasn't been transformed. The biggest changes are in ownership concentration, mounting profit pressures, the profession's socioeconomic elevation, growing (but still inadequate) newsroom diversity and eroding public trust. Contrary to the belief that reporters operate within some sort of magic bubble that insulates them from all outside influence, contributors to "The Business of Journalism" show that changes like the ones described above affect newsroom operations as well as reporters' sense of ethics and professionalism. After all, notes Serrin, journalists are often their own severest censors. If so, then it takes a nonjournalist like McChesney to get the big picture. Something of an unapologetic alarmist and political radical, he favors language like "socialism" and "solution is left reform. . . ." That's scary to a lot of people but probably not as scary as a world in which a handful of like-minded people control all media. As McChesney points out, the annual private Idaho retreat, at which the heads of major media companies--Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corp., Sony and Microsoft included--meet to discuss their industry and strategize for the future, bears "the earmarks of a cartel." It's hard to imagine that Americans of any political or philosophical bent would be comfortable living in what McChesney argues is our future. Some may find his prognosis overly pessimistic. But every thinking person is likely to agree that a serious start needs to be made somewhere. Journalists engaging other journalists in discussions of purpose, à la Rosen, is one approach. A more consequential strategy is to press top public figures to acknowledge the gravity of the threat to our democracy. We might begin by asking someone other than Ralph Nader if he or she thinks this matters at all. Perhaps Al Gore and George W. Bush would like to distinguish themselves by taking on a truly presidential challenge. Russ Baker writes frequently on the media for the Columbia Journalism Review. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire and The New Republic. Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times <----------article ends here-----------> To read more of Russ Baker's work, see his web page at . Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Jul 12 12:50:33 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from milan.essential.org (milan.essential.org [216.0.124.12]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D77852A05E for ; Wed, 12 Jul 2000 12:50:33 -0400 (EDT) Received: from essential.org (ppp-5.essential.org [216.0.125.5]) by milan.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA28960 for ; Wed, 12 Jul 2000 12:50:11 -0400 Message-ID: <396CA16A.615D1948@essential.org> Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 12:48:42 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Coalition wants schools to stop pushing junk food on children Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert July 12, 2000 To reduce childhood obesity, Commercial Alert, child advocates, public health professionals, food safety groups and media scholars today asked key Members of Congress to get the public schools to stop promoting junk food to schoolchildren. The letter to Senate and House Agriculture Committee Chairmen Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Larry Combest, (R-TX) and Ranking Members Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Charles Stenholm (D-TX) says that in thousands of schools "corporations and school administrators have joined together to market high-calorie, caffeinated, high-sugar candy and soda pop to impressionable children," which contradicts the purposes of the National School Lunch Program. The letter follows. Dear Chairmen Lugar and Combest, and Ranking Members Harkin and Stenholm: When he signed the National School Lunch Act into law in 1946, Harry Truman said that "no nation is any healthier than its children." Later that year, Truman expanded on this theme. "The well nourished school child is a better student," Truman said. "He is healthier and more alert. He is developing good food habits which will benefit him for the rest of his life. In short, he is a better asset for his country in every way." Congress enacted the National School Lunch Act to achieve the goal that President Truman articulated so well. The Act established the National School Lunch Program "to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation's children." After extensive hearings, and reviews of statistical surveys of students, Congress concluded that children learn better on a healthy diet. In its report on the bill, the House Committee on Agriculture wrote: "The educational features of a properly chosen diet served at school should not be underemphasized. Not only is the child taught what a good diet consists of, but his parents and family likewise are indirectly instructed." In its own report, the Senate Committee on Agriculture noted that "proper nutrition is essential for the health and well-being of a child and for his growth and development as a citizen." For decades, the School Lunch Program has served this nation well. It has provided tens of billions of healthful meals to the nation's schoolchildren. In recent years, however, the goals of the School Lunch Program have come under increasing attack, and the culprits are the recipients of these federal dollars -- that is, the public schools. In Fiscal Year 1999, schools happily accepted $7.4 billion in taxpayer funds to carry out the federal school food programs. Yet thousands of those schools have openly defied the intent of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees, and Congress as a whole, in providing those dollars, by encouraging school children to eat junk food. In these schools, corporations and school administrators have joined together to market high-calorie, caffeinated, high-sugar candy and soda pop to impressionable children. Propaganda touting the consumption of junk food is now commonplace in the nation's schools. About 12,000 schools show Primedia's Channel One, an in-school marketing program disguised as a news show, which features a parade of ads for junk food and soda pop to a contractually obligated captive audience of about eight million school children. In recent months, Channel One has used the public classrooms to promote Snickers, Twix, M&M's, Pepsi, Hostess Cakes, Milky Way, Doritos, Mountain Dew, Nestle's Crunch, Skittles and others. This propaganda campaign for bad nutrition is intensifying. Soda pop is an example. Advertising Age reported last year that "In the last 18 months alone, the number of exclusive soda contracts in school districts has increased nationwide 300%, to 150." According to Channel One's Teen Fact Book 2000, schools sell soda pop as their "top beverage product," and the top food products sold are potato chips, tortilla chips and cookies. It is probably no accident that childhood obesity has become a major public health problem in the United States. An article in the October 27, 1999 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association notes "alarming increases in obesity among children and adolescents," and an accompanying editorial remarks on the role of the "marketing of snack foods" in the obesity epidemic. In 1998, Surgeon General David Satcher observed that many young people in America today are "starting out obese and dooming themselves to the difficult task of overcoming a tough illness." These young people will subject themselves and the whole society to enormous costs. One recent study estimates that the total annual cost of obesity in the United States is nearly $100 billion, for diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, as well as extra visits to doctors, bed-rest and lost work days. This is exactly the kind of result that Congress intended the School Lunch Program to avoid. It sought to promote healthful eating habits so that young Americans could grow up to be contributors to society, not medical burdens upon it. Yet that is what the public schools -- schools that accept millions of dollars in Lunch Program funds -- are promoting. To its credit, Congress wisely reserved for itself full authority over the educational aspects of the Lunch Program. It specifically prevented the Secretary of Agriculture from getting involved in this area. In other words, the ball is in your court, and if you do not act now, the problem will likely grow worse. Of course, local school administrators can put commercial propaganda in their schools if they wish. That's for them to decide. But it's for Congress to decide whether it will continue to lavish hundreds of millions of dollars in school lunch funds upon schools that are violating the very purpose for that program -- for money. School administrators shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways. They shouldn't be able to take federal money for school lunches, and then take money or products from corporations to subvert the purposes of the lunch program. Actions have consequences, and that applies as much to school administrators as to anyone else. If these people are not willing to abide by the purposes of the School Lunch Program -- that is, the "improvement of the health and well-being of the Nation's youth"-- then perhaps they should pay for their own lunch program. Federal taxpayers deserve better, and so do the nation's youth. Sincerely, Joan Almon, U.S. Coordinator, Alliance for Childhood Susan Berkson, Metro Coordinator, Minnesota Children's Health Environmental Coalition Brian Burt, Professor of Epidemiology, University of Michigan School of Public Health Dr. Brita Butler-Wall, School of Education, Seattle University Jackie Hunt Christensen, Director, Food Safety Project, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Ronnie Cummins, National Campaign Director, Organic Consumers Association Roy F. Fox, Associate Prof. of English Ed. & Lit., University of MO-Columbia; author, Harvesting Minds Rose E. Frisch, Associate Professor of Population Sciences Emerita, Harvard School of Public Health Todd Gitlin, Professor of Culture, Journalism and Sociology, New York University; author, The Twilight of Common Dreams Joan Gussow, M. S. Rose Professor Emeritus, Nutrition and Education, Teachers College, Columbia Univ. Jane M. Healy, author, Failure to Connect Carol Holst, Program Director, Seeds of Simplicity Amid I. Ismail, Professor of Cariology, Restorative Sciences and Endodontics, University of Michigan Michael F. Jacobson, Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest Carden Johnston, Chair, Task Force On Commercialism in Schools, Alabama Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics Norman M. Kaplan, Clinical Professor of Internal Medicine, Univ. of Texas Southwestern Medical Center Timothy J. Kasser, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Knox College David L. Katz, Director, Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center Jean Kilbourne, author, Deadly Persuasion Rebecca T. Kirkland, Professor of Pediatrics, Chief of Academic Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine Ronald M. Krauss, Head, Dept. of Molecular Medicine, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Jane Levine, Co-founder, Kids Can Make A Difference Bob McCannon, Executive Director, New Mexico Media Literacy Project Robert McChesney, Research Associate Professor, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy Bernard McGrane, Associate Prof. of Sociology, Chapman Univ.; author, The Un-TV and the 10 Mph Car Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc. Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University Alex Molnar, Director, Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Marion Nestle, Chair, Department of Nutrition & Food Studies, New York University Neil Postman, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University; author, Amusing Ourselves to Death Eric Rimm, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health Thomas N. Robinson, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine, Stanford Univ. School of Medicine Douglas Rushkoff, author, Coercion and Media Virus Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum Juliet Schor, Senior Lecturer on Women's Studies, Harvard University; author, The Overspent American Mary Story, Professor of Public Health Nutrition, Division of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota Betsy Taylor, Executive Director, Center for a New American Dream David Wall, President, Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools Donald E. Wildmon, President, American Family Association <-----------letter ends here--------> FOR MORE INFORMATION Commercial Alert's web page on the marketing of junk food to schoolchildren is at WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: Contact the members of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees that represent your state. Please tell them to get the public schools to carry out the healthful intent of the National School Lunch Program and stop promoting junk food to schoolchildren. The Congressional switchboard phone is (202) 224-3121. To find the fax numbers and e-mail addresses of Members of Congress, see . Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Republicans Lugar, Richard (IN), Chairman Helms, Jesse (NC) Cochran, Thad (MS) McConnell, Mitch (KY) Coverdell, Paul (GA) Roberts, Pat (KS) Fitzgerald, Peter (IL) Grassley, Charles (IA) Craig, Larry (ID) Santorum, Rick (PA) Democrats Harkin, Tom (IA) Ranking Member Leahy, Patrick (VT) Conrad, Kent (ND) Daschle, Thomas (SD) Baucus, Max (MT) Kerrey, Bob (NE) Johnson, Tim (SD) Lincoln, Blanche (AR) House Agriculture Committee Republicans Combest, Larry (TX - 19) Chairman Barrett, Bill (NE - 3) Vice Chairman Boehner, John (OH - 8) Ewing, Thomas (IL - 15) Goodlatte, Bob (VA - 6) Pombo, Richard (CA - 11) Canady, Charles (FL - 12) Smith, Nick (MI - 7) Everett, Terry (AL - 2) Lucas, Frank (OK - 6) Chenoweth, Helen (ID - 1) Hostettler, John (IN - 8) Chambliss, Saxby (GA - 8) LaHood, Ray (IL - 18) Moran, Jerry (KS - 1) Schaffer, Bob (CO - 4) Thune, John (SD - At Large) Jenkins, William (TN - 1) Cooksey, John (LA - 5) Calvert, Ken (CA - 43) Gutknecht, Gil (MN - 1) Riley, Bob (AL - 3) Walden, Greg (OR - 2) Simpson, Mike (ID - 2) Ose, Douglas (CA - 3) Hayes, Robin (NC - 8) Fletcher, Ernie (KY - 6) Democrats Stenholm, Charles (TX - 17) Ranking Member Baca, Joe (CA - 42) Condit, Gary (CA - 18) Peterson, Collin (MN - 7) Dooley, Calvin (CA - 20) Clayton, Eva (NC - 1) Minge, David (MN - 2) Hilliard, Earl (AL - 7) Pomeroy, Earl (ND - At Large) Holden, Tim (PA - 6) Bishop, Sanford (GA - 2) Thompson, Bennie (MS - 2) Baldacci, John (ME - 2) Berry, Marion (AR - 1) McIntyre, Mike (NC - 7) Stabenow, Deborah (MI - 8) Etheridge, Bobby (NC - 2) John, Christopher (LA - 7) Boswell, Leonard (IA - 3) Phelps, David (IL - 19) Lucas, Ken (KY - 4) Thompson, Mike (CA - 1) Hill, Baron (IN - 9) Baca, Joe (CA - 42) Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Aug 2 16:19:54 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id A968C2A061 for ; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:19:53 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 30476 invoked by alias); 2 Aug 2000 19:31:08 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 2 Aug 2000 19:31:08 -0000 Message-ID: <398881BC.A3432FC7@essential.org> Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2000 16:17:00 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Creeping commercialism at NPR Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert August 2, 2000 Is the creep of commercialism overtaking National Public Radio (NPR)? In its latest step away from its public mission, NPR is planning to spin off its online presence, NPR Online, into an operation that would include for-profit elements. NPR hasn't made its plans for NPR Online available to the public. But insiders say they will likely include for-profit marketing, distribution and e-commerce, as well as banner ads and a mechanism for equity participants. This raises questions about whether NPR is once again turning its back on its non-commercial mission, and how NPR will shield its editorial content from the influence of advertisers. NPR's Board of Directors has not yet made final decisions on how to structure its online presence. Other options under discussion include purely for-profit and non-profit models. "NPR is engaged in intensive discussions with its board and member stations about how we might expand our online presence," said NPR spokeswoman Siriol Evans. The lead advocate for commercializing NPR Online is M. J. Bear, Vice President for NPR Online. Under the most likely plan, visitors to the NPR Online site would see banner ads before they could get to the news. Essentially, NPR Online would become a for-profit filter through which listeners would have to wade to reach the non-commercial editorial content. NPR's internal discussions about its website take place against a backdrop of growing commercial values at NPR, including the increasing use of airtime to play "underwriting credits" which are really corporate advertising, and NPR's lobbying (with the National Association of Broadcasters) against non-commercial low-power FM radio. NPR is so worried about public opinion regarding its steps toward commercialism that it has conducted focus groups to probe public sentiment about the commercialization of NPR. Please tell NPR that you want it to retain its public, non-commercial mission - both on the radio and the Internet - and that NPR Online should be non-commercial. Please call, write or email NPR President & CEO Kevin Klose (202-414-2010, kklose@npr.org) and NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin (202-414-3246, ombudsman@npr.org) to express your concern about plans for commercializing NPR Online, and NPR in general. In an age of alarming concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few large corporations, and the decline of public spiritedness in the commercial media, we need bona fide public radio - that is, non-profit radio that accepts no advertising or corporate grants - which would be free of commercial limitations over editorial content. --------------------- Following is an article from the July 29 edition of the Los Angeles Times. NPR May Net Profit By Jube Shiver National Public Radio is considering spinning off its online operations into a profit-making enterprise to help defray the cost of running the nonprofit public radio network. "NPR is engaged in intensive discussions with its board and member stations about how we might expand our online presence," said NPR spokeswoman Siriol Evans. NPR, a network of 644 radio stations, launched NPR Online six years ago. The Web site, which offers newscasts, commentaries and live audio events, attracts 350,000 visits per week and a source close to the network said NPR hopes to make money selling advertising and making merchandising deals. But some critics say such a move could erode NPR's public trust. "It will devalue the brand of NPR as an independent source" of news and information, said Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert, an advertising watchdog group affiliated with Ralph Nader. -------article ends here-------- Following is an article about corporate advertising on NPR, from the Washington Post, May 21, 1999. And Now a Word About Our Sponsor; Critics Say Public Radio's On-Air Credits Come Too Close to Commercials By Frank Ahrens Garrison Keillor was the center of attention in a bar at the Washington Hilton the other night. It was the opening night of the annual public radio conference and almost everyone wanted to glad-hand Mr. Wobegon and lavish embarrassing platitudes on public radio's biggest--and perhaps tallest--star. But the meaningful dialogue was going on in a corner of the bar, where some station representatives were discussing Lands' End clothing--the sole corporate sponsor of "A Prairie Home Companion." At the beginning of his shows, Keillor intones: "Brought to you by Lands' End, the people who put great casual clothes at your fingertips." "Can they say 'great'?" asked one station representative in the bar. "It's part of the slogan. You can say the slogan," another replied. "But it's qualitative language," parried the first. And on it went. This Talmudic exchange illustrates an increasing nervousness among public radio people, lawmakers and, most important, listeners: nervousness over corporate funding, called by some "underwriter anxiety." Corporations pay for about 15 percent of public radio programming--a small piece of the funding pie, but the fastest growing: One survey shows a 700 percent increase in corporate funding over the past six years. (By comparison, the nation's more than 600 public radio stations get about 14 percent of their total funding--about $ 60 million this year--from the federal government, a percentage that has remained essentially the same over the last decade.) And the number of program breaks for sponsor announcements has risen from one or two per hour to as many as five. "Corporate support has shifted radically in the past two years" at WAMU (88.5) in Washington, says Kim Hodgson, station president and chairman of the National Public Radio board of directors. "It has gone up significantly." Bob Edwards, host of NPR's "Morning Edition," is even blunter: "Underwriting has kept us alive," he says. But there's also a downside, he says: "It has cut into our air time. If you have to read a 30-second underwriter credit, that's less news you can do." WAMU lists 53 corporate underwriters on its Web site, ranging from Microsoft to Intelsat to American College of Nurse-Midwives. WETA (90.9), the other public broadcaster in Washington, lists 50 public and private underwriters, including Lockheed Martin, Wolf Trap and Chevy Chase Bank. By comparison, WBUR radio in Boston, which aggressively pursues corporate underwriting, lists 315 sponsors on its Web site. The frequency of sponsor announcements isn't the only concern. There is also the issue of content. On some stations, underwriter credits sound like commercials, a trend that troubles listeners, recent surveys show. FCC regulations limit what corporations can say during their promos. No "buy this" pleadings. No price information. And no "comparative or qualitative" language--hence the bar debate over the word "great" in the Lands' End promo. Stations can, however, say the company's slogan. And they can give out telephone numbers and Web addresses, just like on commercial radio. The increase in corporate sponsorship has its origins in 1995, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed cutting all public broadcasting funding. That experience energized public radio to aggressively pursue corporate money, lest they wander into the congressional cross hairs once again. WAMU, for instance, has seen its underwriting grow from $ 526,000 in 1995 to an estimated $ 2.2 million this fiscal year. Most of the increase has come from corporate sponsors. (A one-time, 10-second announcement on "Morning Edition" costs $ 325.) At WETA radio and television, the figures grew from $ 16.5 million in 1995 to $ 18.6 million last year. The attraction is mutual. Corporations love to advertise on public radio, which owns perhaps the most cherished demographic around: well-educated, upper-middle-class listeners who have expensive tastes and the money to indulge them. Moreover, they trust public radio much more than other listeners trust commercial radio, a sentiment borne out in listener surveys. Corporations hope some of that trust rubs off on them when they sponsor shows. But listeners chafe when they hear too many underwriter credits. How many is "too many" is unclear. A 1998 study by Audience Research Analysis of Rockville found that 77 percent of public radio listeners think "the on-air mentions of business support are getting more prevalent than in the past." And 35 percent of those surveyed found the promos "more annoying" than in the past. "As long as our messages are not so intrusive and overextended beyond what listeners think is reasonable" they are willing to accept underwriting credits, says Jim Harman, manager of corporate advertising for General Electric, which sponsors public radio and TV shows. "The question is: At what point, contextually, do we start to run into problems with station managers and listeners?" Harman says his company has not sensed "underwriter anxiety," but that may be because GE has been sponsoring public broadcasting for nearly three decades. In addition to objecting to the mere presence of corporate underwriting, people sometimes bristle when the "wrong" corporations sponsor their favorite shows. Example: Angry listeners called WAMU several years ago when they heard that a show was sponsored by the National Agricultural Chemical Association, which advertised its products as "safe." WAMU worked with the organization to omit the word "safe." Calls slacked off, though Hodgson doesn't know if that was prompted by the omission or because the group changed its name to the National Crop Protection Association. WAMU took more flack last year for accepting sponsor money from the Nuclear Energy Institute--the lobbying arm of the atomic power industry. The ads with its slogan--"nuclear technology contributes to life in ways you probably never thought of"--aired during NPR's "Morning Edition." Upset listeners mistakenly thought the spots were being read by "Morning Edition" host Edwards and mounted a modest e-mail campaign suggesting that NPR was in the pocket of the nuclear industry. The ads, which also appeared on commercial radio stations here, were read by WAMU's Bill Redlin, who the station says is not a journalist but an announcer who reads underwriting promos as well as traffic reports and news headlines. Still, public radio managers are constantly working on inventive ways around the FCC rules, creating promos laden with adjectives and lengthy explanations: "the blue-chip company" and "18 million customers worldwide" and "converting natural gas to sulfur-free synthetic fuels." Some promos are so obscure as to be rendered impotent, providing their own unintentional guard against commercialism: "Support for National Public Radio comes from Archer Daniels Midland Company--bringing Novasoy-brand isoflavones to consumers throughout the United States." Regardless of their clarity, the increasing frequency of underwriters' messages prompted two congressmen--Billy Tauzin (R-La.