When I was a boy, I took one of my first newspaper jobs in the
back of the press room, standing next to a rotary letterpress of
the general size and aspect of a steam locomotive, where I “stuffed
papers.” That is, I assembled one section of the paper inside
another. Heavy, inky work for a whole crew of us junior high
schoolers and part-timing moms. And we all got a stern warning the
first day.
“You can’t call any want ads before the paper comes out to the
general public. You do it, we catch you, you’re fired,” Wayne, our
thick-bearded supervisor, told us.
Wayne scared us kids to death, of course. And it astonished me
when two grown-ups in the next few years got fired for jumping the
gun on classifieds. They were not part of our grimy crew, no. One
was a typesetter; he actually read the ads upside-down and
backwards on his stick. Another was one of my Dad’s ad
salesmen.
Years later, when I lived in New York, many young people I knew
put in stints at the Village Voice’s ad department. More
than one got fired for taking the jump on an ad for an apartment.
Weighed against the scarcity of New York apartments, a part-time
job didn’t mean anything. Note that the policy was still in place,
though — as it was in the 1980s when I took classifieds over the
phone at Los Angeles’s Recycler classified advertising
magazine.
I ruminate on this policy — maintaining public trust in
publications — because of the recent flap over radio talk show
Armstrong Williams taking a $240,000 payment from the Bush
administration’s Education department to do nice things on-air
(apparently) on behalf of the No Child Left Behind act. It was
stupid, stupid of the education department (just about what you’d
expect of government officials trying to be clever), and stupid for
Armstrong Williams, who had a unique reputation and position to
protect.
In his newspaper days, H.L. Mencken handled the inevitable flood
of press releases by putting them in a column headed, “What the
Press Agents Say.” These days, the boundaries have blurred
considerably.
Read Myrna Blyth’s entertaining and scathing Spin Sisters :
How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness — and Liberalism — to
the Women of America (St. Martin’s Press, 2004) and you find
out that women’s magazines and high-profile TV shows (Katie, Baba,
etc.) have been doing this kind of thing for decades. In order to
land a celebrity for the cover or the show, such a magazine or
broadcast will give over its entire content control to an army of
press agents and PR flacks. I have worked in magazine advertising.
I assure you that, to some degree, almost every magazine works out
similar deals with advertisers. The ad salesmen I used to work with
even had a made-up word to describe a mutual back-scratch. “I can
get you some advertorial,” a salesman would assure an advertiser.
Meaning, I’ll schmooze the editors to get them to say something
nice about you.
In the trade magazine world, forget it. The people you cover
actually contribute part of your editorial content, sometimes all
if it. That’s just the way it is.
At the same time, for at least the last three decades, a shift
in visual style has transformed magazines and TV. I pitched a story
to one start-up pub in the 1980s whose braintrusters actually
bragged that “You won’t be able to tell our ad pages from our
editorial pages.” Architectural Digest, Vanity
Fair, Vogue? Like that.
And, at a glance, can you tell the difference between commercial
and program content on some TV networks and shows? MTV? VH-1? ESPN,
sometimes?
So, okay, at some level, some radio, TV, newspaper, and magazine
publishing and programming is supposed to be Above All That.
Right. ABC hires George Stephanopoulos. CNN hires James Carville
and Paul Begala. They actually host shows. You can safely say that
the ABC and CNN think they’ve bought something significant. Or that
ABC and CNN have been bought.
Not much difference either way. TV stations love infomercials,
after all, because they don’t have any production costs associated
with them. They’re pure profit. It becomes clearer and clearer that
more and more of the media has adopted the large hunks of the
infomercial format. Most times, for example, Charles Osgood’s daily
radio broadcast simply recasts a press release, adding a line or
two of live interview.
Armstrong Williams played the game clumsily, and he had two
strikes against him from the beginning, as a black conservative. So
now the media world can go through a big moral snort about its
integrity. As soon as possible, things will settle right back down
to normal, reflecting the ethics of your average county
commissioner, writ large.
Down at the bottom, the peons will still get fired for calling
classified ads before pub date. Unless even that standard has
fallen to Ebay.
