Protect endangered reading spaces from noisy TVs

Mon, 16 Apr 2001 07:11:30 -0700

Commercial Alert			April 16, 2001

Commercial Alert and a coalition of reading and media advocates sent a
letter today to President George W. Bush, asking him to protect mass
transit riders and readers from companies that produce transit-based
systems of compulsory TV watching.  The letter follows.

Dear President Bush:

We are writing to you today about reading, and about the public places
in which people do it.  These places are under attack.  The precious
quiet moments that people find in their busy days on public transit, for
reading and study, are threatened.

You can stop this theft of reading time, and we hope you will.

The assault comes in the form of a new scheme to turn the nation's mass
transit vehicles into amphitheaters for the compulsory watching of
television.  According to The Wall Street Journal, two corporations --
Itec Entertainment Corp. and Orbital Sciences Corp. -- have launched a
joint venture to put TV's on buses and trains across the country.  The
purpose of the TVs will be to broadcast "a package of news and weather
-- and a lot of ads."  

The companies are starting with a pilot project on buses in Orlando,
Florida.  But they are moving quickly to penetrate "municipal bus
services nationwide," the Journal reports.  Eventually, the companies
say, they want to deploy their compulsory television system in "buses,
rail and other modes of mass transit" across the country – in other
words, just about every kind of transportation in which people might
want to take a few moments to read.

Millions of people do.  If you have ever ridden on New York City's
subways, Washington's Metro, San Francisco's Muni or Boston's T, you
have seen fellow riders engrossed in reading.  You've seen students
reviewing their lessons and recent immigrants wrestling with an English
as a second language text.  You've seen a kind of mobile field of
dreams.  

You've also seen people reading bestsellers and Bibles.  Many riders use
the quiet time to just think or pray.

Now the hucksters want to call a halt to this.  They just can't bear the
thought that somewhere in America, people might be doing something
constructive and not looking at their ads.  They brag to advertisers of
a "captive audience" that doesn't have a choice in the matter.  They
have designed the TV's so that riders cannot turn them off or even turn
them down.  They boast that the sets are  "hammerproof" – a telling
admission regarding the emotions these sets will provoke.  

Americans today lead hectic lives.  They don't have much quiet time for
reading, and we should treat the little that remains as a precious
national resource.  Certainly the government should not abet in any way
the destruction of this reading time.  It should not help turn public
transit into a commercial free-fire zone.

As Governor of Texas you labored hard to improve reading skills in the
state.  As President, in February you proposed a new $5 billion federal
reading initiative.  Your wife Laura is well known for her dedication to
the causes of childhood reading and adult literacy.  In a high point of
your presidential campaign, which the media mostly ignored, you
encouraged children to turn off their TV sets and read. "If you're a
good reader, you can go to college and be anything you want to be," you
told a third grade class in San Diego. 

That's why reading time is so important.  It is why we urge you to
defend the users of the nation's mass transit against the invasion of
compulsory commercial noise.  You can do this.  You can keep these
spaces safe for reading, study, work and quiet reflection. 
Specifically, you can prohibit any expenditure of federal transportation
funds on mass transit systems that coerce their riders to watch TV to
the detriment of these quieter pursuits.  

This would be a noble action.  It would make you an environmental
president in a new and most important way.  We urge you to take this
stand.

Sincerely,
Don Block, Executive Director, Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council
Les Blomberg, Executive Director, Noise Pollution Clearinghouse
David Bollier, author, policy strategist
Jason Catlett, President, Junkbusters Corp.
Stuart Ewen, Chair, Department of Film and Media Studies, Hunter
College; author of PR! A Social History of Spin*
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*
Sut Jhally, Founder and Executive Director, The Media Education
Foundation
Jean Kilbourne, author, Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the
Way We Think and Feel 
Bob McCannon, Executive Director, New Mexico Media Literacy Project
Jim Metrock, President, Obligation, Inc.
Robert McChesney, Research Associate Professor, U. of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign; author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy*
Carrie McLaren, publisher, Stay Free!
Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University*
Paula Quint, President, The Children's Book Council*
Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of Virtual Culture, New York University;
author, Coercion and Media Virus*
Gary Ruskin, Executive Director, Commercial Alert
Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer, NYPIRG's Straphangers Campaign
Juliet Schor, Senior Lecturer on Women's Studies, Harvard University;
author, The Overspent American*
Betsy Taylor, Executive Director, Center for a New American Dream
Frank Vespe, Executive Director, TV-Turnoff Network
Peter Waite, Executive Director, Laubach Literacy Action

* indicates affiliation for identification purposes only   

<------letter ends here------

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP:
Please contact Sarah Youssef, Associate Director of Domestic Policy in
the White House.  Ask her (politely) to encourage President George W.
Bush to defend readers and reading by prohibiting all expenditures of
federal transportation funds on mass transit systems that compel their
riders to watch TV.

You can reach Ms. Youssef by phone through the White House switchboard
at (202) 456-1414.  Her fax is (202) 456-5557, and email is
<syoussef@who.eop.gov>.

BACKGROUND:
For more information, see Commercial Alert's web page on protecting
endangered reading spaces, at
<http://www.commercialalert.org/readingspaces/index.html>.   Commercial
Alert's home page is at <http://www.commercialalert.org>.

MORE BACKGROUND:
Following is an article from the February 21 edition of the Wall Street
Journal.