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.)--to draft a bill last year that would tighten the FCC rules, essentially allowing underwriters to have only their names read on air. The bill would also deliver up to a 60 percent increase in federal money for public radio to compensate for the likely funding loss from corporations. Though the legislation died last year (Tauzin plans on reintroducing it), its mere existence is significant: Ten years after President Reagan said public broadcasting should consider airing commercials and five years after Gingrich threatened to kill all public funding, some members of Congress are worried that public radio may be becoming too commercial. It's not just lawmakers and listeners who are taking note of the advertising on public radio. Because public radio is tax-exempt, some commercial broadcasters feel it's unfair that public stations can air what essentially is the same advertising and not have to pay the same taxes. "It's not an even playing field," says Jim Farley, vice president for news at WTOP (1500 AM). Farley recently "took a page out of NPR's playbook," he says: His reporters got new Cellular One cell phones in return for an on-air credit. The increased presence of corporate underwriters has led some listeners and even those within public radio to fear that underwriters might influence the news coverage in the segments they sponsor. A three-part series that begins airing next week on "Marketplace," a business show produced by Public Radio International, finds little evidence that corporate underwriting has affected news coverage. Still, the series notes that "Marketplace" itself aired stories about General Electric being indicted for price fixing but largely ignored a 1990 boycott of the company by people who objected to its participation in the nuclear weapons industry. The show's general manager now calls that lapse a "mistake." GE provides more than a quarter of the funding for "Marketplace. But for all the fear of Big Business meddling, the biggest threat to editorial content comes not from corporations but from philanthropic foundations, says J.J. Yore, a "Marketplace" producer. "Foundations have a point of view, and they ask, 'Are you covering health issues,' for instance, and 'Is it appropriate coverage?' " says Yore. "Then they can weigh their funding that way." Public radio star Garrison Keillor puts in a plug for Lands' End at the start of "Prairie Home Companion." -------article ends here------- Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Sep 7 11:25:07 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CCFE52A063 for ; Thu, 7 Sep 2000 11:25:06 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 12434 invoked by alias); 7 Sep 2000 14:48:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 7 Sep 2000 14:48:26 -0000 Message-ID: <39B7B280.8B78498@essential.org> Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 11:21:36 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Demonstration against marketing that exploits children Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert September 7, 2000 On September 14th, A group of educators, physicians, psychologists, parents and child advocates is holding a demonstration against corporate marketing that exploits children. Please come. Details are below. MEDIA ADVISORY WHAT: Demonstration against marketing that exploits children WHO: Educators, physicians, psychologists, parents, child advocates WHERE: Grand Hyatt Hotel, 42nd Street between Lexington and Park Avenues, New York City; in front of the "Golden Marble Awards" for children's advertising which is "celebrating excellence in...advertising targeted at kids." WHEN: Thursday, September 14, 2000 News conference: noon, room #1401 Demonstration: 11:00 A.M.-2:00 P.M., outside 42nd Street entrance WHY: Corporate advertising harms millions of children by promoting violent entertainment, junk food, alcohol, tobacco, materialism, addiction and anti-social behavior. We are protesting corporate exploitation of children at the "Golden Marble Awards" and the "Advertising & Promoting to Kids Conference" to teach marketers how to "get...into the heads of kids." CONTACT: Diane Levin, PhD, Wheelock College, (617) 879-2167 Susan Linn, EdD, Harvard Medical School, (617) 232-8390 x2328 Alvin F. Poussaint, MD, Harvard Medical School, (617) 232-8390 x2303 Allen Kanner, PhD, Wright Institute, (510) 526-8613 <--------media advisory ends here------> FOR MORE INFORMATION: A flier about the demonstration is at and a letter from Diane Levin is at . WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: 1) Please come to the demonstration; and, 2) Send this note around to others who might want to come to the demonstration. Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and advertising. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Mon Sep 11 14:29:49 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CFC532A31F for ; Mon, 11 Sep 2000 14:29:48 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 17821 invoked by alias); 11 Sep 2000 17:54:33 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 11 Sep 2000 17:54:33 -0000 Message-ID: <39BD23B3.3D45F611@essential.org> Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 14:25:55 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Commercial Alert Urges Swift Action to Protect Children from Media Companies Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert September 11, 2000 The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today released its long-awaited report on the marketing of violent entertainment to children . Our statement is below. NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release: For More Information Contact: Monday, September 11, 2000 Gary Ruskin (202) 296-2787 Commercial Alert Urges Swift Action to Protect Children from Media Companies Following the release of today's scathing Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report on the "Marketing of Violent Entertainment to Children," Commercial Alert called for media companies to immediately stop marketing violent entertainment to teenagers and children, and demanded action to protect children from the predatory marketing practices of the entertainment industry. The FTC report "shows that the entertainment industry and its advertising surrogates are strenuously pushing a toxic culture on vulnerable and unsuspecting youth," said Gary Ruskin, Director of Commercial Alert. "They are at war with American parents; they have no respect for families and the sanctity of the household. And they have no shame." The FTC report concludes the entertainment industry promotes violence to children in a deliberate and calculating manner. "Members of the motion picture, music recording and electronic game industries routinely target children under the age of 17 as the audience for movies, music and games that they themselves acknowledge are inappropriate for children or warrant parental caution due to their level of violent content," the report states. "The target marketing of R-rated films, explicit-labeled music, and M-rated games to children under 17 is pervasive, and the target marketing of PG-13 rated films and T-rated games to children under 12 is common." The entertainment industry treats children's minds "like oil fields or gold mines to be exploited for profit," Ruskin said. While the FTC report provides useful detail about the marketing practices of the movie, video game and music industries, it fails parents by recommending "tried and failed" techniques of industry self-regulation to halt the aggressive marketing of violent entertainment to children. "The FTC's toothless recommendations are a recipe for inaction, and a pathetic gesture that will make possible the continued profiteering from sales of violent products to children," Ruskin said. "Once again, parents see a system that shows more concern for corporations that prey on children, than for children themselves," Ruskin said. "Parents pay taxes and they deserve something in return – certainly more than this." Commercial Alert urges immediate action to help parents fend off the aggressive marketing of violent entertainment to their children: * The President should issue an executive order stating that the federal government will not contract with any advertising agency that produces ads for violent entertainment, nor purchase advertising on any television program that is violent, or contains ads for violent entertainment. * Congress should require music company CEO's to recite and distribute the lyrics for each label's top ten selling songs at annual shareholders meetings. * Political parties should refuse and refund soft money campaign contributions from companies that produce violent entertainment. * Congress or the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should require TV stations to run public service announcements, as a condition of licensure, about the health hazards of watching violent programming before any violent program, or any ad for violent entertainment. * Congress should restore the FTC's power to regulate advertising to children as an unfair act or practice, and affirmatively direct the FTC to undertake such action to protect children, and provide funding to enable it to do so. * The Surgeon General should launch a campaign to reduce children's demand for violent entertainment. * Corporations should make available to parents, upon request, all advertising of violent entertainment that targets children. Commercial Alert works to restrain the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism. Commercial Alert's web page is at . -30- <------------------------> FOR MORE INFORMATION: See Commercial Alert's web page on media violence and children, at . The FTC's report is available at: . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Sep 14 10:58:22 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 23EE62A05E for ; Thu, 14 Sep 2000 10:58:22 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 30391 invoked by alias); 14 Sep 2000 14:24:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 14 Sep 2000 14:24:03 -0000 Message-ID: <39C0E691.AE51BB7E@essential.org> Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 10:54:09 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: GAO Report Shows Most Kids Not Protected from Ads in Schools Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert September 14, 2000 The US Government Accounting Office released a report today on "Commercial Activities in Schools." It is available at Our statement is below. NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release: For More Information Contact: Thursday, September 14, 2000 Gary Ruskin (202) 296-2787 GAO Report Shows Most Kids Not Protected from Ads in Schools A U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report released today shows that few states or local school boards make any real effort to protect students from the drastic increase in commercial advertising in the public schools. In response, Commercial Alert demanded action to stem this tide and to give parents and children more power to fight it. The GAO report, titled "Commercial Activities in Schools," found that "In-school marketing has become a growing industry. Some marketing professionals are increasingly targeting children in school, companies are becoming known for their success in negotiating contracts between school districts and beverage companies, and both educators and corporate managers are attending conferences to learn how to increase revenue from in-school marketing for their schools and companies." The report found that only "19 states currently have statutes or regulations that address school-related commercial activities, but in 14 of these states, statutes and regulations are not comprehensive..." "Parents beware: public schools are permitting commercial advertisers to have free access to children, and do little to prevent it," said Gary Ruskin, Director of Commercial Alert. "Many public schools even show ads to promote violent entertainment, junk food, video games, and other products parents may not want their children to have." This year, broad coalitions of progressive and conservative organizations, educators and scholars urged schools to get rid of Channel One, a marketing company that has enlisted schools to compel about eight million children to watch two minutes of ads each school day. A similar coalition has challenged the ZapMe! Corp for its efforts to turn school computers into ad-delivery systems which extract information from unsuspecting children for market research purposes. A coalition of progressive and conservative organizations and health professionals recently called attention to the way many public schools aggressively market high-calorie junk food, even as childhood obesity is skyrocketing. "While marketers have tried to turn the public classrooms into free-fire zones for corporate advertising, few states and school boards have protected vulnerable schoolchildren from these commercial invasions," Ruskin said. "Most states and local school boards haven't done their job. It is time for Congress to step in." Commercial Alert opposes the use of the compulsory school laws to deliver a captive audience of schoolchildren to corporate advertisers. Commercial Alert supports state legislation and local policies to prohibit schools from contractually obligating students to watch commercial advertising during school time. It also supports federal legislation to make such prohibitions, as a condition of receiving federal education funds. Given the desperate lack of funds in many public schools, Congress "ought to spend some of the budget surplus on the public schools, so that children won't have to attend schools that are multiplexes of commercialism," Ruskin said. "A little extra money could reduce the temptation for the schools to sell their kids to advertisers." Commercial Alert works to restrain the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web address is . The GAO report is number GAO/HEHS-00-156. It was requested by Rep. George Miller and Sen. Christopher Dodd. It is available at . -30- <--------release ends here----------> Following is Rep. George Miller's news release on the GAO report. NEWS FROM REPRESENTATIVE GEORGE MILLLER (D-CA) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, September 14, 2000 CONTACT: Daniel Weiss, 202/225-2095 FIRST EVER CONGRESSIONAL STUDY OF COMMERCIAL ACTIVITIES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS FINDS ADVERTISING AND OTHER CONTRACTS ON THE RISE, SCHOOL POLICIES UNEVEN WASHINGTON - Advertising on school buses and in classrooms, exclusive soda contracts, Channel 1, and other forms of commercial activities are widespread and increasing in public schools, yet policies governing these practices are incomplete or nonexistent, according to a government report released today. The General Accounting Office (GAO) report requested by two Members of Congress is the first comprehensive congressional investigation of commercial activities in the classroom, a rapidly growing trend that can reduce instructional time and pose risks to student learning and privacy. The trend also raises larger questions about the role and influence private parties should have on public education. "This report indicates that many schools and parents are not prepared for the onslaught of marketers trying to reach the lucrative youth market through the classroom," said Congressman George Miller (D-CA), who requested the report along with Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT). "Parents, school officials and policy makers should take a close look at school policies on commercialism and make informed decisions about what they want children exposed to at school. If schools are going to encourage students to drink soda at 9:00 in the morning, for example, parents might want to be made aware of that fact," Miller said. "What is becoming clear is that companies are seeking to exploit the educational platform of our schools to launch the sale of their products," Miller added. "This week's FTC report on entertainment targeted to kids, for example, noted that records and movies with inappropriate explicit lyrics were promoted in school settings with no indication that parents were aware of it. Ultimately, commercialism in schools is yet another way in which the parent-child relationship is interfered with by corporate interests." The GAO report analyzed commercialism laws in all 50 states and in seven school districts in California, Michigan and New Mexico. The GAO found that policies are uneven and inadequate. According to the GAO, "laws and regulations governing commercial activities in public schools are not comprehensive" and sometimes "lacked formal guidance." The GAO reported that only "19 states currently have statutes or regulations that address school-related commercial activities." Further, state policies are often limited in scope and vary widely. For example, Michigan laws do not address commercial activities at all, while New Mexico's only law on the subject expressly permits advertising in and on school buses. In contrast, GAO found that five states - California, New York, Florida, Illinois, and Maine - had comprehensive policies, meaning they authorized or restricted three or more types of commercial activities. New York law generally prohibits commercial activities on school premises and California law requires school boards to conduct open public hearings before approving many types of commercial contracts. Laws in Florida, and Maine expressly permit districts or superintendents to enter into various commercial agreements. GAO found that local policies also varied widely, leading many decisions to be made on an ad hoc basis. In addition, the GAO raised concerns that school district policies have not yet adapted to changes in commercial technologies, noting that "none are targeted towards newer forms of media-based advertising, such as those delivered by Channel One and ZapMe!" "We recognize and deplore the financial constraints most American schools face today," added Miller, a senior member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "But it would be a mistake to suggest that commercial contracts can make up the whole difference without having additional ramifications. Children are distracted enough as it is without being further enticed by computer pop-up ads for jeans and sneakers, or campus billboards boasting soft drinks and candy. Miller and Dodd requested the report after learning of numerous examples of commercialism in schools: * A Colorado school district administrator sent a letter urging principals to allow students virtually unlimited access to Coke machines and to consider allowing drinks in classrooms to increase sales and therefore profits for the school. * A student in Georgia was suspended for wearing a Pepsi shirt on school-sponsored "Coke Day." * The roof of a Texas school is painted with the Dr. Pepper logo to be seen by passing planes. * Classroom material sponsored by Exxon teaches how the Valdez spill was a great example of environmental protection. * School buses in a Colorado district are covered with Old Navy and 7-Up logos. * A Math textbook teaches students about fractions by having them calculate how many kids prefer the Sony Play Station to Sega Saturn. * Channel One provides 2 minutes of commercial advertising to 40 percent of middle and high school children every day. "We plan to look closely at the issues raised by the GAO report and the response of state and local governments to ensure that learning, not commerce, remains the priority in school," Miller said. "If there is a reasonable balance that can be achieved we need to know what that is. Right now, it is clear that commercialism is increasing without much knowledge of its breadth or impact on our schools." Earlier this Congress, Miller and Dodd introduced legislation to protect student privacy from market researchers. Their bill, the Student Privacy Protection Act, would require parents' permission before children can participate in commercial market research in school, such as cereal tasting, monitoring web browsing habits, or opinion surveys. None of the districts visited by GAO have polices that specifically address market research. "The GAO's findings demonstrate the need for Congress to pass our student privacy bill," Miller said. The GAO report is available on Miller's website at www.house.gov/georgemiller/, under "What's New." ### <-------release ends here--------> FOR MORE INFORMATION: See Commercial Alert's website at . WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: * Tell your local school board members, state legislators and Members of Congress to adopt strong policies to protect children from commercial advertising and market research in the public schools, and to oppose the use of the compulsory school laws to deliver a captive audience of schoolchildren to corporate advertisers and market researchers. Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Fri Sep 15 15:50:12 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 9A9A62A05E for ; Fri, 15 Sep 2000 15:50:11 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 5418 invoked by alias); 15 Sep 2000 19:09:39 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 15 Sep 2000 19:09:39 -0000 Message-ID: <39C27ACD.B6FE3183@essential.org> Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 15:38:53 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Commercial Alert Praises Bush For Encouraging Children to Watch Less TV Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert September 15, 2000 NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release: For More Information Contact: Friday, September 15, 2000 Gary Ruskin (202) 296-2787 Commercial Alert Praises Bush For Encouraging Children to Watch Less TV Commercial Alert congratulated Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush for encouraging students to read books instead of watching television, and urged Bush to articulate what he would do as President to get children to read more and watch less TV. According to a report by the Associated Press, today Bush "stopped at Central Elementary School, a predominantly Hispanic school where he urged third-graders in a reading class to pick up a book instead of watching TV." "Bush has hit upon a major education reform that would help improve the moral tone of the country," said Gary Ruskin, Director of Commercial Alert. "But how will Bush translate that thought into action?" "If children read more and watched less TV, they would learn more and would be less exposed to the toxic culture of violence, crassness and materialism that the media companies are producing," Ruskin said. "The best answer to violence and crassness in the media is to turn off the media. Bush is onto something here," Ruskin said. "The question is, is this just typical politician talk, or does he really mean it? And if he means it, what is he going to do?" Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web address is . -30- <--------release ends here---------> FOR MORE INFORMATION: See Commercial Alert's web pages on television at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Mon Sep 18 17:03:25 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 069EC2A060 for ; Mon, 18 Sep 2000 17:03:25 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 18861 invoked by alias); 18 Sep 2000 20:30:33 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 18 Sep 2000 20:30:33 -0000 Message-ID: <39C681EC.EFB1CE4C@essential.org> Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 16:58:20 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: For Honest Government, Turn Off Your TV Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert September 18, 2000 For Honest Government, Turn Off Your TV By Gary Ruskin As the 2000 election campaign heats up, millions are bracing for the barrage of obnoxious political ads that are starting to fill our homes. They are feeling a sense of hopelessness about the political morass and corruption, and wondering if there is something -- anything -- they can do to clean it up. Well, there is. We don't have to wait for the politicians to take action. We can do it tonight, in our own homes. Without spending a penny or losing a moment of time. (In fact we'll gain time.) It's so simple. We can just turn off our televisions. Put them in the basement or the closet. Perhaps even throw them out. It's do-it-ourselves campaign finance reform. Here's how it works. The tube is a prime culprit in the corruption of American politics. The high cost of the TV ads drives the money orgy that has swallowed Washington. "Television advertising is the greatest single force increasing the price of political campaigns," the Washington Post says. Enormous sums are needed to buy TV ads, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a national, prime-time 30-second spot. The money comes mainly from corporations and wealthy special interests, in exchange for political influence. Former Democratic fundraiser Johnny Chung said it best: "[T]he White House is like a subway -- you have to put in coins to open the gates." This year's elections will be the most expensive in history. No matter who wins, fat cat donors will have more influence than ever, and ordinary citizens less. It looks like Congress won't solve the problem that it itself helped to create, so it's time to take the matter into our own hands. It would be so easy. Turn off the TV. If a thirty-second spot appears and no one's watching it, then does it really appear? If fewer people watch, then TV will lose its influence in the political arena, and politicians will spend less money on it. Who is going to spend a fortune to run TV ads that no one sees? The campaign money might get spent on other things. But the other things don't cost as much. So campaigns would become less expensive, and the role of money would become smaller. This could make a big difference in the quality of our government. It could bring other benefits too. If we watch less TV, we'll avoid the nasty political ads that have become the common currency of political campaigns. People often forget that the ugliness of politics today is largely a phenomenon of television. In person, politicians usually try to be as nice as Mr. Rogers. That's why they hire actors to do the dirty work in the ads -- they want to keep their own images clean. To stop watching would be a good way to tell politicians that we are fed up with the mudslinging and character assassination, and the hired media hit-men. The whole tenor of the campaign season might improve. The best part is, there's virtually nothing to lose. Network television is nothing to write home about. Most local news is pathetic and getting worse. "If it bleeds, it leads," the saying goes. The campaign "news" has been squeezed into the same pattern. In 1968, the average presidential campaign sound bite on network news was 43 seconds. In 1996 election, it dropped to 8.2 seconds. Third graders communicate in longer segments than that. Regrettably, it isn't likely to get much better. Every technology has predispositions -- "The medium is the message," as Marshall McLuhan said -- and the predisposition of television is to dumb down whatever it touches. The tube must "suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business," Professor Neil Postman observes in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. So to smart-up political campaigns, we need to turn off the thing that is doing the most to dumb them down. Might as well read a newspaper instead. When we disengage from the forces that are wrecking our politics, we render them impotent. We can do this ourselves. By cleaning up our politics, we'd improve our lives as well. -30- <----article ends here----> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. For more information, see our website at , and our web page on television at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Sep 21 11:32:18 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 70BD62A060 for ; Thu, 21 Sep 2000 11:32:17 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 23988 invoked by alias); 21 Sep 2000 15:00:17 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 21 Sep 2000 15:00:17 -0000 Message-ID: <39CA28DA.F3759AFC@essential.org> Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 11:27:22 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: e-marketing to children Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert September 21, 2000 Following is a rare glimpse into the shrouded world of conferences on marketing to children. Kudos to the San Francisco Bay Guardian for getting the story. http://www.sfbg.com/News/34/51/51ogdigi.html Dot-com marketers descend on S.F. By A. Clay Thompson, San Francisco Bay Guardian If you have children, be afraid. Be very afraid. Internet marketing gurus are busy cooking up online schemes to drain kids' piggy banks – not to mention their parents' credit cards. Spending a few hours at "Digital Kids," the two-day e-marketing confab held in San Francisco Sept. 12 and 13, made that crystal clear. Sponsored by Jupiter Communications, a leading tech consulting firm, the forum brought the heavyweights of the dot-coms-for-kids set to the posh Argent Hotel to talk shop and pitch product. Surrounded by some 400 new-economy players – think young white people in semicasual attire punching data into PalmPilots – I caught the keynote. "In simple terms we all know that kids are surfing the Web in record numbers – but translating this traffic into profits is quite a different matter," offered speaker John Barbour, a Scot who heads ToysRus.com. "I can see a number of you thinking right now, 'Wow, with all these kids surfing the Web, there's got to be a lot of cool business opportunities.' " But right now minors account for only 1 percent of online toy sales, Barbour lamented. "Most kids and teens don't have credit cards to make online purchases," he said. Luckily for Barbour and colleagues, a host of savvy start-ups like Rocketcash.com and MainXchange.com are tackling that problem by offering kiddie e-commerce services. Rocketcash is a debit system – mail in a check or money order and start spending at more than 100 online stores, including Backstreet Boys Direct and DesignerOutlet.com! The site offers "RocketFuel Reward Points" for big spenders. MainXchange boasts auctions, a Wall Street game, and even real stock-market investing, as well as e-money. To broaden its reach beyond the home PC, the company is working with schoolteachers to get its stock-trader game into the classroom. "We're in schools in 44 states," marketing vice president Gayle A. Keck told me. "I was surprised at how interested even younger kids are in the stock market. They really are like little stockbrokers." At a panel called "Learning for Profit: The Web and Educational Content," Tom Kalinske, president of Knowledge Universe, kicked off the discussion with discouraging statistics: "Only 10 percent of high school graduates can write a coherent, grammatically correct paragraph." The silver lining: with parents spending $19 billion annually on learning products, "the kids business," as Kalinske dubbed it, is booming. These "sad facts," Kalinske said, "lead up to a huge market opportunity" for companies such as Knowledge Universe and BigChalk.com. Knowledge Universe – a $1.8 billion outfit bankrolled by junk-bond ex-con Michael Milken – sells a huge array of educational products, many of them computer-based. BigChalk's site aims for kids, librarians, teachers, and parents, offering a workable, semi-organized search engine and online shopping mall. BigChalk, like many of the dot-coms on display at "Digital Kids," hopes to fill its coffers with taxpayer loot by selling Web-based teaching products to school districts. But BigChalk CEO John Lynch complains, "This is not a market opportunity without its challenges. The school building is actually viewed as sacred ground not to be defiled by crass commercialism. And that's not the view just held by the majority of teachers; that's the view held by the majority of educators and the majority of parents, too." The day after Lynch's speech a group of 80 educators and youth advocates, including professors from UC Berkeley and Stanford, released a 99-page report arguing that wiring classrooms is a waste of money that actually hinders learning. Dan Pelson, CEO of Bolt, a teen chat room destination, said his site had sculpted chats to provide market research for Ford, a major advertiser. "When they [young people] get in there and say, 'The Ford Focus sucks,' that is invaluable to Ford," Pelson told listeners. While almost all the panelists were highly caffeinated Caucasian alpha males like Pelson, the company show-and-tell booths upstairs were staffed by bouncy young women. Virginia Ginsberg, a P.R. flack for Your Own World, showed me the company's playful, preteen-focused CD-ROM – which promptly crashed. The "interactive environment" features constantly updated banner ads on nearly every page. "The advertisements make a lot of parents uncomfortable,"Ginsberg told me. But, she said, Your Own World gives kids an out: click on the banners, and they mutate into video games or animated movie trailers. Later, at a panel titled "Targeting Teen Shoppers," another executive sounded the battle cry: "We are here to suck the money out of their pockets!" <-----article ends here-------> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Fri Sep 22 15:58:53 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 882792A3C3 for ; Fri, 22 Sep 2000 15:58:52 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 1639 invoked by alias); 22 Sep 2000 19:27:13 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 22 Sep 2000 19:27:13 -0000 Message-ID: <39CBB8BF.4F958DFA@essential.org> Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 15:53:35 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Stop peddling junk food to children, Commercial Alert tells publishers Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert September 22, 2000 Following a report in today's New York Times that some book publishers are promoting toddler-targeted books that advertise junk food, Commercial Alert asked American Association of Publishers President Pat Schroeder to "remind the publishing industry that it exists for the nurture of children and not the commercial exploitation of them." The letter follows. Dear Ms. Schroeder: During your career in the U.S. House of Representatives, you built a reputation as an advocate for children, and you deserved it. As Chair of the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, you worked hard for the Family and Medical Leave Act, among many other important causes. That work included your efforts to protect children from the machinations of advertisers and marketers. For example, in 1992, you and three House colleagues asked RJR Nabisco to stop their lethal Joe Camel campaign. You work showed an awareness of the importance of nutrition to child health. For example, in 1991, you proposed an amendment to authorize a federal government-funded study on the "general health and well-being of adolescents." In your floor speech in support of the Schroeder Amendment, you said you wanted an investigation of "the health-promoting and health-threatening behaviors in which adolescents engage" -- including, specifically, "nutrition." The wheel has come around in a way that probably causes you great personal chagrin. As you know, publishers have begun to use children's books as advertisements for junk food. These books feature junk foods as characters and often involve activities that require the parent to purchase the product. "[S]nack-brand children's books have exploded in the last two years into a genre all their own," The New York Times reports, "as Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Scholastic have all jumped into the field. Millions of copies have been sold, with a full shelf of new titles on the way." The Times article notes that food companies see the books as a splendid vehicle for marketing junk food to toddlers. "‘It is a great way to get the Froot Loops brand equity into a different place, where normally you don't get exposure — taking it from the cereal aisle and into another area like learning,' said Meghan Parkhurst, a spokeswoman for Kellogg..." Publishers such as Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Scholastic are promoting junk food to vulnerable and unsuspecting children at a time of skyrocketing childhood obesity. About one in every five children now falls into that category. Childhood diabetes is rising too. Dr. Robin S. Goland, co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center told the Times in 1998 that "With the numbers we're starting to see, this could be the beginning of an epidemic." These book publishers are plainly exploiting children for commercial gain. Miriam Bar-on, the chairwoman of the public education committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics told the Times, "I think the whole thing is revolting, to be targeting these little kids with that kind of marketing." No less important, these publishers are degrading the concept of publishing itself. If publishers are now hucksters, and books are just ads, then we aren't just sliding down the slope. We've already hit bottom. Which means, of course, that this is a good time for your industry to pick itself up. Toddlers and children need your help once again. Please do everything in your power to urge the publishers towards the high road. Someone has to remind the publishing industry that it exists for the nurture of children and not the commercial exploitation of them. Publishers should be providers of mental and emotional nourishment, not junk food. Sincerely, Gary Ruskin Director <-----letter ends here-------> WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: Please ask American Association of Publishers President Pat Schroeder to make sure that book publishers stop peddling junk food to children. Pat Schroeder's phone is (202) 347-3375, fax is (202) 347-3690 and email is . Following is today's New York Times article on snack food books for toddlers. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/22/business/22TODD.html Snack Foods Become Stars of Books for Children By David D. Kikpatrick As the host of the "Bring Your Own Baby" reading group at the Enchanted Forest bookstore in Dallas, Susan Minshall meets plenty of parents anxious to start their toddlers reading — and to make them sit still. So she recommends the newly published "Kellogg's Froot Loops! Counting Fun Book," which invites toddlers to insert the sugary cereal in cut-out holes in its cardboard pages. "I call this a going-out-to-dinner book — you have your kid sitting in a highchair and it is something to do," she said. "And it is a great way to begin getting them started reading because eating is when they will pay attention." This fall, parents and teachers can choose from a sudden proliferation of books starring brand-name candies and snacks like Froot Loops, Cheerios, M & M's, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, Reese's Pieces, Skittles, Hershey's chocolates, Sun-Maid raisins and Oreo cookies. Introduced six years ago by a Massachusetts nursery school teacher, snack-brand children's books have exploded in the last two years into a genre all their own as Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Scholastic have all jumped into the field. Millions of copies have been sold, with a full shelf of new titles on the way. Random House planned its first entry this year — a book based on Taco Bell's fast food and Chihuahua mascot — until Taco Bell pulled the dog from its commercials. The publishers and authors pay a licensing fee to the food companies, who see a novel opportunity to market to toddlers. "It is a great way to get the Froot Loops brand equity into a different place, where normally you don't get exposure — taking it from the cereal aisle and into another area like learning," said Meghan Parkhurst, a spokeswoman for Kellogg, adding that the company also provides Froot Loops book covers to schools. But not everyone is pleased to see brand-name snacks invading the world of books. Publishers have based children's books on characters from movies and television for years, but have only recently turned to brand-name foods known mainly from commercials. Some parents, educators and pediatricians object that the books will engrave snack- food brands in toddlers impressionable minds, hook them on junk food, and lead to eating problems later in life. "It's offensive. I wouldn't let my kid anywhere near books like that," said Marit Larson of Manhattan, mother of a 2-year-old son. The books have met some resistance from specialty children's bookstores. Some, including Books of Wonder and the Bank Street children's bookstore in New York, have refused to stock many of the titles. "I think it is such an abuse — manipulating your audience when they don't have the ability in any way to assess," said Ann-Marie Mott, lower school coordinator at the Bank Street School for Children. Miriam Bar-on, the chairwoman of the public education committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a professor of pediatrics at Loyola University in Chicago, said, "I think the whole thing is revolting, to be targeting these little kids with that kind of marketing." In addition to building positive associations with foods of little nutritional value that may damage children's teeth, she said, the books encourage parents to reward their children with treats, which creates a psychologically fraught relationship with food. "You want to use food for nutrition — you don't want food to seem more powerful than it is," she said. She also warned that toddlers could choke on small candies like M & M's. But plenty of parents and teachers are embracing the new genre. Several titles have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the last year alone. The best-selling food book, "The Cheerios Play Book," sold more than 1.2 million copies in the last two years. "We love them," said Judy Kelley, a kindergarten teacher at the Lilja school in Natick, Mass. "You hate to always use food, but it is such a hit with the kids because they can count them and then it is so rewarding for them to eat them." Kelly Eshback, head of the parent- teacher organization at the Florence Rideout Elemenatry School in Wilton, N.H., said the books turned snack and cereal advertisements to a worthy purpose. "Any book that they recognize for whatever reason and read and enjoy is a good thing," she added. "I guess product names are a way of life for us now." The boom in brand-name-snack books began with Barbara Barbieri McGrath, the nursery school teacher in Wellesley, Mass., who discovered in 1982 that her students' interest perked up at brand names they recognized from advertisements. She composed a little poem about M & M's to teach children to count. "I just made M & M's with construction paper because you can't feed chocolate to 4- and 5-year-olds, then I laminated them so the kids thought they were really special," she said. She and her husband, a carpenter, set out to turn the idea into a book, but their initial efforts foundered. No one had heard of publishing children's books so similar to advertising. Even after her husband signed a deal with Mars to use its M & M's trademark, 35 publishers turned them down, she said. Finally, in 1992, a friend referred her to nearby Charlesbridge Publishing. In 1994, Charlesbridge published the "The M & M Brand Counting Book" in hardcover and paperback, and it quickly became the house's best-selling title. More than one million copies have been sold, along with a small-size board book for toddlers and special editions for Halloween and Christmas, with Valentine's Day and Easter editions on the way. All help teach hand-eye coordination and simple concepts like counting and colors by asking children to count the candies or place them on the pages of the books. The holiday books include cutout spaces for the candies. After the success of the first M & M's books, Mrs. McGrath quit her teaching job to make a career out of writing snack-brand children's books for a variety of publishers, including eight M & M's editions; five Cheerios editions, including Spanish-language versions; a Kellogg's Froot Loops book; three Pepperidge Farm Goldfish books; Skittles books in hardcover and paperback; a Hershey Kisses board book; and a Necco Sweethearts book. The pages of the board books are covered in plastic, so smudged chocolate or grease wipes away. Trademark owners are always allowed to approve the books' contents before publication, Mrs. McGrath said. Hardcover books sell for about $10, and paperbacks for about $5. She says that she usually pays half her royalty rate — typically 15 percent of the cover price on hardcover books and 7 percent on paperbacks — to the brand's owner, after paying the company an upfront advance, too. "People always say, `How much are they paying you to advertise for them?' but that's not how it works," she said. In fact, she often feels the cereal and candy makers fail to appreciate the marketing her books provide. "I think the fees should come down, because these books take the brands to a place they ordinarily can't get to. They can't usually get to the books parents read their kids and they can't get to advertise in schools. You can't come in and blast the kids with advertising in those places, and these books are actually getting the exact target age group." After the success of Mrs. McGrath's M & M's book, several other authors started writing similar books of their own, and Simon & Schuster's children's division decided to get into the act. "A big part of our business is brand-oriented in terms of media tie-ins like `Rugrats' or `Blue's Clues,' so we thought, what other brands are important that we could translate into wholesome books for kids?" said Robin Corey, publisher of Simon & Schuster's novelties and tie-ins division. "We knocked out dozens of brands because we felt they might not be parent-endorsed — overly sweet candies or cereals, or cookies that weren't wholesome all-American enough." The company decided to start with Cheerios. Simon & Schuster's Cheerios book, designed by the publisher's art director, Lee Wade, pioneered the addition of cutouts for inserting pieces of cereal, and quickly became a runaway best seller. More than 1.2 million copies are in print. It far outsold Mrs. McGrath's own Cheerios book, published by Scholastic at the same time in the fall of 1998. General Mills, which licenses the Cheerios name for both editions, declined to tell Scholastic about Simon & Schuster's book, said Bernette Ford, editorial director of Scholastic's Cartwheel Books imprint. Since the success of the Cheerios book, food companies started to take notice of the untapped potential in children's books. Candy, cookie, cereal, and snack makers deluged publishers with proposals for books based on their products. "I broke a crown on a piece of sticky candy that came with one proposal," Ms. Corey said. "Our editorial staff is about 50 pounds heavier." Publishers are scrambling to find products that fit the bill. Simon & Schuster followed up its Cheerios success with books on Sun-Maid raisins. Charlesbridge moved from M & M's to Skittles. Scholastic began a series based on Hershey's Kisses and other candies. HarperCollins jumped into the field with Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, Kellogg's Froot Loops, and, soon, Necco Sweetheart candies. Publishers also began expanding upward from toddlers into books for children in elementary school, too, including "Reese's Pieces: Count by Fives," the "Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar Fractions Book," and "Skittles Math Riddles." Ms. Corey said Simon & Schuster still limited itself to "wholesome" foods, like Oreos, which are featured in "The Oreo Cookie Counting Book" the company is publishing this fall. It teaches children to count down from 10 cookies to `'one little Oreo . . . too tasty to resist." Most publishers are blasé about introducing books that look like advertisements into the highchair and the classroom. "The whole issue of the commercialization of children's books, that came a lot of years earlier," said Susan Katz, publisher of HarperCollins children's division. But some publishers are not proud of it. "Its not that these books resemble advertising — they are advertising. They are P.R. for the food manufacturer and as such they are vaguely reprehensible," said Kate Klimo, publisher of Random House's children's books division, which recently canceled the series of books based on Taco Bell's Chihuahua."Now just watch me get a deal with one of them," she added with a laugh. <------article ends here------> Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web site is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Sat Sep 23 14:13:42 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 06C5F2A05E for ; Sat, 23 Sep 2000 14:13:42 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 23434 invoked by alias); 23 Sep 2000 17:42:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 23 Sep 2000 17:42:29 -0000 Message-ID: <39CCF1A3.A90BA838@essential.org> Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 14:08:35 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Shielding Children Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert September 23, 2000 Following is a op-ed by Susan Linn and Diane Levin about the commercial assault on children, in the Sept. 22 edition of the Christian Science Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/09/22/fpcon-edit.shtml Shielding Children By Susan Linn and Diane E. Levin It's rare that an award ceremony should be cause for alarm. But the third annual Golden Marble Awards, the advertising industry's celebration of successful marketing to children, ought to worry anyone concerned about our children's well-being. This year the ceremony was held in New York on Sept. 14 – the same day the federal government published a report documenting the rapid growth of marketing in schools, and four days after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its findings that media companies deliberately market violence to children. Marketing to children has become so pervasive that the ad world apparently thinks it warrants a separate awards ceremony. These awards honor artistry without questioning the ethics of marketing to children. The annointed commercials may be brilliantly designed and executed, but the praise is bestowed without regard for the way ads manipulate children or for how the products affect children and families. Kids are barraged with advertising from the moment they wake up until bedtime. Corporations spent more than $12 billion in 1999 marketing to children. They're bombarded with products linked to TV characters, toy giveaways at fast-food chains, and product placements in movies and television. Children see 30,000 commercials annually on television alone. And there's growing evidence that it's harmful to them. Last month, after reviewing 1,000 studies conducted over 30 years, a coalition of professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, linked violent media to aggressive behavior. Yet professional wrestling programs, which are rated TV-14, and violent movies such as "X-Men" (rated PG-13) peddle violent action figures to preschoolers. As the recent FTC report confirms, the entertainment industry