Pubdate: Wed, 19 Jan 2000
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact:  200 Liberty Street, New York, NY 10281
Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Author: John Podhoretz

TV ANTIDRUG MESSAGES ARE NO SCANDAL

It's a form of "mind control,'' protests Harvard media eminence Bill
Kovach. "Insidious," shudders former Federal Communications Commission
counsel Robert Corn Revere. "The most craven thing I've heard of yet,"
hollers Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Media Access Project. The New
York Times editorial page says the "deeply unhealthy" practice "should
disturb anyone who believes in the need for all media. . . to remain
free from government meddling."

Good heavens, what could this insidious, deeply unhealthy form of
governmental mind control possibly be? It's nothing more than broadcast
television networks working with the Office of National Drug Control Policy
(familiarly known as the "drug czar's" office) on an entirely voluntary
basis to coordinate antidrug messages in their shows.

Don't worry. Big Brother isn't programming prime time.

In 1997, when the government program in question started, drug use was
increasing, especially among teenagers not surprising, given the country's
stewardship by a president who joked about how he "didn't inhale." In this
atmosphere, the Partnership for a Drug Free America, the private
consortium that promoted Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" message and made the
famous fried egg "This is your brain on drugs" commercials, was having
increasing difficulty getting free TV time from the networks and raising
money in general.

So the Partnership began a lobbying campaign that ended with the
Republican Congress committing $1 billion over five years to
disseminate antidrug messages in mainstream media. The responsibility
for spending that money was given to the drug czar's office, under the
leadership of the popular Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

Lest the idea of the federal government buying advertising time of any
kind raise your First Amendment hackles, consider this: One of the
major advertisers on American television in the past 25 years has been
the U.S. military, which needs to reach possible recruits, and will
spend more than $300 million on ads this year.

But there was one catch to the antidrug ad money. To get it, Congress
insisted, the networks had to give away an equal amount of time free.
(Think of it as a dollar for dollar match, the kind of thing they talk
about during pledge drives on PBS, when some corporation agrees to
equal every contribution made during the course of the evening.) That
meant the networks would be selling their time to the government at a
50% discount.

They didn't have to accept the ad buy. No law forced them to sell the
time. They could have told the drug czar to stuff it. Instead, as they
were in the midst of an ad slump and eager to get their hands on big
tranches of money, they leapt at the arrangement.

Flash forward to 1998. Suddenly the ad slump has ended, what with the
white hot economy and a whole new class of dot com advertisers hungry
for prime time space. The networks are sorry they sold their time too
cheaply, but what can they do? A contract's a contract. At which point
the drug czar's office makes an offer: It's only interested in getting
its antidrug message out. If the networks want to get back some of the
free time they had promised, the office would be willing to count
appropriate messages in the prime time shows themselves as meeting the
network's matching obligation. 

Once again, the networks could have
said no, and stuck to the original contract. But they leapt at this
idea as well. So a system was devised whereby the networks would get a
certain amount of advertising credit for an antidrug message (30
seconds for a half hour show, 21/2 minutes for an hour long show)
deemed appropriate by the drug czar's office. In order to ensure they
would get the credit they wanted—in some cases worth almost $1
million—the networks (including the Fox network owned by my employer,
News Corp.) sent some scripts to the drug czar's office for approval.

There's an argument now about whether the drug czar's office insisted
on seeing these scripts before the shows aired or whether that
practice simply developed over time. Alan Levitt, the official
responsible for this program at the drug czar's office, says he made
no such demand. ABC President Patricia Fili Krushel says as of last
year it became a requirement. Mr. Levitt says that was a
"miscommunication." Whatever. The fact remains that nothing untoward
happened here. Quite the opposite. The drug czar's office is a federal
agency entrusted with $1 billion of taxpayers' money, which means it
must exercise responsible oversight. It offered an incentive to
private businesses with whom it had an airtight contractual
arrangement to do something of redeeming social value that cost the
taxpayers nothing and fulfilled Congress's intention to get antidrug
messages on the air. Once again, the networks' were under no
compulsion to agree to this They could just have fulfilled their end
of the bargain to the letter. , Even so, the Hollywood creative types
contacted by Salon (which uncovered this arrangement) reacted as
though they have been turned into functionaries of a totalitarian
government. 

"I'm so caught off guard, so stunned," Chicago Hope
producer John Tinker, one of whose episodes was vetted without his
knowledge, told Salon. "All of this is disturbing." 

Come now. As Mr. Tinker surely knows,; federal agencies and offices vet
Hollywood’s scripts all the time whenever filmmakers} seek to us
e their facilities and equipment .The military, in particular, goes through
scripts line by line to determine whether a script conveys an attitude the
Pentagon
finds congenial before it will consent to rent out planes and aircraft
carriers and the like"

The only real "miscommunication” here is that the networks kept the
arrangement secret from the people who make the programs. That's a
matter to be negotiated between those two parties. Otherwise, the
First Amendment watchdogs can curl up and take a nice nap. The
Constitution is safe.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mr. Podhoretz, who worked for the drugczar's office in 1989, is a
columnist for the New York Post, a contributing editor at the Weekly
Standard and a contributor to the Fox News Channel.
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