Advertisers Seek Out City Buses To Broadcast Their Latest Pitches
By Robert Johnson

Advertisers dream of captive audiences. So much so that in recent years,
they've even tried placing ads on turnstiles at sporting events, despite
the fact that the audience is restrained for only a second or so.

Now Orbital Sciences Corp., a maker of mass-transit tracking systems, is
teaming up with Itec Entertainment Corp., a small theme-park design
company, to target the ultimate captive audience: riders of city buses,
who are typically confined in the vehicle for 10 to 20 minutes. The
joint-venture partners want to plant television screens inside municipal
buses to broadcast a package of news and weather -- and lots of ads.

Orbital is already running a pilot program in Orlando, Fla., where about
a dozen buses have been showing programs and information on upcoming bus
stops on the closed-circuit TV system since October. Advertisers with
air time include the Value Pawn store chain and First Choice Auto
Finance, a used-car credit provider.

Some passengers say they welcome the TVs. "Watching the monitors gives
you something to do," says Steve Choiniere, manager of an Orlando
clothing store and a regular bus rider. "I saw one story about the
outdoors that had mountains and woods. It was a lot better than watching
the same old buildings pass by outside the bus."

Others aren't so happy about being trapped on a bus with TVs showing ads
at a preset volume. "The whole idea of television ads blaring at you on
a bus is offensive," says James Clark, editor of monthly Orlando
magazine and an occasional city-bus rider. "It's bad enough that you
have to be riding a crowded bus in the first place, but this is adding
insult to injury."

The designers, in fact, have taken pains to prevent passengers from
injuring the TV systems, and vice-versa. The screens and monitor boxes,
which hang down from the bus ceilings in boxes, have contoured corners
to help prevent riders from hitting their heads. They are also what Itec
describes as "hammerproof."

"Someone may take a swing at these screens and try to yank them down,"
says Doug Tison, legal affairs director for Orlando's bus system, known
as Lynx. The TV systems, which include three monitors for each vehicle,
cost about $11,000 to install per bus.

The programming, which Itec puts together, draws stories from a variety
of news wires. Some stories appear as printed text, but others, such as
lifestyle and nature features, are color video.

Itec also generates content at its small Orlando studios, such as trivia
questions that appear occasionally on the bus TVs. "It really doesn't
take much to entertain most people on a bus ride," says Daniel West,
vice president of Itec Network, the closely held company's telecasting
unit.

So far, advertisers have been pleased with the results of the Orlando
pilot program -- and the cost to participate, says Annette Percival,
president of Advantage Marketing Concepts, a media-buying company in
Orlando. The Orbital-Itec partnership has guaranteed a total of one
million viewers during six months of telecasting the 30-second spots,
for $1,500 a month, Ms. Percival says. By comparison, she says, reaching
such an audience via television in Orlando homes would cost about $3,500
a month.

One satisfied customer is the U.S. Marine Corps, whose advertising
agency, J. Walter Thompson, a unit of New York's WPP Group PLC, bought
recruiting ads on the Orlando buses in November. The bus ads are the
same 30-second spots running on network TV, depicting a Marine with a
sword slaying a dragon.

"The Marine recruiters in Orlando tell us that prospects are noticing
the bus ads and responding positively," says Gary Sayers, the agency's
district supervisor for the Southeast U.S.

This week, Orbital is launching an effort to market the systems to
municipal bus services nationwide. The Dulles, Va.-based company is
offering to distribute Itec's TV monitors for free to municipalities
that agree to try the bus-TV system. Orbital says it's in talks with
several cities but declined to say which ones. Under proposed sales
agreements, Orbital and Itec would split about 90% of the revenue.

The news and weather can be tailored to each city, notes Marc Plogstedt,
a partner at Itec. The technology could also work in commuter trains, he
says.

Similar systems are being developed and tested by other companies on bus
systems in Singapore and London.

Orbital already has numerous municipal contacts because its mass-transit
tracking systems are used on 25% of the nation's 81,000 municipal buses.
The systems help dispatchers keep track of the vehicles.

Orlando-based Itec is best known for designing such popular rides as
Universal Studios' Jurassic Park and Spiderman in Orlando. In the
Jurassic Park ride, for example, the company plans which way the boats
will turn and what the dinosaurs will do. Itec's client list includes
Walt Disney World and the Mirage Resort in Las Vegas.

So with such a glamorous resume, why bother with buses, perhaps the
world's dullest rides? "That's just the point; it's a challenge," says
Bill Coan, a partner at Itec. It's also a wide-open market, he adds.

But what's the best part for an advertiser? Mr. Plogstedt, the Itec
partner, says it's probably that passengers have to pay attention to the
screen to be alerted that their stop is coming "so they can get off."

And get away.    

<----article ends here---->

Ralph Nader founded Commercial Alert in 1998 to keep the commercial
culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting
children and subverting the higher values of family, community,
environmental integrity and democracy.  Commercial Alert's website is at
<http://www.commercialalert.org>.

Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the
commercial-alert mailing list <commercial-alert@lists.essential.org>. To
subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to
<http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/commercial-alert> or send
the word "subscribe" to <alert@essential.org>.

PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY
-- 
Gary Ruskin | gary@essential.org
Commercial Alert | Congressional Accountability Project
http://www.commercialalert.org | http://www.congressproject.org
phone: 202.296.2787 or 503.295.6916