intentionally markets violent content to children through products it officially rates as unsuitable. At a time when childhood obesity has become a major public health problem, the fast-food industry is the biggest advertiser on television. McDonald's alone spends $6 million a year on advertising. Studies show that obese children are more susceptible to the "feel good" messages embedded in advertising. At the same time, advertisers present children with models who are impossibly slim. Over one-third of girls in grades 5 to 8 report dieting in the last year, and studies document that discontent with body images rises with exposure to fashion magazines. Advertising even affects the way children play. The most advertised, bestselling toys are linked to media programs. Yet children often play less creatively with toys based on characters from television and film. Young children are vulnerable to marketing exploitation. They tend to believe what they see, they don't understand that ads are meant to sell them something, and they have trouble differentiating between commercials and programming. The deregulation of children's television in 1984 made it possible to use programs to promote toys, further blurring the line between ads and shows. In addition, companies now wield increasingly sophisticated technology, extensive market research, and the expertise of child psychologists. Today, children influence purchases totaling about $500 billion a year – a sure sign of corporations' success. The ubiquitous media, combined with virtually unrestricted marketing practices, makes obsolete the conventional wisdom that parents can protect their children from commercial culture. To some extent, parents can mitigate the effects of marketing, but unless families retreat to the woods, children are exposed at friends' houses, on the street, the playground, supermarkets, and even in school. That companies get awards for doing the best job of manipulating children into buying things is emblematic of a consumer culture that is out of control. Parents need help from policymakers to protect children from this unprecedented assault. The White House should lead the way by convening a conference on corporate marketing and its effects on children to serve as a springboard for national dialogue and lay the groundwork for creating appropriate policy. The National Institutes of Health should fund research on the psychosocial and health consequences of intensive marketing to children. Children pay for advertising. They pay with their safety, their health, and their creativity. Why should the industry reward itself for succeeding at a practice that exploits society's most vulnerable members? The Third Annual Golden Marble Awards should be the last. Susan Linn is associate director of the media center at Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston. Diane E. Levin is a professor of education at Wheelock College in Boston and author of 'Remote Control Childhood' (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1998). <-----article ends here-----> Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web site is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Tue Sep 26 09:36:30 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D40442A05E for ; Tue, 26 Sep 2000 09:36:29 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 17456 invoked by alias); 26 Sep 2000 13:06:13 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.225.137) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 26 Sep 2000 13:06:13 -0000 Message-ID: <39D0A525.6B61FCAE@essential.org> Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 09:31:17 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Fun with Duk and Jin Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert September 26, 2000 Following is a column by Frank Lingo in today's Kansas City Star. . Fun with Duk and Jin By Frank Lingo See Dick buy See Dick jump. See Dick jump like Mike when he wears Nikes. See Jane run. See Jane run like Ms. Jones when she wears Nikes. See Dick and Jane dream. See Duk work. See Duk stack shoes on ships for squat. see Jin sew. See Jin sew for a dollar a day. See Duk and Jin's nightmare. See Tiger make millions. See Nike make billions. See moms spend a hundred on two-buck shoes. See kids stuck on status. See kids forgetting fun. See kids watch TV in school. See junk-food ads on school TV. See exclusive deals for pop in schools. See kids get fat and dumb. See companies get rich. See kids watch TV at home. See kids love talking frogs. See kids think beer is fun. See parents not notice. See Bud cultivate customers. See the people of Philip Morris. See them finally retire Joe Camel. See a generation think Joe was cool. See 3,000 American kids start smoking today. See what you can do about it. See Philip Morris around the world. See African billboards of smoking white Americans. See Marlboro sponsor concerts. See Marlboro pass out free cigarettes. See, the first one's free, kid. See an average T-shirt. See Tommy print "Tommy" on it. See it triple in price. See Tommy laugh all the way to the bank. See focus on fashion defy reason. See violence in movies and video games. See ads for them on shows kids watch. See Congress and candidates harrumph. See them take money from movie makers. See Congress and candidates cave. See our children's unformed minds. See our children's trusting hearts. See their minds become addicted. See their hearts designed to fear. See us lose our children. <------article ends here------> Frank Lingo's column appears in the Kansas City Star on alternate Tuesdays. To reach him, send e-mail to franklingo@earthlink.net. Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web site is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Sep 28 19:42:09 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from milan.essential.org (milan.essential.org [216.0.124.12]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A72682A060 for ; Thu, 28 Sep 2000 19:42:09 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (gary@localhost) by milan.essential.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id TAA28432 for ; Thu, 28 Sep 2000 19:42:09 -0400 Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 19:42:09 -0400 (EDT) From: Gary Ruskin To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Subject: Commercial Alert praises Hillary Clinton's proposed ban on ads to preschoolers Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Commercial Alert September 28, 2000 NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release: For More Information Contact: Thursday, September 28, 2000 Gary Ruskin (202) 296-2787 Commercial Alert Praises Hillary Clinton's Proposed Ban on Ads Targeted at Preschoolers Commercial Alert applauded First Lady Hillary Clinton for proposing to ban advertising targeted to preschoolers, and asked her to explain her ideas in greater detail. According to yesterday's New York Times, Mrs. Clinton said "Too many companies simply see our children as little cash cows that they can exploit." "Mrs. Clinton's worthy proposal should have been enacted by Congress years ago," said Gary Ruskin, Director of Commercial Alert. "Preschoolers desperately need protection from corporations that promote our noxious culture of violent entertainment, video games, gambling, materialism, alcohol, junk food and tobacco. But older children are vulnerable and need these safeguards too." "Parents can't cope with the fusillade of ads on their own, " Ruskin said. "They just need help." Mrs. Clinton also proposed a ban on advertising in public elementary schools. Such a proposal apparently would not substantially affect Channel One, an in-school marketing company based in New York that compels 8 million children to watch two minutes of ads each school day. "Mrs. Clinton proposal would be a small step forward, but ought to be extended to older children too. The public classrooms are for learning, not advertising." "Mrs. Clinton ought to explain precisely what she would do to protect children from the influences of corporate advertisers," Ruskin said. "For example, would she support a ban corporations such as Channel One, ZapMe! Coca-Cola and Pepsi from marketing in the public schools? Would she prohibit the use of the public schools to promote violent entertainment?" Last year, Commercial Alert wrote a letter, signed by sixty psychologists, asking the American Psychological Association to protect children against the use of psychology to influence or exploit children for commercial purposes. The letter is at . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism. Commercial Alert's web address is . -30- <--------news release ends here------> Following is an excerpt of the September 27 edition of the Bulletin's Frontrunner. Hillary Proposes Ban On Ads To Young Kids. The New York Times (9/27, Nagourney) reported, "Declaring that advertisers were directing a 'barrage of materialistic marketing' at young children, Hillary Rodham Clinton today called on the Federal government to ban commercials aimed at preschool children, and to prohibit advertising inside public elementary schools." Mrs. Clinton "said the Federal Trade Commission should be authorized to ban advertising that it determines is intended for young children susceptible to manipulation. She also called for legislation that would prohibit the marketing of materials to children in elementary schools, as on book covers with advertisements." Mrs. Clinton said, "Too many companies simply see our children as little cash cows that they can exploit. We know that advertisers target the youngest of our children. Imagine. They are advertising to children who have not yet even reached kindergarten. They are trying to get these children to be influenced in what they want to buy and own." The New York Daily News (9/27, Lewine, Siegel) reported, "Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed banning all TV advertising directed at preschoolers yesterday and making public elementary schools ad-free zones." With her proposals yesterday, the First Lady "again borrowed from the playbook of her husband, who scored points embracing such popular, narrowly drawn issues as school uniforms and the V chip for TV sets. In seeking to limit TV ads aimed at preschoolers, Clinton reopens a debate that raged when the Federal Trade Commission under President Jimmy Carter was slapped down in its attempt to enact such curbs. Under her proposal, the FTC would have the power to halt any such commercials. " Clinton also "blasted a new generation of marketing and advertising in elementary schools, such as free curriculum materials sponsored by McDonald's and ads through media such as Channel One and the Internet service ZapMe!" <------article ends here------> Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Sun Oct 1 13:42:48 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 22B452A05E for ; Sun, 1 Oct 2000 13:42:48 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 30049 invoked by alias); 1 Oct 2000 17:14:15 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 1 Oct 2000 17:14:15 -0000 Message-ID: <39D77645.845D6B9B@essential.org> Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2000 13:37:09 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Sen. Brownback carries water for company that promotes violent entertainment to schoolchildren Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert October 1, 2000 Conservative and progressive organizations and scholars criticized U.S. Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) for his work as "chief Senate apologist" for Primedia's Channel One, which "exploits children for commercial gain" by compelling them to watch advertising in schools, including ads for violent entertainment. The letter follows. September 29, 2000 Dear Senator Brownback: We are disappointed that you have become the chief Senate apologist for Primedia's Channel One, a marketing company that uses the schools to bypass parental authority and promotes violent entertainment to school children. As you know, Primedia's Channel One, under the guise of a news show, delivers two minutes of advertising each schoolday to a captive audience of approximately eight million children in 12,000 schools. Joel Babbit, then-president of Channel One, explained in 1994 why advertisers like Channel One: "The biggest selling point to advertisers [is] . . . we are forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials. Many parents detest Channel One because it directly undercuts their authority. Essentially, Channel One is a vehicle for advertisers to promote in schools what many parents wouldn't allow into their homes. For example, in recent months, Channel One has advertised violent movies such as "Supernova," "The Mummy," and James Bond "The World is Not Enough." You have spoken in public on behalf of parents against the promotion of violent entertainment to children. We expected that you would seek to support the authority of parents in this matter as well. Instead, we find you working on the side of those who wish to bypass parents and promote violent entertainment to vulnerable schoolchildren. The opposition to Channel One is large and growing. For example, in June, 1999, the Southern Baptist Convention, which represents the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, passed a resolution urging community leaders to remove Channel One from the schools. Channel One is a big step in the wrong direction for children, schools and taxpayers. 1. Channel One uses the compulsory attendance laws to force children to watch ads. 2. Channel One wastes precious school time. Channel One consumes the equivalent of one instructional week of school time each school year, including one full day watching ads. 3. Channel One helps advertisers bypass parents to promote products which parents may not approve of, such as exorbitantly expensive athletic sneakers and violent movies. 4. Channel One wastes tax dollars spent on schools. A 1998 study by Max Sawicky and Alex Molnar, titled "The Hidden Costs of Channel One," concluded that Channel One's cost to taxpayers in lost class time is $1.8 billion per year. 5. Channel One may harm children's health. Channel One advertises Snickers, Twix, M&M's, Pepsi and other junk food to children in classrooms. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported last year that "Obesity is epidemic in the United States." Obesity is a major public health problem. Given skyrocketing levels of childhood obesity and diabetes, it is insanity for schools to encourage children to develop poor eating habits. 6. Channel One -- not parents or school boards -- decides its ads and program content. Channel One violates the principle of local control of education. Parents should be able to choose who may affect their children's lives, not Channel One. 7. Channel One undermines parents' efforts to teach positive values to their children. Channel One teaches a curriculum of materialism, that buying is good, and will solve your problems, and that consumption and self-gratification are the goals and ends of life. 8. Channel One corrupts the integrity of public education and diminishes the moral authority of schools and teachers. In effect, Channel One appropriates the authority of schools and teachers and transfers it to advertisers for these controversial products. Schools implicitly endorse the products that Channel One advertises. You defend Channel One because it delivers anti-drug messages to children. Even if such messages were effective, there are other ways to deliver anti-drug messages that do not undermine parental authority the way Channel One does. Channel One's blatant commercializing of the schools outweighs -- and perhaps even undercuts -- any merit that its anti-drug messages might otherwise have. Parents need your help, Senator. We need you to help parents control the influences on their own children. Please reconsider your position on Channel One, and fight for parents and children -- not an anti-family corporation that exploits children for commercial gain. Sincerely, Bob McCannon, Executive Director, New Mexico Media Literacy Project Robert McChesney, Research Associate Professor, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy Jim Metrock, President, Obligation Inc. Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, President, American Family Association <------letter ends here--------> WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: Contact Senator Brownback and ask him to: 1) Withdraw his support for Primedia's Channel One; and, 2) Eliminate all federal funding for Primedia's Channel One. Senator Brownback's phone is (202) 224-6521, fax (202) 228-1265 and email is . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web page on Channel One is at and its website is at Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Oct 18 10:39:47 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 589E02A32A for ; Wed, 18 Oct 2000 10:39:47 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 23103 invoked by alias); 18 Oct 2000 13:42:41 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 18 Oct 2000 13:42:41 -0000 Message-ID: <39EDB66F.60D2F531@essential.org> Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 10:40:47 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Governor Taft Urged Not to Punish Children Who Decline to Watch Channel One or TV in School Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert October 18, 2000 Commercial Alert and Obligation Inc. sent a letter today to Ohio Governor Bob Taft asking him not to allow local school systems to punish children who won't watch Primedia's Channel One in the public schools. According to the Toledo Blade, two Ohio children were held in a juvenile detention center on October 6th for refusing to watch Channel One and TV in public school. Primedia's Channel One is a controversial televised in-school marketing program. The letter follows. Dear Governor Taft: Local school officials are using Ohio's compulsory education laws to force children to watch commercial television and advertising in school, including the controversial marketing program Channel One. We urge you to take a stand for children and stop this abuse of the authority of the state. According to the Toledo Blade, two Ohio children, D.J. and Carlotta Maurer, spent October 6th in the Wood County Juvenile Detention Center because they refused to watch Channel One and other televised programming at Perrysburg Junior High School. They refused because they choose not to take in the degraded commercial culture that Channel One and media corporations deliver to children each day. Channel One does not exist to help or teach kids. It exists to help corporations that want to market to kids. As a Channel One executive once said, "The biggest selling point to advertisers [is] . . . we are forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials" each day. Ohio's compulsory education laws exist for the nurture of children, not their exploitation. But Primedia's Channel One has been able to harness the coercive arm of the State of Ohio to force schoolchildren to watch its daily fare. This includes "lite" news and advertisements for violent entertainment such as "Supernova," "The Mummy," and James Bond "The World is Not Enough," as well as junk food, video games and low-grade sensuality. That is a blatant misuse of state power. It is not the proper role of the schools or the state to promote such products and values to innocent and vulnerable schoolchildren. Certainly, the laws of the state should never be used to compel children to subject themselves to such promotion. When the government sends children to a juvenile detention center because they don't want to watch advertising, that is both Orwellian and more than a little sick. The public schools ought to be a sanctuary from the noxious aspects of the commercial culture. Many parents are rightly worried about the way the commercial culture saturates their kids lives with degraded values and nonstop seductions. We strongly urge you to take a stand for parents and remove Channel One from Ohio's public schools. This would be a clarion call for those parents who wish their children to grow up free from the depredations and enticements of the media corporations and their advertisers. Sincerely, Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc. <-----letter ends here------> WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: Please ask Ohio Governor Bob Taft to 1) Get Channel One out of Ohio's public schools; and, 2) Make sure that local school systems to punish children who won't watch TV or Primedia's Channel One in the public schools. Governor Taft's email address is , his fax is (614) 466-9354 and phone is 614-466-3555. FOR MORE INFORMATION about the Maurer children and their detention for refusing to watch Channel One and TV in school, see the web page Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web page is at . Obligation, Inc. works to remind businesses and governments of their responsibility to children. Obligation's website is at Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Oct 18 15:57:24 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 937982A060 for ; Wed, 18 Oct 2000 15:57:23 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 1363 invoked by alias); 18 Oct 2000 19:00:21 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 18 Oct 2000 19:00:21 -0000 Message-ID: <39EE00DF.186B683@essential.org> Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 15:58:23 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Groups Praise Bush's Statement about TV: "The best weapon is the off-on button" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert October 18, 2000 NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 For More Information Contact: Jennifer Kurz, TV-Turnoff Network: (202) 518-5556 Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert: (202) 296-2787 Groups Praise Bush's Statement about TV: "The best weapon is the off-on button" TV-Turnoff Network and Commercial Alert applaud Texas Governor George W. Bush for saying at yesterday's presidential debate that in the battle to prevent TV and popular culture from undermining the values we pass onto our children, "the best weapon is the off/on button and...eating dinner with [your children]." The average American child witnesses 200,000 violent acts on television by age 18 and see 20,000 commercials every year. The average child will spend over 1,000 hours watching television this year, far more than the 900 hours they will spend in school. "Parents today face an avalanche of violent, sexually-explicit and commercial-laden material. Governor Bush is right on target: the best way to protect children is to turn off the TV and turn on life," agreed Frank Vespe, Executive Director of TV-Turnoff Network. Many children are now required to watch television in school. Channel One, a marketing company, delivers two minutes of advertising and ten minutes of lite "news" to about eight million students in 12,000 schools. "We already have values-based education in the schools. The problem is that it's Channel One's values. That means promoting materialism, violent entertainment, and low-grade sensuality to impressionable schoolchildren," said Gary Ruskin, Director of Commercial Alert. "If Bush and Gore want to encourage strong values among our children, they ought to get Channel One out of the public schools." Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web address is . TV-Turnoff Network, formerly TV-Free America, is a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that encourages children and adults to watch much less television in order to promote healthier lives and communities. TV-Turnoff Network organizes National TV-Turnoff Week each year in April. Since 1995 more than 24 million Americans have turned off their television and re-engaged in life. National TV-Turnoff Week, 2001 will be April 23-29. In addition, TV-Turnoff Networks acclaimed More Reading, Less TV program helps students acquire a deep and long-lasting enjoyment of reading. Visit us on the web at . <------release ends here-------> Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Tue Oct 24 12:15:57 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 3376829AE8 for ; Tue, 24 Oct 2000 12:15:57 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 23879 invoked by alias); 24 Oct 2000 15:20:25 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 24 Oct 2000 15:20:25 -0000 Message-ID: <39F5B5B3.35069FB6@essential.org> Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 12:15:47 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Wall Street Meets Pornography Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert October 24, 2000 Following is an article on the big business of pornography, from yesterday's New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/23/technology/23PORN.html Wall Street Meets Pornography By Timothy Egan Provo, Utah — The video-store chain that Larry W. Peterman owned in this valley of wide streets and ubiquitous churches carried the kind of rentals found anywhere in the country — from Disney classics to films about the sexual adventures of nurses. Mr. Peterman built a thriving business until he was charged last year with selling obscene material and faced the prospect of bankruptcy and jail. Just before the trial, Mr. Peterman's lawyer, Randy Spencer, came up with an idea while looking out the window of the courtroom at the Provo Marriott. He sent an investigator to the hotel to record all the sex films that a guest could obtain through the hotel's pay-per-view channels. He then obtained records on how much erotic fare people here were buying from their cable and satellite television providers. As it turned out, people in Utah County, a place that often boasts of being the most conservative area in the nation, were disproportionately large consumers of the very videos that prosecutors had labeled obscene and illegal. And far more Utah County residents were getting their adult movies from the sky or cable than they were from the stores owned by Larry Peterman. Why file criminal charges against a lone video retailer, Mr. Spencer argued, when some of the biggest corporations in America, including a hotel chain whose board of directors includes W. Mitt Romney, president of the Salt Lake City Olympics organizing committee, and a satellite broadcaster heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corporation, were selling the same product? "I despise this stuff — some of it is really raunchy," said Mr. Spencer, a public defender who described himself as a devout Mormon. "But the fact is that an awful lot of people here in Utah County are paying to look at porn. What that says to me is that we're normal." It took only a few minutes for the jury to find Mr. Peterman not guilty on all charges. His case illustrates what has happened to an industry that used to be confined to the margins of commerce, in the seedy parts of most towns, run by people who never dreamed of taking their companies to Wall Street. Spurred by changes in technology that make pornography easier to order into the home than pizza, and court decisions that offer broad legal protection, the business of selling sexual desire through images has become a $10 billion annual industry in the United States, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., and the industry's own Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Whatever the phenomenon may say about the nature of American society, the financial rewards are so great that some of the biggest distributors of explicit sex on film and online include the country's most recognizable corporate names. The General Motors Corporation, the world's largest company, now sells more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire. The 8.7 million Americans who subscribe to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, buy nearly $200 million a year in pay-per-view sex films from satellite, according to estimates provided by distributors of the films, estimates the company did not dispute. EchoStar Communications Corporation, the No. 2 satellite provider, whose chief financial backers include Mr. Murdoch, makes more money selling graphic adult films through its satellite subsidiary than Playboy, the oldest and best-known company in the sex business, does with its magazine, cable and Internet businesses combined, according to public and private revenue accounts by the companies. AT&T Corporation, the nation's biggest communications company, offers a hard- core sex channel called the Hot Network to subscribers to its broadband cable service. It also owns a company that sells sex videos to nearly a million hotel rooms. Nearly one in five of AT&T's broadband cable customers pays an average of $10 a film to see what the distributor calls "real, live all-American sex — not simulated by actors." For all the money being made on sex — legally — by mainstream corporations, the topic remains taboo outside the boardroom. The major satellite and cable companies do very little marketing of their X-rated products, and they are not mentioned in annual reports except in the vaguest of euphemisms. None of the corporate leaders of AT&T, Time Warner, General Motors, EchoStar, Liberty Media, Marriott International, Hilton, On Command, LodgeNet Entertainment or the News Corporation — all companies that have a big financial stake in adult films and that are held by millions of shareholders — were willing to speak publicly about the sex side of their businesses. "How can we?" said an official at AT&T. "It's the crazy aunt in the attic. Everyone knows she's there, but you can't say anything about it." For hotels, the sex that can be piped through television generates far more money than the beer, wine and snacks sold from the rooms' mini-bars. Just under 1.5 million hotel rooms, or about 40 percent of all hotel rooms in the nation, are equipped with television boxes that sell the kind of films that used to be seen mostly in adults-only theaters, according to the two leading companies in the business. Based on estimates provided by the hotel industry, at least half of all guests buy these adult movies, which means that pay-per-view sex from television hotel rooms may generate about $190 million a year in sales. At home, Americans buy or rent more than $4 billion a year worth of graphic sex videos from retail outlets and spend an additional $800 million on less explicit sexual films — all told, about 32 percent of the business for general-interest video retailers that carry adult topics, according to compilations done by two trade organizations that track video rentals. Chains like Tower Records now stock nearly 500 titles in their so-called erotic category, far more than films about history or dinosaurs. On the Internet, sex is one of the few things that prompts large numbers of people to disclose their credit card numbers. According to two Web ratings services, about one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visits one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least once a month — more people than go to sports or government sites. Though estimates have been greatly inflated by some e-commerce sex merchants, analysts from Forrester Research say that sex sites on the Web generate at least $1 billion a year in revenue, providing a windfall for credit card companies, Internet search engines and people who build Web sites, among others in the commercial food chain. Some of the most popular Web properties — which feature quick links to sites labeled "Virgin Sluts" and "See Teens Have Sex" — are owned by a publicly held company in Boulder, Colo. That company, New Frontier Media, has stock traded like any other, and it expects its video network to be in 25 million homes within a few years. It does business with several major companies, including EchoStar and In Demand, the nation's leading pay-per-view distributor, which is owned in part by AT&T, Time Warner, Advance-Newhouse, Cox Communications and Comcast. Another company, LodgeNet, whose chairman is Scott C. Petersen, does $180 million in annual business selling sex videos and other forms of room entertainment to hotels. LodgeNet is a major employer in Sioux Falls, S.D., its home base. It is a client of the accounting giant Arthur Andersen, and nearly a fifth of the company's public shares are held by a Park Avenue investment firm, Red Coat Capital Management of New York. "We feel good about what we do," said Ann Parker, a spokeswoman for LodgeNet, which trades on the Nasdaq market. "We're good corporate citizens. We contribute to local charities." The biggest provider of hard-core sex videos and adult Web content, Vivid Entertainment Group of Van Nuys, Calif., whose founders and principal owners are Steven Hirsch and David James, has been making the rounds of investment bankers of late, preparing for an initial public stock offering next year that could ultimately lead to the first porn billionaire. "The adult entertainment business is just exploding," said Bill Asher, the president of Vivid, whose offices are in a new granite and glass building that houses investment and venture capital firms. "Right now there are a lot of people making a lot of money. Somebody's got to take control of it, and we figure it might as well be us. We see ourselves as the designated driver of this business." To the astonishment of Mr. Flynt, who began in the pornography business by selling poor-quality pictures of naked girls as a way to build interest in his strip clubs, his competitors in the $10 billion annual adult market are mainstream corporations whose board members are among the American business elite. "We're in the small leagues compared to some of those companies like General Motors or AT&T," Mr. Flynt said. "But it doesn't surprise me that they got into it. I've always said that other than the desire for survival, the strongest desire we have is sex." The Technology Factor Look, Ma, No Staples! Thirty years ago, a federal study put the total retail value of hard-core pornography in the United States between $5 million and $10 million — or about the same amount that a single successful sex-related Web site brings in today. It seemed likely that the industry would remain where it had always been — largely out of sight, but profitable, and faced with consistent legal problems. What kept the market relatively small, in the view of people in the industry, were the barriers between consumer and product. Typically, a person would have to go to a run-down part of town, among people considered less than savory, to find hard-core adult films or bookstores. These retail outlets frequently were raided by law enforcement authorities, further adding to the risk for a consumer — a risk of shame, or arrest. In 1975, the Sony Corporation released the videocassette recorder to the broad market, and within 10 years, about 75 percent of all American households owned a VCR. Once the venue had moved from theater to the privacy of the home, the adult entertainment industry was never the same. For example, a single film, "Deep Throat," generated more than $100 million in sales, thanks in large part to the popularity of VCR's, Frederick S. Lane III writes in his book "Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age" (Routledge, 2000). But even with most Americans owning VCR's, people still had to take a trip to the video store, risking some embarrassment. Pay-per-view television and the Internet removed the final barriers. Cable and satellite programmers allow people to buy a variety of sex-based programming, from Playboy, on the lighter side, to the Hot Network, owned by Vivid, and the Erotic Television Network, distributed by New Frontier, on the more explicit end of the spectrum. Consumers could watch movies of people having sex without ever leaving home. What investors and bigger corporations soon discovered was the vast audience for pornography — once the privacy barrier was eliminated. Twenty percent of all American households with a VCR or cable access will pay to watch an explicit adult video — and 10 percent will pay frequently, according to the distributors New Frontier and Vivid. That interest explains, in part, why the production of pornographic films has grown tenfold in the last decade. There are now nearly 10,000 adult movies made every year, according to an annual survey of the films produced in the Los Angeles area. Last year, there were 711 million rentals of hard-core sex films, according to Adult Video News, an industry magazine that is to pornographic films what the trade publication Billboard is to records. It even has its own film awards —modeled after the Oscars. But video rentals have reached a plateau over the last two years. The future is pay- per-view at home — driven by the easy access and good technical quality of digital television — and pay-per-view from the Internet, driven by the technological innovations of new cable and phone lines that carry far more images, more quickly, to a computer screen. "Videos changed the way people could view porn because they were able to watch in the privacy of their homes," said Barry Parr, an electronic commerce analyst with International Data Corporation. "Internet pornography takes that a step further — they can do it with absolute privacy." The number of people visiting sex sites on the Web doubled over the last year, outpacing the number of new Internet users. Some of the more popular sex Web sites attract in excess of 50 million hits, or visits, a month, according to the ratings services Nielsen/ Net and Media Metrix. About one in a thousand people who visit a site will subscribe, for fees averaging $20 a month, according to some of the leading Web pornography providers and Flying Crocodile Inc., a company based in Seattle that tracks and services the sexual-content market. At the same time that technology was making it easier for people to view pornography, legal obstacles were falling. The 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California established a threshold for defining illegal pornography; a major test was that it had to be considered obscene to the "average person, applying contemporary community standards." Initially, the case helped prosecutors clamp down on publications and movies. But that proved to be short-lived. If "Deep Throat" could sell $100 million worth of copies, then what was the community standard? "The court may have handed off the determination of obscenity to the local community, but the standards of local communities had fundamentally changed," writes Mr. Lane in "Obscene Profits." When Mr. Peterman was prosecuted for distributing obscene material in Utah last year, he became one of the few video retailers in the nation charged with such a crime in recent years. In a state long regarded as a bastion of family-values morality, more than 4,000 people signed petitions supporting his prosecution. But Mr. Peterman showed that he had 4,000 regular customers for sex videos. His lawyer argued that Mr. Peterman was not violating community standards, because people in Utah County bought 20,000 adult sex videos from one satellite programmer alone in the period that Mr. Peterman was said to have broken the law; it was double the volume in most cities the size of Provo. And in the Provo Marriott, guests were paying for nearly 3,000 explicit adult videos every year, according to court testimony. After the Peterman trial, that hotel dropped its adult movies. "My client was just a little guy," Mr. Spencer said, "a mom-and-pop dealer in a very big business." The Corporate Factor It's the Demand, Companies Say At a time when political campaigns from the presidential level down to that of the local school board have made an issue of sexual excess in broadcasting, the corporate entanglements in the pornography business have blurred the lines of the debate. In Missouri this year, Senator John Ashcroft, a Republican, ran ads denouncing "Hollywood's decaying influence" on society, singling out his Democratic opponent, Gov. Mel Carnahan, for accepting donations from Christie Hefner, the Playboy executive. Mr. Carnahan, who died last week in a plane crash, had countered by pointing to donations to Mr. Ashcroft from Charles W. Ergen, chief executive of EchoStar, which sells adult pay-per-view through its fast-growing DishNetwork satellite division. "If he's going to start that, he's in greater trouble than I am," Mr. Carnahan had said. Mr. Ashcroft's supporters had replied that there was still a distinction between the two companies: EchoStar did not produce pornography — it merely sold it, while Playboy created its own videos and pictures, they said. "We added adult at the request of our customers," said Judiann Atencio, a spokeswoman for EchoStar. "We have something for everybody, from Irish hurling to cricket. Adult is there if you want it." When AT&T announced that it would start offering the hard-core Hot Network to its 2.2 million digital cable subscribers beginning in August, they were castigated by critics and pressured by religious and civic groups that hold stock in the company. A group of mutual-fund investors, which included the Sisters of Charity of New York, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and the Mennonite Church, told AT&T its members did not want their three million shares invested in a company that sold pornography. "At the heart of our concern is the concept of mainstream companies getting into hard-core pornography," said Mark Regier, who manages a mutual fund for 800,000 members of the Mennonite faith. "For a company with AT&T's tradition and its charitable work to be involved with pornography at this level is unbelievable. And I don't think many people understand what it means to take away the barriers to this kind of material, such as AT&T is doing." For AT&T, there are sound business reasons to start carrying the highly profitable Hot Network. Unlike distributors of mainstream Hollywood pictures, sex-film distributors typically offer the programmers a split of 80 percent of the revenue, compared with 50 percent or less for routine features. Impulse buys, in which customers tap a code into a remote and a movie follows, have also spurred in-home sales of pornographic films. "Impulse technology — that's been just incredible," said Mr. Asher of Vivid Entertainment, which makes hundreds of adult films and claims that it sells a million copies a month to cable, satellite, home video and hotel retailers. "You have about 35 million homes with this kind of technology now," Mr. Asher said, "and it's growing enormously. It's easy and it's private — that's the key." Although the companies that program explicit sex films will not give out their revenue figures for this category, a report by the Showtime Event Television company found that adult pay-per-view took in $367 million last year — a more than sixfold increase from the $54 million of 1993, easily outpacing the growth of pay-per-view "events" like boxing and wrestling. Time Warner, EchoStar, General Motors and AT&T all say they are simply responding to a growing American market that wants pornography in the home. At the same time, the companies say new technology makes it possible for parents to keep such programming away from children. "We call it choice and control," said Tracy Hollingsworth, a spokeswoman for AT&T Broadband, the company's cable division. "Basically, you use your remote to block out any programming you don't want. But if you want it, we offer a wide range of programming that is available in the market we're in." Hotel chains have made similar decisions when, this year, several groups urged them to get rid of the adult pay-per-view programs that are in nearly 60 percent of all middle- to high-end hotels. Only one chain, the relatively small Omni Hotels, chose to remove the sex films. "What we noticed was that early on, the content was R-rated, but then it migrated rather quickly to really raunchy stuff — just hard-core porn," said Jim Caldwell, the president of Omni. "I thought: What are we doing? We don't have topless waitresses in the restaurant." Mr. Caldwell said more than 50 percent of all guests were buying the sex films. "The anonymity is the big thing," he said. Omni's decision to remove pay-per-view sex videos from the company's 15,000 rooms will cost the company more than $1.8 million a year, Mr. Caldwell said. But he said he had received phone calls and letters of thanks from 50,000 people — more than for any other corporate decision. Much larger hotel chains, like Marriott, which calls itself the world's largest hotel management firm, with nearly 300,000 rooms in the United States, and Hilton, with 290,000 rooms under its control, have not made changes. Some critics said Marriott, run by several prominent members of the Mormon Church, though not affiliated in any way with the church itself, should drop its adult movies, given the stand against explicit sexual materials that Mormons have long taken. But company officials said they were mostly franchisers, and could not make unilateral decisions for the hotel owners who paid to be a part of the Marriott chain. The two companies that provide hotels with pornographic films are both traded on Wall Street and have enjoyed big run-ups in their stock prices over the last few years. The leader, On Command, based in Denver, is worth more than $400 million, and its principal owner is Liberty Media, controlled by John C. Malone, the cable and telecommunications magnate who sits on the board of AT&T and recently agreed to buy up to 15 percent of the shares of Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation. The chairman and chief executive of On Command is Jerome H. Kern, a former New York corporate lawyer active in civic and volunteer causes, serving on the board of New York University and as a director of Volunteers of America in Colorado. On Command would not discuss how much money it is making on adult films. But in its annual report, the company said it was generating $23 a room each month for the 835,000 hotel rooms it reaches. The company goal is to get into an additional one million hotel rooms. Analysts say at least half the revenue comes from adult films. The company recently began offering all-day erotic television to hotel customers, for a single price of $15.99. "Talk about your captive audience," said Mr. Asher of Vivid. "I've heard that in some hotels, 85 to 90 percent of all profits from in- room spending comes from adult channels." The Money Factor Big Profits Now, Bigger Ones on Way While the big companies that deliver sex films to homes and hotels will not talk about how popular explicit sexual materials are, the makers and distributors say the volume is enormous. And court testimony and documents that were made public in the Peterman case also offered some insight into the profit potential. "Despite the fact that this material isn't marketed, revenue-wise, it's one of our biggest moneymakers," said Peggy Simons of TCI Cable, in court testimony in Mr. Peterman's case. TCI, controlled by Mr. Malone, has since been bought by AT&T. "When we talk to the companies one-on- one, they tell us we're great, that we're a huge moneymaker for them," said Mr. Asher, whose company owns the Hot Network, which is available in 16 million homes. "And by the way, I tell my biggest customers — don't say you ever met me." In trying to take public his company, which now does about $80 million a year in sales, Mr. Asher said, "The biggest problem I have is the image of the adult business. People think it's run by the mob, or a bunch of guys with gold chains. I grew up in Paris, Illinois. I have a master's of business administration degree." The Hot Network portrays people having sex in a variety of methods — what the company calls "widely accepted sexual activity" — and prohibits scenes of violence, nonconsensual sex, drug use, forced bondage and sex with minors. Analysts of electronic commerce and telecommunications say the mainstream sex market might be leveling off, but new technology is likely to bring in even more consumers. "The novelty of it has not worn off yet, and I don't believe it will wear off," said Sean Calder, a vice president for e-commerce at Nielsen/Net Ratings, which gauges the popularity of Web sites. "The numbers point to a huge personal need. We see lots of people logging on at 3 in the morning." The $30 billion project to rewire the cable industry with lines capable of bringing more material, and allowing people to buy on impulse, will play a big part in the emerging home pornography market. "These companies like AT&T, they're thinking ahead to a time, perhaps in 10 years, when 50 million Americans will have broadband capability and all their television and Internet will be interactive through one big box," said Bryn Pryor, technology editor for Adult Video News, the trade magazine. "But it's not just technology that made the big boys get into it," Mr. Pryor said. "This just happens to be a business where you can't lose money." <-------article ends here--------> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web address is . