speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Poverty of Civil Libertarianism
Advertising strongly influences all media that sell it. 89 American
tobacco companies spent $585 million on advertising in 1990,
mostly in magazines and newspapers (because they are barred from
television). American magazines were 40 per cent more likely to
publish news articles about the dangers of smoking if they refused
cigarette ads; women's magazines were twice as likely; indeed, six
women's magazines that took tobacco money published no feature
articles about smoking and health between 1982 and 1986. 90
Financial World, a journal with half a million subscribers, hired UC
Berkeley Professor Graef S. Crystal in 1991 to write a column on
executive remuneration. When advertising pages dropped 30 per
cent in the next four months it quickly fired him. Editor Geoffrey N.
Smith explained:
1 have tremendous respect for [Crystal] as an academician, He's
the foremost authority in that field, but you know it's just pretty
incendiary stuff. . . . [l]f you're a C.E.O. and it's your picture
featured in that column . . . you don't always like it. Some of them
have spoken to their lawyers. It's just been quite controversial.
Crystal noted that he had written a similar column for Fortune
magazine until forced to retract his criticism that executives at Time
Warner Inc, Fortune's parent, were overpaid. He concluded bitterly:
"I can't find a niche in any American magazine that has advertising
//91
Because television requires large audiences to generate the advertising
revenue necessary to defray its high production costs,
networks are wary of offending viewers. Each maintains a standards
division, whose 60 employees examine every script and video. 92
After "LA. Law" introduced a lesbian character who kissed another
woman the producers quickly transformed her into a less threatening
bisexual. A "Quantum Leap" script about a gay teenage naval cadet
who committed suicide after being beaten by student vigilantes was
rewritten to make the character older and have him saved from the
beating and suicide. Even so, sponsor withdrawals cost the network
$150,000. ABC earlier had lost $1.5 million when advertisers
backed away from a "thirtysomething" episode showing two gay
men in bed, and NBC had suffered pullouts from its movie about the
Supreme Court's abortion decision. Although Dan Quayle has
sought political capital by maligning the eponymous hero of "Murphy
Brown" for choosing to have a baby alone, executive producer
Diane English saw that as the less controversial decision. Had
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