On The Media

BOB GARFIELD: Selling stuff to kids on TV is as old as - well - TV. But now the whole world is getting angry about it. Last week, the European Union threatened to crack down on junk food marketing to children, unless the industry shapes up. Closer to home, the Centers for Disease Control are deep into a study on the impact of pitching sugary sweets to kids. On Tuesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the most recent class action obesity suit against McDonald's could proceed on the merit of the claim that misleading advertising to children may have damaged the health of the plaintiffs.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the food people and the ad people have teamed up in a new lobbying group called The Alliance for American Advertising to defend what is being called a first Amendment right to advertise. The alliance, which includes General Mills, Kellogg and Kraft, along with two major ad industry groups, aims to (quote) "promote the industry's willingness to police itself." Kraft had already started by pledging to stop marketing it's most unhealthy products - Kool-Aid and Oreos, among others, to the under 12 crowd.

BOB GARFIELD: To prepare for a recent article in Slate, Seth Stevenson got up early a few Saturdays ago and settled in for the morning cartoons. He'd read such recent books as Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood, and Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and Consumer Culture. He wanted to see if the ads were likely to generate the kind of greed and envy that led to schoolyard brawls and incessant nagging as the authors claimed.

SETH STEVENSON: The books will say things like, you know, kids are bombarded now - there's so much more marketing going on to kids than there was, you know, twenty years ago. I don't think that's necessarily true. I remember watching cartoons, you know, every waking minute that I was home and could be in front of a television, and I think that's the same for kids now. What the books pointed out that perhaps I hadn't thought much of before is how much damage these ads were actually, you know, doing to me in my day, just as they're doing to kids now. Kids aren't able to tell the difference between the ads and the programs themselves. Kids under a certain age can't tell what persuasive intent is - that someone's trying to sell them something - they don't understand that concept. And you know, our frontal cortexes aren't really fully developed until we're in our late teens or maybe even early 20s, and it's possible that all this marketing that's going on to children really is changing parts of our personalities - changing our insecurities, our acquisitiveness. And so, it made me take a look at that in myself and think, gosh, you know, would things have been different if we did have a ban on marketing to children? Perhaps there would be insecurities that I don't have, or perhaps I wouldn't want that new gadget quite so much.

BOB GARFIELD: But isn't the point exactly that, because kids have sort of zero understanding of what an ad is, and because their threshold of desire is also zero - they basically want everything they see on TV - whether it's in the programming or in the advertising - that there is an ultimate neutralizer of the corruption of their consumer souls, and that's their parents, who need only either turn off the TV or just say no. You want such and such a product - you want the pirate ship? - No.

SETH STEVENSON: Yeah. I mean that's the reaction a lot of people will have - it's the parents' job to stop kids from wanting the stuff or telling the kids - sorry, you just can't have it. When you read these books, you'll see they say, you know, parents are under assault from the marketers, and that the parents' at doing that has become harder and harder, and it's unfair to put all that on the parents' shoulders. We should create some regulations that put a little of that burden on the marketers too and make parents' lives a little bit easier.

BOB GARFIELD: You mentioned that parents, or any adult, is seldom seen in these ads, and when they do show up, they're not portrayed in the most flattering light.

SETH STEVENSON: Yeah, they're almost never there. [LAUGHS] Usually it's just the kids, doing their own thing. When the parents are there, they're either scolds that the kids ignore, or they're, you know, the subject of jokes. They're made to look ridiculous.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You also talked about subtle and, and not so subtle sexist and racist messages which infuse a lot of the advertising.

SETH STEVENSON: You know, all the ads for toys for little boys take place in the backyard, outside- [TAPED COMMERCIAL PLAYS]

ANNOUNCER: How quick can you rip, how fast can you roll, how high can you fly? Fly Wheels! Fly Wheels [...?...] - each sold separately.

SETH STEVENSON: All the ads for little girls take place inside, in, you know, beautiful pink little bedrooms. That's to be expected. Also, in any ad that features a cast of multi-cultural kids, it's almost always the white boys who end up as the protagonists and spokesmen for the ad.

BOB GARFIELD: Eerily foresaging their later role as white men, holding the reins of power in the society. I want to ask you about how you ended your piece in Slate, because you noticed that, in addition to the toys and the, the food products, there was another category of advertised product that you had not recalled seeing when you were watching cartoons as a kid.

SETH STEVENSON: That's right. It seemed to me like more than half the ads I saw weren't for toys or food at all. They were for media products. They were ads for the DVDs like Princess Diaries and ads for video games and video game systems and for movies like Limony Snicket.

ANNOUNCER: Shark Tales on DVD February 8th. He's a Player. Remember this name! Oscar. And he's swimming with sharks! [SING-SONG] DAN DAN DAN DAN-DAN DAN - (Game tested.)

SETH STEVENSON: I think it's not so much the toys they covet - it's the movies - it's the DVDs and the video games, and that made me wonder if we are raising a generation of media addicts - a bunch of little scopaphiliacs who just sit there, inert, and are bombarded with all this media. To me, that was the thing that seemed genuinely different and the thing that perhaps we should concern ourselves with. [COMMERCIAL PLAYS] [SPRIGHTLY MUSIC UNDER]

ANNOUNCER: Disney's greatest hits. 40 magical songs on 2 CDs. [SONG EXCERPT: THE CIRCLE OF LIFE]

BOB GARFIELD: It would seem to me that, on the face of it, a, a little kid hectoring mom, you know, agitating for a media product is better than nagging for, for sugared cereal or some other sort of junk food, or is the stuff that you're seeing advertised really just media junk food?

SETH STEVENSON: Well, maybe it is better than the kid wanting a sugary cereal, but the question you might ask is whether it's better than a kid wanting a toy - that maybe might be more conducive to creativity than just sitting back and letting the Princess Diaries DVD wash over you.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, Seth, thank you very much.

SETH STEVENSON: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Seth Stevenson is a regular contributor to Slate.com. [KID-ORIENTED COMMERCIAL] [THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: 58: 00 That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Anne Kossef, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Susanna Dillaplane and Angelo Bello. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl. Katya Rogers is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcasts at onthemedia.org -- and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.