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Sat Oct 28 15:03:10 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CD3EF29AF2 for ; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 15:03:09 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 2764 invoked by alias); 28 Oct 2000 18:09:28 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 28 Oct 2000 18:09:28 -0000 Message-ID: <39FB2316.612B594@essential.org> Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 15:03:50 -0400 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Nader on education and commercialism Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert October 28, 2000 Following is a statement by Ralph Nader on education and commercialism. http://www.votenader.com/issues/edu_commercialism.html Our children are now exposed to the most intense marketing onslaught in history. From the age of 9 months to 19 years, precise corporate selling is beamed directly to children separating them from their parents, an unheard of practice formerly, and teaching them how to nag their beleaguered parents as unpaid salesmen for companies. There is a bombardment of their impressionable minds -- including, increasingly, in the schools themselves. "In-school marketing has become a growing industry," according to a recent General Accounting Office report, Commercial Activities in Schools. "Some marketing professionals are increasingly targeting children in school, companies are becoming known for their success in negotiating contracts between school districts and beverage companies, and both educators and corporate managers are attending conferences to learn how to increase revenue from in-school marketing for their schools and companies." Channel One and ZapMe! deliver advertisements to a captive audience of school kids watching their television programming or using their computers. Some companies have managed to procure space on school buses or in schools for their billboard advertisements. Corporate propaganda masquerading as educational materials are presented to unsuspecting children. Coke and Pepsi bribe their way into school halls, and cut deals with school administrators to promote their product. This does not prepare the next generation to become literate, self-renewing, effective citizens for a deliberative democracy. Instead, this commercial traffic breeds a rat-pack product conformity and makes children even more vulnerable to commercial messages outside of school This situation is intolerable, and it must not be tolerated. Schools must be prohibited by law from contractually obligating students to watch commercial advertising during school time, and commercial signage should be banned from indoor school property and school buses. Schools must be adequately funded, so that administrators and teachers -- whose job is to educate, not to advertise -- do not feel pressured to cut deals with the corporate hucksters who want still more access to our children, and to steadily increase their influence over the schools. <-----statement ends here-------> Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web site is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Mon Oct 30 10:49:25 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 06DDB29AEE for ; Mon, 30 Oct 2000 10:49:25 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 6929 invoked by alias); 30 Oct 2000 14:56:15 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 30 Oct 2000 14:56:15 -0000 Message-ID: <39FD989E.366188F6@essential.org> Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 10:49:50 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Denver Mayor Webb: "Not everything should be for sale" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert October 30, 2000 Following is a fine article about the effort to keep Denver's stadium name "Mile High," from yesterday's New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/29/national/29DENV.html Denver Journal: What's in a Stadium Name -- Tradition or Money? by Michael Janofsky "Not everything should be for sale," Mayor Wellington E. Webb said this week -- raising more than a few eyebrows, because what he does not want to sell could mean as much as $89 million for Denver and the surrounding five counties. What he does not want to sell is the right to name the $400 million football stadium under construction beside Mile High Stadium, the rickety home of the city's beloved Denver Broncos since 1962. The new stadium is scheduled to open next summer, in time for the start of the 2001 season. Mile High will be leveled and the land will be turned into a parking lot. Ever since voters approved a small sales tax two years ago to finance the new stadium, the question of what to call it has roiled the community. Other cities in the same situation have solicited bids from corporate interests, an exercise that generated millions of dollars for the operating authorities and produced such evocative names as FedEx Field outside Washington, PSINet Stadium in Baltimore, Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville, Fla., and the Core States Arena in Philadelphia, which became First Union Center after one bank acquired the other. For some of those cities, the naming rights meant hundreds of millions of dollars over the length of the contract. Here, the solicitation proceeded in much the same way. A nine-member panel of government representatives, the Metropolitan Football Stadium District, was appointed to handle marketing issues and identify potential sponsors. Local newspapers have reported that several companies have expressed an interest, including AT&T Broadband, Janus Capital Corporation and Invesco Funds Group. A spokesman for the panel declined to comment on negotiations, other than to say the published lists were inaccurate. But to Mr. Webb, it hardly matters who the bidding companies are or even if the money would be used to pay off the construction bonds early, saving the taxpayers money. "My position is that everything in life is too unsettled," he said. "Utility companies want to deregulate. With phone companies, you don't know who's handling your calls -- AT&T, MCI, Sprint, whoever. Banks change names so fast, the names on your checks don't correspond to who owns the bank. So for me, why would you sell an identifiable icon, even for millions of dollars? We're a Western city, a new city that doesn't have many icons. Once they're gone, they're gone." Old Mile High may be a tin-can structure, a gangly maze of seats and beams that has no discernible style or panache, never mind luxury suites. But what it does have, in its name, is a deep connection to a city that sits 5,280 feet above sea level and projects an unmistakable image based on its proximity to the Rocky Mountains. Officials in the Colorado ski industry say that when it happens to be snowing on a day a Broncos game is televised nationally, the ski resorts are bombarded with telephone callers seeking reservations. With the bidding process under way, Mr. Webb said he had received countless calls, letters and e-mail messages expressing hope that the new stadium keep the name Mile High. A poll commissioned by a new grass-roots group, Friends of Mile High, found that nearly 70 percent of the respondents preferred the old name to a commercialized alternative. Mr. Webb's ardent support for retaining the old name has struck some critics as irresponsible, inasmuch as taxpayers are bearing 75 percent of the construction costs through a 10-year sales tax of one cent per $10. The Broncos are paying the other 25 percent. Several local officials say they favor selling the naming rights to pay down the debt and have urged Mr. Webb to allow the district panel to do its job without trying to influence public opinion. But that is precisely why Mr. Webb, who is a Democrat, and other Mile High supporters say they have been speaking out. They want to make sure the panel fulfills each of the two requirements of the bonding legislation: that bids are sought for naming rights, and that public sentiment is taken into account. John Hickenlooper, a Denver businessman who has helped lead the fight to retain the Mile High name, said he feared that the Broncos' ownership, which favors selling naming rights, had too much influence in the solicitation process because of a $15 million no-interest loan by the team early in the process to cover construction costs. If naming rights are sold, the loan would be paid back right away from the proceeds. Mr. Hickenlooper called the arrangement "a conflict of interests that verges on corruption," an accusation the team disputes. "We are a private company that is ultimately receiving the largest share of financial gain," said Joe Ellis, vice president of business operations for the Broncos, explaining the team's position. "If any additional money could be brought in to ease taxpayer burdens, the Broncos feel it our responsibility to support that kind of effort." Still, Mr. Webb says he is unconvinced that dropping Mile High is the right way to go. "In New York, I can't imagine they'd change the name Yankee Stadium," he said. "So why should we change our name here? And I think most people agree with me." <-----article ends here------> WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: Send Denver Mayor Wellington Webb a note of thanks for helping to keep the name "Mile High" on Denver's stadium. His email is and phone is (720) 865-9000. FOR MORE INFORMATION: See Commercial Alert's web page on stadium naming rights, at . Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Nov 2 09:59:57 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 6084F29AE8 for ; Thu, 2 Nov 2000 09:59:57 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 15766 invoked by alias); 2 Nov 2000 15:02:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 2 Nov 2000 15:02:53 -0000 Message-ID: <3A018186.51997261@essential.org> Date: Thu, 02 Nov 2000 10:00:22 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: NYTimes on ZapMe Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert November 2, 2000 Following is today's New York Times article on the ZapMe Corp. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/02/technology/02COMP.html Free Computers for Schools: An Offer Too Good to Last By John Schwartz Earlier this year, Plainfield High School in Central Village, Conn., signed up for a free computer lab from the ZapMe Corporation. The highflying company was promising to connect the nation's schools to the Internet, asking only to deliver advertising to the students' computer screens to pay the freight. Last week, the Plainfield school superintendent got the bill. An e-mail message from a company employee explained that times were tough for ZapMe, which had come under attack as a tool of commercialization in the schools and had experienced a drop in its stock to just over $2 from a high of $13.75. As a result, the superintendent was told, the company was quitting the free-computer business. Starting in February, the message explained, "there will be a fee charged for the service and equipment." It said the school could go ahead and install the computers, wait until a price list arrived in November before making a decision, or make arrangements for ZapMe to pick up the equipment. "It was quite a shock," said the superintendent, Mary Conway. Her school had spent $4,000 to prepare a room for the computers — a lot of money for Plainfield, which ranks 161st out of the state's 169 school districts in spending. "The board apparently made the decision that it was worth the risk because we are so poor and needed the computers. Now we're really in rough shape." ZapMe says it has given millions of students access to the Internet in 2,000 schools nationwide; a total of 15,000 had signed up for the service. At its height last fall, ZapMe's stock was worth half a billion dollars; the company was emblematic of the new economy, a place where good deeds, vision and commerce form a single elegant braid. Now it has all unraveled: ZapMe says it is refocusing on selling its technologies for high-speed Internet access and services via satellite to business. It says, meanwhile, that it is trying to find ways to keep the school network alive without forcing the schools to pay. "We are exploring many opportunities," said the company's founder and chief executive, Lance Mortensen, "including -- but not limited to -- partnerships, the outright sale of the network, joint ventures and alternative options to schools that would allow them to keep the labs, which means, obviously, for pay." The story of ZapMe and schools like Plainfield shows the ripple effects of the dot-com downturn that extend far beyond Silicon Valley and Alley. To its founders, ZapMe had a noble vision defeated by a handful of naysaying activists opposed to any commercialism in schools and ready to jump to conclusions about the company's use of data about the students' computer use. While schools were still eager to sign up, Mr. Mortensen said, the bad publicity worried potential advertisers "about having an association of their brand with our brand." "It's heartbreaking for me," he said. "That opportunity we gave America's schools was taken away" by "a few people." To its critics, ZapMe represented a bad idea that collapsed under its own weight. Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert, a group affiliated with Ralph Nader that opposes "excessive commercialism" in society, was involved in a public relations war that Mr. Mortensen cites as the key factor in his company's decline. Mr. Ruskin counters that "their business model of violating the privacy of children and forcing them to watch ads was a total flop." Mr. Mortensen insists that he hopes to keep the service free to the schools through subsidies from business, foundations and government. "We're looking for people to adopt these schools," he said, but noted that ZapMe still had bills to pay. He said the company was spending about $3,000 a month on each of the smaller schools it served to pay off the equipment costs — typically 5 to 15 computers — and supply high-speed Internet connections. "We personally anticipate, through a number of efforts, to get that cost discounted down," he said. At first, ZapMe, based in San Ramon, Calif., made an offer that thousands of schools found too tempting to pass up: a complete computer lab with PC's, teacher training and access over high-speed satellite connections to a collection of 13,000 child-safe Web sites. The company insists that while it reserved the contractual right to track students' surfing habits individually, it never gathered anything more than their age, sex and ZIP code — information it then shared in aggregate form with advertisers. When the company announced a program called ZapPoints, which would have given students points toward prizes while gathering personally identifiable information about them, the outcry was so swift and loud that ZapMe quickly discontinued the idea. "The privacy thing is mind-boggling because we never took a student's address, never took a student's phone number," Mr. Mortensen said. But Nancy Willard, a consultant at the University of Oregon's Center for Advanced Technology in Education, said the ZapPoints program was the company's fundamental flaw. "The ZapMe model was going to fail because of the level of commercial intrusion into the schools" required by the ZapPoints program, which was an essential part of reaching profitability, she said. "Once educators became aware of that, they would end up saying `No, this is not appropriate.' " Mr. Mortensen said the e-mail message that Plainfield received was a mistake. "That's an action by one employee and not the corporation," he said. He did not deny that the company might ask for money to keep the program running but said "there would be no forced issue," since the company could simply pick up the PC's. "We never gave the computers to the schools" outright, Mr. Mortensen said. And William R. Connon, a Hartford lawyer who represents the Plainfield Township schools, said the ZapMe contract gives the company the right to charge for its services or to take them back. A half-dozen schools with existing labs contacted by a reporter said they had not heard from ZapMe about the future of their programs. Donna Unterreiner, a library media specialist for the Margaret Buerkle Junior High School in St. Louis, said that the ZapMe lab had been "a godsend for us," since the school district had not been able to pass bond issues that would have otherwise paid for Internet access. The advertising, she said, did not bother her or her students. "Can you turn on a computer anywhere, and they don't have ads on them?" she asked. Schools that have not yet received computers are also waiting to hear what ZapMe has in store. William G. Smojver, director of technology and information services for the school district of Waukesha, Wis., near Milwaukee, said he called the company recently to ask about the pending delivery of machines and was told that a letter would be going out soon describing the company's new policy. "We are fairly pessimistic about receiving anything," he said. George Smith, director of technology for the Green Bay School District in Wisconsin, said he had not yet heard from ZapMe about the 45 computers the company had provided. He did say, however, that technical problems had limited the usefulness of the computer labs. "They can come pick 'em up and take 'em back," Mr. Smith said. "Nobody will shed a tear." <-----article ends here------> FOR MORE INFORMATION See Commercial Alert's web page on the ZapMe Corp. at . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Fri Nov 3 14:46:42 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CDF9D29AE8 for ; Fri, 3 Nov 2000 14:46:41 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 19638 invoked by alias); 3 Nov 2000 19:50:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 3 Nov 2000 19:50:03 -0000 Message-ID: <3A0314BF.1AC1973D@essential.org> Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2000 14:40:47 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Child Advocates Want Ad-Free Internet Filters For Schools Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert November 3, 2000 A coalition of child advocates and academics sent letters today to President Clinton, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and other key Members of Congress asking that federally mandated Internet filters in schools and libraries be prohibited from carrying advertising. The letter states that "An effort to protect kids from pornography should not be the occasion to open them up to commercial predators." The letters were sent to President Clinton; Senators John McCain, Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Richard Shelby (R-AL); and Representative Ernest Istook (R-OK). The letter to Senator McCain follows. Dear Chairman McCain: We want to alert you to an unintended consequence of the mandatory software filter provision currently attached to the fiscal year 2001 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill. Corporations might use such mandated software filters to deliver advertising to captive audiences of impressionable schoolchildren. An effort to protect kids from pornography should not be the occasion to open them up to commercial predators. We urge you to ensure that any mandatory software filter provision for schools and libraries that receive federal technology funds also prohibits that filtering program from acting as an advertising delivery mechanism. Schools are for learning, not selling. But some companies use Internet filters to deliver advertising to children. For example, N2H2 tells advertisers to "Own the education desktop by reaching teens and tweens where they learn the most -- the classroom. N2H2 is the leader in filtering Internet content for schools all across the United States. In doing so, we reach over 13.5 million* students who view 4 billion online pages a year. And our sponsorship and advertising opportunities let you be a part of every Web page they explore." N2H2 tells advertisers that they can "tailor a comprehensive program that drives your corporate and brand loyalty initiatives through scholastically-focused activities." The unintended consequence of promoting advertising in the public schools would be easily fixed by including language that prohibits such federally mandated Internet software filters from delivering advertisements. If you have any questions about this letter, or want to discuss how to amend the mandatory software filter provision, please call Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert at (202) 296-2787, or Jim Metrock of Obligation, Inc. at (205) 612-3376 or Andrew Hagelshaw of the Center for Commercial-free Public Education at (510) 268-1100. Sincerely, Brita Butler-Wall, author, A Parent's Guide to Commercialism in Schools Jason Catlett, President, Junkbusters Corp. Colleen Cordes, Co-Coordinator, Task Force on Computers in Childhood, Alliance for Childhood George Gerbner, President and Founder, Cultural Environment Movement; Dean Emeritus, Annenberg School of Communication Andrew Hagelshaw, Executive Director, Center for Commercial-Free Public Education Velma LaPoint, Associate Professor of Human Development, Howard University Diane Levin, Professor of Education, Wheelock College; author, Remote Control Childhood Carden Johnston, MD, FAAP, FACEP, FRCP; Past President, Alabama Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics Robert McChesney, Research Associate Professor, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc. Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert Juliet Schor, Senior Lecturer on Women's Studies, Harvard University; author, The Overspent American Nancy Willard, Project Director, Responsible Netizen, Center for Advanced Technology in Education, University of Oregon <-----letter ends here-----> BACKGROUND: Following is an excerpt from the October 30, 2000 issue of National Journal's Technology Daily Education: White House Amenable To Tweaked Net Filtering Measure by Drew Clark The White House on Monday accepted an agreement calling for mandatory software filters for schools and libraries that receive federal technology funds, pleasing congressional advocates of Internet filters and disappointing civil liberties groups that have argued against requiring them. "The essentials of the bill remain the same," said David Crane, a staffer for Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain, R-AZ, explaining that some small changes had been made to the measure, which is attached to the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill. The filtering provision combines elements of McCain's S. 97, with other portions authored by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-PA, and Rep. Ernest Istook, R-OK. [snip] <---------> WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: Please ask Senator John McCain (nicely) to prohibit federally mandated Internet filters from delivering advertisements. Senator McCain's email address is , phone number is (202) 224-2235 and fax number (202) 228-2862. Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Sat Nov 4 14:42:48 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CF6F429B0F for ; Sat, 4 Nov 2000 14:42:47 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 10030 invoked by alias); 4 Nov 2000 19:46:28 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 4 Nov 2000 19:46:28 -0000 Message-ID: <3A0466C6.8A76344C@essential.org> Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2000 14:43:02 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Ohio gets tougher on junk food peddlers Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Commercial Alert November 4, 2000 Here's a bit of good news in the effort to keep our kids safe from junk food marketers at a time of skyrocketing childhood obesity and diabetes. On October 13, the Ohio Department of Education issued a new policy to ban the sale of junk food and soda pop while serving school breakfast and lunch. This new Ohio policy is a step forward. But it should be expanded to ban both the marketing and sale of junk food on public school grounds -- at all times -- and not only in Ohio, but across the country. Such policy would help carry out the purpose of National School Lunch Act, which President Truman said was to "safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation's children." Following is an article in yesterday's Cleveland Plain-Dealer about the new Ohio policy. http://www.cleveland.com/news/index.ssf?/news/pd/cc03soda.html Sales of Pop, Candy Imperil School Funds by Scott Stephens State education officials are threatening to withhold federal money from schools that peddle pop and candy to students while breakfast and lunch are being served. "We felt we really needed to hit this hard," said Lorita Myles, director of the Ohio Department of Education's Child Nutrition Services. "It is a violation of federal policy, and it is contrary to the messages about nutrition we are trying to send children." Myles said her department received complaints that some schools sold sugary sodas, chewing gum, gumdrops and other snacks of little or no nutritional value as government-subsidized breakfasts and lunches featuring milk and fruit were being dished out. The U.S. Department of Agriculture allows schools to sell sugary snacks during meal times only if vending machines or coolers are outside cafeterias and lunchrooms or are turned off during serving hours. The recent complaints to the Education Department prompted a strongly worded memorandum to local superintendents from Associate State Superintendent Hank Rubin. Rubin warned districts the state would withhold reimbursements for free or reduced meals or expel districts from the program if they continued to violate the policy. Education officials declined to identify the districts they are investigating or estimate how many schools are violating provisions of the federal meals program. "Schools that are selling carbonated beverages may rationalize the action by claiming the need for increased profits," Rubin wrote to school district leaders. "We recognize profits are alluring, but we must ask ourselves, Are we willing to sacrifice the principles of good nutrition and the health and well-being of our children?' " Education officials concede that most districts adhere to the federal guidelines. In Solon, for example, vending machines pitching pop and candy are simply turned off during meal times, Superintendent Joseph V. Regano said. "That's the easiest way to handle it," Regano said. But Solon does not have an exclusive contract with a soft drink company pledging to push one product over another. A report released in September by the General Accounting Office found that 200 school districts across the nation have signed such contracts with soft-drink giants like Coca-Cola and Pepsico. One of those districts is North Olmsted, which in June signed a $1 million contract with Pepsi to sell its products exclusively for the next 10 years. As part of that contract, the soft drink company will give the district $40,000 annually for its general fund, build a concession stand at the district's football stadium and purchase sports equipment and other items for students. The district will also receive a 35 percent commission on all sales. Under the North Olmsted contract, the district has control over the number and location of vending machines and the times of day they can be used. In elementary schools, vending machines are found only in the teachers' lounge. Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, said soft-drink contracts with schools vary greatly across the country. But he applauded Ohio's get-tough approach. "Kids are exposed to a parade of junk food and soda pop, so I'm happy to hear about Ohio taking action," he said. <----article ends here----> FOR MORE INFORMATION: * Read the Ohio Department of Education policy memorandum at . * See Commercial Alert's web page on the marketing of junk food to schoolchildren, at , and especially a letter to the U.S. Senate and House Agriculture Committees, at . Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Nov 8 16:38:35 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D2F9A29AF3 for ; Wed, 8 Nov 2000 16:38:34 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 13349 invoked by alias); 8 Nov 2000 21:43:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 8 Nov 2000 21:43:37 -0000 Message-ID: <3A09C7DF.7CA75AD6@essential.org> Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2000 16:38:39 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: cell phones & the erosion of public space Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert November 8, 2000 Following is a fine article about cell phones and the commercializaion of public space, from the November issue of the Washington Monthly. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0011.rowe.html Reach Out And Annoy Someone: When Public Space Turns Private, We're All Stuck Listening to the Noise By Jonathan Rowe In the latter 1990s, in the midst of the high tech boom, I spent a lot of time in a coffee shop in the theater district in San Francisco. It was near Union Square, the tourist hub, and I observed a scene play out there time and time again. Mom is nursing her mocha. The kids are picking at their muffins, feet dangling from their chairs. And there's Dad, pulled back slightly from the table, talking into his cell phone. I would watch the kids' faces, vacant and a little forlorn, and wonder what happens to kids whose parents aren't there even when they are. How can we expect kids to pay attention if we are too busy to pay attention to them? Peter Breggin, the psychiatrist, says much "attention deficit disorder" is really "dad deficit disorder." Maybe he's right. As I sat there, I would think, too, about the disconnect between the way we talk about the economy in the U.S. and the way we actually experience it. The media were enthusing daily about the nation's record "expansion," and here were these kids staring off into space. It was supposed to be a "communications revolution," and yet here, in the technological epicenter, the members of this family were avoiding one another's eyes. With technology in particular, we can't seem to acknowledge the actual content of our economic experience; and we discuss the implications only within a narrow bandwidth of human concern. Is there a health risk? Might the thing cause cancer? That's about it with cell phones, computers, genetic engineering, and a host of other new developments. As a result, we must await the verdict of the doctors to find out whether we are permitted to have qualms or reservations. Jacob Needleman, the contemporary philosopher, says that we Americans are "metaphysically repressed," and the inability to discuss the implications of technology -- except in bodily or stock market terms -- is a case in point. I don't discount the significance of cancer. But there is something missing from a discussion that can't get beyond the most literal and utilitarian concerns. Actually, some of the problems with cell phones aren't at all squishy or abstract. If you've been clipped by a car tooling around the corner while the driver sits gabbing, cell phone in hand, then you are aware of this. The big problem, of course, is the noise. For sheer intrusiveness, cell phones rank with mega-amp car stereoes and political commercials, and they are harder to escape. We all know the drill. First the endearing beep, which is like an alarm clock going off at 5:30 a.m. Then people shout into the things, as though they are talking across the Cross Bronx Expressway. It's become a regular feature at movies and ball games, restaurants and parks. I've heard the things going off in men's room stalls. They represent more than mere annoyances. Cell phones affect life in ways that are, I suspect, beyond the capacity of the empirical mind to grasp. Travel is an example. Thomas Carlyle once advised Anthony Trollope to use travel as a time to "sit still and label his thoughts." For centuries, travel played this quiet role. I have a hunch that the eloquence and depth of this nation's founders had partly to do with their mode of travel. Madison, Jefferson, and the others had that long ride to Philadelphia in which to sort out their thoughts and work over their sentences in their minds. There was time in which thought could expand; we can hear the echoes today in the spaciousness and considered quality of such documents as the Federalist Papers -- a quality that political argument today rarely achieves. In more recent times, trains have served as a link to that kind of travel. I used to look forward to Amtrak rides almost as a sanctuary. They provided precious hours in which to work or read or simply muse without the interruptions of the telephone and office. But now, cell phones have caught up with me. They have turned Amtrak into a horizontal telephone booth; on a recent trip to New York my wife and I were besieged by cell phones and their cousins, high-powered walkmen, literally on all sides. The trip, which used to be a pleasure, has become one long headache. I wrote the president of Amtrak to tell him this. I tried to be constructive. There is a real opportunity here for Amtrak to get ahead of the curve, I said. Why not provide "Quiet Cars" the way they provided No Smoking cars when smoking first became an issue? Amtrak could give riders a choice, which is what America is supposed to be about‹and which Amtrak's main competitors, the airlines, cannot do. This seemed like a no-lose proposition. The yakkers could yak, others could enjoy the quiet, and Amtrak could have a PR coup. (In a just world, the cell phoners would have to sit together in Noise Cars, but I was trying to be accomodating.) The argument seemed pretty convincing. As the weeks passed, I imagined my letter circulating at the highest levels. Perhaps I'd even be called in as a consultant. Now that I have the reply, I'm not holding my breath. But the reasons that Amtrak offered for inaction are worth a few moments, since they suggest how quickly a technology invokes its own system of rationalization. For example, the letter said that Amtrak does not want to inconvenience the "responsible" users of cell phones. That's typical; try to isolate a few aberrant users and so legitimate the rest. But cell phones are like cigarettes in this respect -- they are intrusive when used normally, as intended. They beep like a seat belt warning, or play a tinny melody like a musical toilet seat. People usually shout into them. They produce secondhand noise, just as cigarettes produce secondhand smoke; and from the standpoint of the forced consumer of this noise, the only responsible use is non-use. Then the letter turned the issue upside down. "We hesitate to restrict responsible users of cell phones," it said, "especially since many customers find train travel to be an ideal way to get work done." But that is exactly why cell phones should be restricted -- because many travelers are trying to get work done. For one thing, the notion that people are busily working on cell phones is New Economy hype. I have been a coerced eavesdropper on more conversations than I could count. I have listened to executives gab about their shopping hauls and weekend conquests. I once had to endure, between Philadelphia and New York, an extended brag from an associate sports agent regarding the important people he was meeting. It is not often that I hear anyone actually discussing work. But more importantly, consider the assumption here. We have two people who arguably are trying to get some work done. There's the cell phone user, who wants to make noise. And there's myself (and probably numerous others), who would appreciate a little quiet. Why does the noise automatically take precedence over the quiet? Why does the polluter get first dibs on the air? This is where the trail starts to get warm, I think. There is something about technology that enables it to take front seat in any situation it enters; which is to say, there is something in ourselves that seeks to give it this seat. A Maine essayist by the name of John Gould once noted this about the ordinary telephone. He was up on his roof one day when his wife called to him about something. "Later," he said, "Can't you see I'm working?" Later came, and this time the phone rang. Gould scrambled down the ladder in a frantic attempt to get to that phone. Afterwards he reflected upon what had happened. His wife could wait, he thought, but the phone rang with the authority of Mussolini in a bad mood. Most of us probably have had this experience. We've been making a purchase when the phone rang and the clerk dropped us cold and got into a long conversation on the phone. Or perhaps we had a visitor in our own office and interrupted the conversation to pick up the phone. Whatever is happening, the telephone comes first. Call waiting ratchets up the authority structure like a dictatorship that adds minions at the top. Now there are intrusions upon the intrusions; how many of us hear that click and think, "Oh, just let it ring." What is it about these things that makes us so obedient, and so oblivious to that which lies outside them -- such as actual people? I once asked a man who was bellowing into a cell phone in the coffee shop in San Francisco why he was talking so loudly. A bad connection, he said. It had not crossed his mind that anything else mattered at that moment. Like computers and television, cell phones pull people into their own psychological polar field, and the pull is strong. I've watched people complete a conversation, start to put the thing away, and then freeze. They sit staring at it, as though trying to think of someone else to call. The phone is there. It demands to be used, almost the way a cigarette demands to be smoked. Does the person own the cell phone, or is it the other way around? And what does that suggest about where this "communications revolution" is taking us? When I was in Hong Kong a year and a half ago, it was becoming a cell-phone hell. The official statistics said there was one phone for every two people, but it often felt like two for one. They were everywhere; the table scenes in the splendid food courts in the high rise malls were San Francisco to the second or third power. At a table with four people, two or three might be talking on the phone. You'd see a couple on a date, and one was talking on the phone. In a way I could understand the fixation. Hong Kong is crowded almost beyond belief. It makes parts of Manhattan feel like Kansas, and I suspect that a cell phone offers an escape, a kind of crack in space. It is an entrance to a realm in which you are the center of attention, the star. Access becomes a status symbol in itself. A lawyer friend of mine there described the new ritual at the start of business meetings. Everyone puts their cell phone on the conference table, next to their legal pad, almost like a gun. My power call against yours, gweilo (Chinese for foreigner; literally "ghost"). The smallest ones are the most expensive, and therefore have the most status. In places like Hong Kong, moreover, most people live in cramped quarters, which means consumption must take less space consuming forms. That's all understandable. To a lesser degree, such considerations apply in places such as Washington and New York. There is something lonely about a wired world. The more plugged in everyone else is the more we feel we have to be there too. But then effect becomes cause. The very thing that pulls us away from live public spaces begins to make those spaces uninhabitable. It is the pollution of the aural commons, the enclosure of public space by giant telecommunications firms, and the result is to push us all towards private space -- if we can afford it. This is technological Reaganism, a world in which personal desires are all that matters and to hell with everything else. So everything else starts to go to hell. The libertarian dogmatics of the computer crowd thus become self-fulfilling prophecies. But there's this, too. Not only are they saying, "Get out of my face." They are also saying, "I can't stop myself. I'm hooked." It is a communications revolution all right, but one that requires psychologists and anthropologists to understand. Economists just don't get it. They couch these events in the language of Locke and Smith -- if rational people seeking a rational self-interest. But in reality it's the old dark stuff: the vagrant passions and attachments of the human heart. But forgive me. I forgot. This is the longest economic expansion on record we are talking about here so we aren't supposed to get too deep. So I'll just close with a prediction. Secondhand noise is going to become a bigger issue in the next decade than secondhand smoke was in the last. It will be part of the big second wave of environmentalism -- the fight against cognitive pollution, the despoiling of the aural and visual commons, whether by cell phones and walkmen or by advertising everywhere. It's going to be a wrenching battle, but I predict at least one early victory. Quiet cars on Amtrak within five years. Meanwhile, I have my eye on a company in Israel, called NetLine Technologies, that makes small portable devices to block cell phones. Technically, they are illegal, and I doubt that more technology ultimately is the answer. But they do raise a useful question. If some people can use technology to pollute the air we share, why can't other people use technology to clean it up again? <------article ends here-----> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Nov 9 14:02:57 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 15EBC29AF3 for ; Thu, 9 Nov 2000 14:02:57 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 2391 invoked by alias); 9 Nov 2000 19:08:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 9 Nov 2000 19:08:18 -0000 Message-ID: <3A0AF471.67B24125@essential.org> Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2000 14:01:05 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Is Primedia Getting Into the Pornography Business? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Commercial Alert November 9, 2000 NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release: For More Information Contact: Thursday, November 9, 2000 Gary Ruskin (202) 296-2787 Jim Metrock (205) 612-3376 Is Primedia Getting Into the Pornography Business? Following the announcement of a proposed merger between Primedia Inc. and About.com Inc., two media watchdog groups raised questions regarding whether it was proper and appropriate for Primedia, a large media company, to merge with About.com, which generates an unspecified amount of revenue from Internet pornography. Primedia owns several child-targeted magazines, such as Teen Beat and Seventeen, and Channel One, an in-school marketing company that delivers ten minutes of "lite" news and two minutes of advertising each schoolday to a captive audience of approximately eight million children. About.com operates roughly general interest 700 websites, and several which appear to promote an extensive library of pornography. For example, About.com operates websites on "Adult Swinging,""Amateur Erotica," and "Fetishism." About.com's adult film guide, "Margie S." tells About.com patrons that her adult film newsletter will "give you the lowdown on the best xxx films & stars past & present with plenty of links to the hottest porno places." "Primedia shareholders have to look at themselves in the mirror and decide whether they wish to go into business partnership with porn peddlers," said Gary Ruskin, Director of Commercial Alert. "The mainstreaming of pornography is a national tragedy," said Jim Metrock, President of Obligation, Inc. "About.com provides visitors with help in finding prostitutes, pornographic films, and links to sites like ‘TeenX -- the Best Teen Site on the Web!' and ‘All Teen Pix.'" On October 23rd, The New York Times reported that some of the largest multinational corporations, such as AT&T and General Motors, are major distributors of pornography. "The General Motors Corporation, the world's largest company, now sells more graphic sex films than does Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire." "This is what's worst about big business today -- the incessant peddling of materialism, violence, pornography, addiction, self-indulgence and anti-social behavior," Ruskin said. "The more cultural sewage, the better, as long as it's profitable." Ruskin noted that this may be a cautionary tale for schools that bring corporate marketers into the classroom. "When you let the camel's nose into the tent, you might end up getting the whole camel. Now the schools are starting to smell the camel," Ruskin said. "The public needs to know who is talking to their kids," Metrock said. "I have serious concerns about Primedia's influence on children with its Seventeen magazine and its very controversial Channel One program. If Internet porn is acceptable to Primedia, then the public will find Primedia an unacceptable provider of content to children." Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition Executive Director, is a lobbyist for Primedia's Channel One. "Does Ralph Reed want to associate himself with a corporation that promotes ‘Schoolgirls4U'?" Ruskin asked. Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's web page is at . Obligation, Inc. works to remind businesses and governments of their responsibility to children. Obligation's website is at . -30- <-------release ends here--------> Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Mon Nov 27 15:09:57 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2C37F29B06 for ; Mon, 27 Nov 2000 15:09:56 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 13380 invoked by alias); 27 Nov 2000 20:17:04 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 27 Nov 2000 20:17:04 -0000 Message-ID: <3A22BF6E.699CA52E@essential.org> Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 15:09:18 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: In Harm's Way Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: commercial-alert-admin@lists.essential.org Errors-To: commercial-alert-admin@lists.essential.org X-BeenThere: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: on the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Commercial Alert November 27, 2000 A group of Boston doctors has just released an important report on the effects of toxic chemicals on child development. The report focuses on how "neurotoxic chemicals contribute to developmental delays, hyperactivity, memory loss, attention deficit, learning disabilities and aggressive behavior." The report concludes that "Neurodevelopmental disabilities are widespread, and chemical exposures are important and preventable contributors to these conditions." The report, titled "In Harm's Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development," was published by the Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility. It is available at . The report notes that "Protecting our children from preventable and potentially harmful exposures requires a precautionary policy that can only occur with basic changes in the regulatory process. The inability of the current regulatory system to protect public health is not surprising, considering the disproportionate influence of special interests in the regulatory process. When there is evidence for serious, widespread and irreversible harm, as described in this report, residual scientific uncertainties should not be used to delay precautionary actions." Following is an excellent (but technical) summary of the report, from Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly. =======================Electronic Edition======================== . . . RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #712 . . ---November 23, 2000--- . . HEADLINES: . . CHILDREN IN HARM'S WAY . . ========== . . Environmental Research Foundation . . P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403 . . Fax (410) 263-8944; E-mail: erf@rachel.org . . ========== . . All back issues are available by E-mail: send E-mail to . . info@rachel.org with the single word HELP in the message. . . Back issues are also available from http://www.rachel.org. . . To start your own free subscription, send E-mail to . . listserv@rachel.org with the words . . SUBSCRIBE RACHEL-WEEKLY YOUR NAME in the message. . . The Rachel newsletter is now also available in Spanish; . . to learn how to subscribe in Spanish, send the word . . AYUDA in an E-mail message to info@rachel.org. . ================================================================= CHILDREN IN HARM'S WAY by Rachel Massey* A new report by a group of physicians says that millions of children in the U.S. exhibit learning disabilities, reduced IQ and destructive, aggressive behavior because of exposures to toxic chemicals.[1] "Neurodevelopmental disabilities are widespread, and chemical exposures are important and preventable contributors to these conditions," the report says (pg. 117). Titled IN HARM'S WAY, the report was written by physicians Ted Schettler and Jill Stein and two of their colleagues and was published by Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility in partnership with the Clean Water Fund. IN HARM'S WAY links toxic exposures during early childhood, or even before birth, to lifelong disabilities including attention disorders, reduced IQ and poorly-controlled aggression. IN HARM'S WAY reviews scientific and medical information on a range of toxins to which most or all American children are exposed, and draws links to the rising number of children diagnosed each year with abnormal brain development or function. The report is a call to action for everyone interested in children's welfare and the future of our society. To avert brain damage in growing numbers of children, we have to reclaim our government from corporate special interests, the report concludes. Developmental disabilities such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia and uncontrollable aggression currently affect an estimated 12 million children under age 18 in the U.S. -- almost one child in five. Furthermore, the incidence of some of these disabilities appears to have increased dramatically in recent decades. For example, nationwide, the number of children classified with learning disabilities and placed in special education programs increased 191% between 1977 and 1994. The number of children taking the drug Ritalin to combat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has approximately doubled every 4 to 7 years since 1971. Experts estimate that autism rates have risen from around 4 per 10,000 in the early 1980s to between 12 and 20 per 10,000 in the 1990s. According to a recent article in US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, the number of children in New York classified with learning disabilities rose 55 percent between 1983 and 1996. [2] Some argue that reported disabilities are increasing because of improved diagnosis and rising expectations as children are required to learn more complicated skills at younger ages. But many parents, teachers, and physicians who work with children think these explanations are only partially correct because "they can not imagine that such disabilities escaped notice in the past," the report says. (pg. 11) Experts may argue about the exact number of children suffering from individual disorders, but the undisputed reality is that huge numbers of children currently suffer with serious developmental disabilities and they are exposed to many toxic chemicals that are known to produce such disabilities. "We believe we can no longer ignore the mounting evidence that chemical exposures contribute to the epidemic of developmental disabilities," the report says. (pg. 9) IN HARM'S WAY walks us through a sampling of neurotoxic substances to which many or all American children are exposed -- metals (lead, mercury, manganese); nicotine; pesticides; persistent organochlorine compounds (e.g., dioxin and PCBs); solvents, including alcohol; fluoride; and food additives -- and reviews existing human and animal data on developmental effects of these chemicals. These effects can vary dramatically depending on the exact timing of exposures. Tiny exposures that would have no noticeable effect at most stages of development can produce devastating permanent damage if they occur during a "window of vulnerability" when certain organs are developing rapidly. (pg. 9) Here is a sampling of the toxins that can misdirect the development of a child's brain. -- Lead exposure in infants and children is associated with attention deficit, aggression, and reduced IQ. Blood lead levels below those labeled "safe" by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are associated with learning problems, and no threshold has been identified below which adverse effects do not occur. Young monkeys exposed to lead show symptoms including heightened distractability and inappropriate responses to stimuli. One million American children currently live with blood lead levels above the threshold recognized by EPA as affecting behavior and cognition. Millions more would be added to this list if EPA's threshold were updated to take account of the most current science on the effects of lead in children. -- At low doses, mercury exposure can produce impairments in language ability, attention, and memory; at high doses it can cause mental retardation, vision problems, and problems walking. Mercury enters the environment through waste incinerators and coal-burning power plants. It bioaccumulates in fish in its most toxic form, methylmercury (see REHW #597). The EPA estimates that 1.16 million women of childbearing age "eat sufficient amounts of mercury-contaminated fish to pose a risk of harm to their future children." (pg. 64) -- Many pesticides kill insects by exerting a toxic effect on cells in the nervous system. Not surprisingly, such pesticides can disrupt the development and functioning of the human nervous system by the same mechanisms. Animal studies show that neurotoxic pesticides can produce permanent changes in brain structure and functioning when exposures occur on a single critical day of development. For example, some effects occurred in newborn mice if exposures occurred on day 10 of development, but not if exposures occurred on day 3 or 19. (pg. 82) Short-lived "pulse" exposures may have devastating developmental effects and yet can be difficult or impossible to identify after the fact (see REHW # 648). -- One pesticide exposure study examined children in two Mexican communities. The two communities were very similar in ethnic composition and culture, but one community practiced chemical-intensive agriculture while the other used few farm chemicals. Children in the community with chemical-intensive agriculture scored substantially lower on measures of memory, physical stamina and coordination, and had trouble with ordinary children's activities such as drawing a simple picture of a person. (pgs. 82-83) Children in the pesticide-exposed group also displayed more aggressive behavior than their unexposed counterparts (see REHW #648). -- Dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are organochlorine compounds that bioaccumulate in fatty tissue and are found at significant levels in human breast milk. Both animal and human studies show strong links between these pollutants and developmental disorders. Monkeys exposed before birth to dioxin in the range of human breast milk contamination levels were impaired in their ability to reverse a learned behavior in response to new stimuli. Young monkeys exposed to PCBs at levels typically found in human breast milk showed retarded learning as well as abnormally repetitive behavior. Studies of human children have found lowered IQs associated with PCB exposure in the womb, and a study of babies whose mothers ate PCB-contaminated fish from Lake Ontario found impaired development including abnormal reflexes and startle responses. (pgs. 76-79) These are just a few of the studies covered in IN HARM'S WAY. Government officials set "safe" exposure levels based on individual chemicals. But in the real world children are exposed to many chemicals simultaneously. Such multiple exposures can be far more damaging than exposure to single chemicals. For example, one study found that certain combinations of pesticides produce changes in thyroid levels that are not observed when the chemicals are tested individually, and thus the combination may produce unexpected developmental effects (see REHW #648). Proper thyroid levels are essential for brain development. Other studies reveal that exposure to a combination of mercury and PCBs, two pollutants that accumulate in fish, can produce even greater effects on neurological development than either pollutant alone. (pg. 67) Under our current regulatory system, industrial chemicals need not be tested for toxicity before they are marketed. (pg. 108) EPA estimates that somewhere between 2400 and 4000 industrial chemicals now on the market are neurotoxic. (pg. 107) However, this number is "highly speculative" (pg. 107) because most chemicals in commercial use have not been tested for neurotoxicity. EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) -- which covers just 625 out of 80,000 industrial chemicals -- reported that nearly a billion pounds of known neurotoxins were released directly into air and water in 1997. (pg. 103) Pesticides must be tested before marketing, but not for toxicity to the nervous system. Of 890 pesticide "active ingredients" EPA believes 140 are neurotoxins. Some 20 million U.S. children under age 5 eat an average of 8 different pesticides on their food each day. (pg. 106) The authors of IN HARM'S WAY point out that there is no reason to delay protecting our children; we don't need more scientific information before taking precautionary action. "We should not need to identify with certainty exactly how much and through what mechanism a neurotoxic pesticide impairs brain development before coming to the conclusion that public health is not protected when the urine of virtually every child in this country contains residues of these chemicals. ... We do not need to exhaustively understand the mechanism by which methylmercury interferes with normal fetal brain development before concluding that it is not acceptable for freshwater and many ocean fish to be sufficiently contaminated with mercury to threaten developing brains. We know how to reduce the environmental releases of mercury so that fish are once again safe to eat regularly. We can modify manufacturing practices so that lead use in products goes steadily down instead of up. We can eliminate or modify outmoded technologies that produce the dioxin that contaminates fetuses and breast milk. We know how to do these things." (pgs. 121-122) In order to do these things, we have to take back control of our regulatory system. As things stand now, corporations that benefit financially by exposing children to toxic substances are accepted -- even by most environmentalists -- as valid "stakeholders" in the process that determines "safe" levels of exposure. As a result, we have failed to protect our children from industrial poisons. As the authors of IN HARM'S WAY put it, "The role of special interests in the regulation of environmental chemicals is an important matter for public debate, as it has direct relevance to the neurological development of children now and in the future." (pg. 121) In sum, our current regulatory system is like a trial in which the criminal defendant gets to serve on the jury. If we want to have children who can play, think and learn normally, we will have to change corporations and our government so that protecting brain development comes ahead of protecting profits. ======================= * Rachel Massey is a consultant to Environmental Research Foundation. [1] Ted Schettler, Jill Stein, Fay Reich, Maria Valenti, and David Wallinga, IN HARM'S WAY: TOXIC THREATS TO CHILD DEVELOPMENT (Cambridge, Mass.: Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility [GBPSR], May 2000). Available on the web at http://www.igc.org/psr/ or as a paper copy from GBPSR in Cambridge, Mass.; telephone 617-497-7440. [2] Sheila Kaplan and Jim Morris, "Kids At Risk," US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT Vol. 128, No. 4 (June 19, 2000), pgs. 47-53. ################################################################ NOTICE In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. Environmental Research Foundation provides this electronic version of RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY free of charge even though it costs the organization considerable time and money to produce it. We would like to continue to provide this service free. You could help by making a tax-deductible contribution (anything you can afford, whether $5.00 or $500.00). Please send your tax-deductible contribution to: Environmental Research Foundation, P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403-7036. Please do not send credit card information via E-mail. For further information about making tax-deductible contributions to E.R.F. by credit card please phone us toll free at 1-888-2RACHEL, or at (410) 263-1584, or fax us at (410) 263-8944. --Peter Montague, Editor ################################################################ <------article ends here-----> Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Wed Nov 29 21:16:30 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0952C29B25 for ; Wed, 29 Nov 2000 21:16:29 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 12691 invoked by alias); 30 Nov 2000 02:24:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 30 Nov 2000 02:24:26 -0000 Message-ID: <3A25B7BA.2B68FE9D@essential.org> Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 21:13:14 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Commercial Alert Criticizes Library of Congress Over Coke Ad Deal Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: commercial-alert-admin@lists.essential.org Errors-To: commercial-alert-admin@lists.essential.org X-BeenThere: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: on the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Commercial Alert November 29, 2000 Following is today's news release about the misuse of the Library of Congress to promote Coca-Cola. NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release: For More Information Contact: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 Gary Ruskin (202) 296-2787 Commercial Alert Criticizes Library of Congress Over Coke Ad Deal As Coca-Cola Co. announced a donation of old ads that allows it to bask in the public splendor of the Library of Congress, Commercial Alert criticized Librarian of Congress James H. Billington for "allowing the Library of Congress to be used as a tawdry prop to sell junk food," said Gary Ruskin, Director of Commercial Alert, which opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. "It is not the proper role of the taxpayer-financed Library of Congress to help promote junk food like Coca-Cola to a nation that is suffering skyrocketing levels of obesity," Ruskin said. "It is crass commercialism for James Billington to degrade Jefferson's library and founding ideals into a huckster's backdrop." At a widely-publicized ceremony tonight at the Library of Congress, Coca-Cola Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas Daft will donate 50 years of Coke ads to the Library of Congress. Such commercialism in the Library of Congress is disrespectful to Thomas Jefferson and his ideals. More than anyone else, Jefferson is the founder of the Library of Congress. In 1816, Jefferson wrote "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." This month, in the largest racial discrimination settlement in U.S. history, Coca-Cola Co. agreed to pay $192.5 million to settle allegations that it routinely discriminated against black employees in pay, promotions and performance evaluations. "The Library of Congress is wrong to associate itself with a corporation that has engaged in such shameful conduct," Ruskin said. Consuming large quantities of sugared soft drinks, such as Coca-Cola, laden with excess calories, caffeine and other additives, can contribute to obesity, tooth decay, osteoporosis, heart disease, and kidney stones, according to a study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, "Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks are Harming Americans' Health." Commercial Alert's web address is . -30- <-------release ends here-------> FOR MORE INFORMATION * About today's Coca-Cola promotional events at the Library of Congress, see today's Washington Post article "It's the Reel Thing: Library Gets Coca-Cola Collection" at . * About Coca-Cola's historic $192.5 million settlement of a racial discrimination lawsuit, see a November 17 Washington Post article "Coke to Pay $193 Million in Bias Suit" at . * About the health effects of drinking Coca-Cola, see the report "Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks are Harming Americans' Health," by Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, at . Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Thu Dec 7 15:21:21 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 89B0729AF2 for ; Thu, 7 Dec 2000 15:21:20 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 16810 invoked by alias); 7 Dec 2000 20:31:50 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 7 Dec 2000 20:31:50 -0000 Message-ID: <3A2FF113.DB45C56D@essential.org> Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 15:20:35 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: The holidays and the obedience trainers Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: commercial-alert-admin@lists.essential.org Errors-To: commercial-alert-admin@lists.essential.org X-BeenThere: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: on the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Commercial Alert December 7, 2000 Following is an article from the December 3rd edition of the Charlotte Observer. Kids Are Obedient -- to Advertisers; Children May Give Their Parents Problems and Headaches. But for Advertisers They Are Cooperative to a Fault. by Gary Ruskin and Jonathan Rowe If you want to get a sense of the spirit of this Christmas season -- the commercial version, at least -- you might pick up a copy of Advertising Age magazine. There you will find such articles as "Young Girls Targeted by Makeup Companies," which describes the efforts of cosmetics firms to make eight year olds feel a need to paint their faces - to sell "kid makeup," the magazine says. Christmas cheer for advertisers means nagging, pouting, insecure kids throwing tantrums until their parents relent. It creates tension and chaos in the family, yet in reality it is a form of training -- obedience training -- that is taking place on a societal scale. Kids may give their parents problems and headaches. But for advertisers they are cooperative to a fault. If you doubt this, listen to what your kids are nagging for this holiday season and then ask yourself "Where did they get that idea?" Each year, advertisers and marketers spend billions of dollars to put kids through a kind of cultural obedience school. Sessions become especially intense during Christmas season. More than half of the toy industry's annual $30 billion in sales happen in the holiday season, and this is not an act of nature. The toy industry will "put their promotional machines to work to try to make something a demand item for Christmas," said Alan Dorfman, president of Basic Fun, a toy company. But it's not just the toy industry that targets kids these days. Marketers have realized they can harness the nag potential of children to move all sorts of products. "Virtually every consumer-goods industry, from airlines to zinnia-seed sellers, targets kids," says James U. McNeal, a retired professor at Texas A&M University, and the dean of the marketing to children movement. The central strategy of the obedience trainers has been to interpose themselves between parents and kids - and supplant the role of parents as guides to values and behavior. In just about every venue in children's lives -- the home, the school, and all points in between -- marketers have set up an authority structure to deliver messages that is outside of parental control. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation last year found that children spend 38 hours a week watching or listening to media -- most of which carries advertising -- with little or no parental supervision. Marketers use sophisticated psychological techniques to influence kids once they have their attention. "There are a lot of agencies and kids' marketing firms that have psychologists on staff and on retainer," said Debbie Solomon, senior partner and group research director at the ad agency J. Walter Thompson. These professional kiddie influencers know what they are doing. McNeal, who has spent 35 years studying how to market to children, articulates what every parent already knows -- that advertising "works very effectively in the sense of implanting brand names in their minds and creating desires for the products." The results of this obedience training are pretty much what you'd expect: whining and hyper-stimulated children, fights over gifts, family strife and stressed parents. In other words, Happy Holidays. Some 76 percent of Americans feel that excessive holiday advertising and marketing to kids is taking the joy and meaning out of the season, according to a recent poll. But parents are overwhelmed. They wage a grim daily battle with a commercial culture that is hostile to their deepest values, and they need some help. As the psychological tools of the obedience trainers grow more sophisticated, things are only going to get worse. The time has come for some disobedience -- commercial disobedience. If we really value kids and families -- and Christmas itself -- we will start to disengage from the psychological miasma that the advertisers have launched upon our kids. And we ought to get the politicians involved, too. Here's a question for the new president and members of Congress to start the new year: what they are going to do to give parents more power and more tools to combat the advertisers and their assault upon the nation's kids? Gary Ruskin is director of Commercial Alert, a national family network protecting children and communities from commercialism, advertising and marketing. Jonathan Rowe is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. <-------article ends here--------> Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert's website is at . Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the commercial-alert mailing list . To subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to or send the word "subscribe" to . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009 Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406 http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org -------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Fri Dec 8 13:44:47 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: commercial-alert@venice.essential.org Received: from ns2.vpinet.net (ns2.vpinet.net [209.76.252.7]) by venice.essential.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 5032C29B0B for ; Fri, 8 Dec 2000 13:44:46 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 14106 invoked by alias); 8 Dec 2000 18:55:34 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO essential.org) (216.250.232.28) by envirocitizen.org with SMTP; 8 Dec 2000 18:55:34 -0000 Message-ID: <3A312BF0.35C27094@essential.org> Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2000 13:44:00 -0500 From: Gary Ruskin Organization: http://www.essential.org/alert/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Subject: Booze ads on TV Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: commercial-alert-admin@lists.essential.org Errors-To: commercial-alert-admin@lists.essential.org X-BeenThere: commercial-alert@lists.essential.org Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: on the excesses of advertising, marketing and commercialism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Commercial Alert December 8, 2000 Following is an article in yesterday's New York Times today about the spread of hard liquor ads on TV. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/07/business/07ADCO.html Advertising: Cocktail Hour Returns to TV by Patricia Winters Lauro The commercial opens on a picturesque shot of smoky mountains, followed by a montage of simple country scenes: a flat-bed truck filled with barrels rambling down a country lane and a close-up of a weathered and lined old man — all set to a country- style instrumental. It is a familiar image that has been used to sell Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey in magazine advertising since the 1950's. But it is now appearing in an unfamiliar but more powerful setting — on television. The hard liquor industry, which has operated under a self-imposed radio and television advertising ban since shortly after the repeal of Prohibition, quietly dropped its own broadcast prohibition in 1996. And since then, slowly and with little fanfare, the nation's top distilled spirits companies — those that make vodka, gin, whiskey, rum and the like — have turned to the airwaves to promote their products. Though acceptance, especially on television, is sporadic and still limited nationally, such ads are the first signs of the industry's attempt to use all the methods of modern marketing to reverse years of declining sales in the United States. Liquor companies say their absence from television had become a relic, placing them at a competitive disadvantage against beer and wine, which have advertised on the air for years. Distillers say the United States — despite its Puritan heritage — is becoming more European in attitude, and the public is now willing to accept liquor advertising on television and radio. But critics disagree, arguing that there is no public benefit in advertising hard liquor on the airwaves. Instead, they say, to avoid encouraging underage drinking and to protect public health, all alcoholic beverage promotions — beer and wine advertising included — should be limited and more carefully regulated. With this in mind, the industry appears to be moving carefully to avoid attacks. The national television networks — including most cable networks — continue to ban liquor advertising. And drinking in general is something that television programming tries hard not to glamorize, said Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. But beer drinking, he added, has always been more acceptable. "In the past decade especially, television has been really careful about showing drinking," he said. "In `Cheers,' for example, there was virtually no reference to hard liquor. It was barely served there. But beer has a social lubricant quality to it. Think of Drew Carey or Norm — take away beer and you wouldn't have the same character." Last year, liquor advertising on television and radio totaled some $18 million, up from virtually nothing in 1995. Compared with the estimated $255 million the liquor industry spent in print advertising, broadcast advertising of liquor is a drop in the bottle. But that is changing. This year two major brands, Captain Morgan Spiced Rum, and Bacardi, began multimillion-dollar campaigns that included television. Other popular brands, like Allied Domecq's Kahlúa and Crown Royal and Chivas Regal, both owned by Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Inc., continued their nascent TV campaigns. "TV is the quickest way to build a brand," said Joe Tripodi, chief marketing officer at the Seagram Spirits and Wine Group in New York. Industry officials said television would help make mixed drinks as socially acceptable as, say, having a beer. "Our Kahlúa ads build brand awareness and reinforce the fact that responsible, moderate consumption of distilled spirits is socially acceptable," said Matt Wiant, a marketing vice president at Allied Domecq Spirits and Wine North America. Today, Mr. Tripodi said, it is possible to advertise on television and reach an overwhelmingly adult audience — something that was impossible to do years ago when the three major networks reached a mass audience and the market was difficult to segment. The growth of a diverse media marketplace, where programs and whole networks are tailored to adults, is the main reason the industry says it was able to drop its broadcast ad ban. At the same time, just about every major liquor brand in the country has now adopted radio advertising, said Judy Blatman, spokeswoman at the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a Washington trade group known as Discus. For years, distillers were resentful that beer and wine could advertise on television and radio with little restriction. During the 1980's and much of the 1990's, liquor sales lost a substantial portion of the overall market for alcoholic beverages to wine and beer, though lately liquor sales have risen slightly. "We vie for market share with beer and wine and yet we're being discriminated against," Ms. Blatman said. "All forms of beverage alcohol should be judged by the same criteria. There's no such thing as soft and hard alcohol — alcohol is alcohol." There is a long precedent in American culture, however, for treating the forms of alcohol differently, said Mr. Thompson of Syracuse. Distillers have found that getting the media to agree to equivalency has not been easy. The National Association of Broadcasters said none of the broadcast television and radio networks accept hard liquor advertising. Most local affiliate and independent stations, which are free to make their own decisions, continue to refuse liquor ads, said Dennis Wharton, an association spokesman in Washington. The Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau said nearly all the cable networks had similar exclusionary policies for hard liquor. "Marketers want to make it look like there's a huge upswing when we are not hearing that at all," Mr. Wharton said. "Certainly there's been no huge uptick." Media buyers have been getting on the air by bypassing the networks and buying advertising from local station affiliates or cable system operators. The ads run locally, but often during very popular shows. So while, say, NBC or a national cable network like TNT or MTV Networks declines liquor advertising at the network level, the local station or cable system in each market can make its own determination. More than 100 local television station affiliates in nearly 90 markets have agreed to take Seagram's advertising. And through local cable system operators that have agreed to accept liquor ads, the company can now reach almost 20 percent of all households with cable television, Mr. Tripodi said. The big city markets remain largely out of reach, he added, but ads for Captain Morgan ran this year on cable systems in Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles. Ads for the Jack Daniel Distillery have run in 12 local markets on NBC, Fox and CBS stations and have appeared in various cities during hit shows like "E.R." and "West Wing," Phil Lynch, a spokesman for the Brown-Forman Corporation, a wine and spirit maker, said. The ads have run in Miami, Las Vegas and several small markets. Bacardi's commercials have been picked up by cable systems in 12 states from New York to Texas and have run in local cable markets on ESPN, ESPN2, the Comedy Channel, VH1, and E! Entertainment Television, as well as on MTV during the popular MTV Music Awards, a Bacardi spokeswoman, Laura Baddish, said. The audience for the awards show, she said, had "a higher than average composition of adults." And spots for Kahlúa's low-alcohol line have run in local markets on USA and the Sci-Fi Channel, said Mr. Wiant of Allied Domecq. Local radio has clearly been a benefactor. Radio, traditionally less of a medium for reaching children, has been more willing to accept liquor advertising, said Jim Porcarelli, director of client services at Grey Global's MediaCom, a media buying firm in New York that is a unit of the Grey Global Group. Competitive Media Reporting said liquor companies spent about $15 million on ads in local markets around the country last year, up from $11.5 million in 1998. Seagram said it had run advertising on radio stations in 200 of the 300 top national markets in the country. Discus said most of the 2,000 broadcast outlets that had accepted liquor advertising since the ban was dropped four years ago were radio stations. "TV has been on the radar of political watchdog groups because of its higher degree of visibility," Mr. Porcarelli said. "Radio has been less of an issue." Advertisers say they have received f