Who's the Boss?

Why the ratings wars are good for consumers -- and consumer reporters.

John Stossel from the June 1991 issue

For I7 years I was a television consumer reporter. This was an odd job, because in essence it meant my employers paid me to criticize the people who pay them. I was rewarded for telling people what advertisers didn’t want them to know.

I assume it would have been a given in any discussion among government planners 20 years ago (or even now) that this kind of reporting would simply not happen. I can hear the arguments:

“This is one more reason why government-supported television is so necessary. If consumers are to be given important information about products that are dangerous, ineffective, or simply more expensive than other available choices, they won’t get it from commercial broadcasters. Just as Consumer Reports reviews products credibly because the magazine carries no advertising, only PBS can do consumer reporting.”

The planners’ arguments seem logical, but the reality today is that there is no significant consumer reporting on public television, while there is an endless parade of it on commercial TV. Consumer Reports syndicates a news service to 70 television stations; not one is a PBS affiliate. How can this be? In commercial broadcast television, advertisers pay for everything. Appropriately, the networks court them as any business should court its valued customers. Media buyers are favored with fine food, lavish parties (less lavish lately), hard-to-get tickets, etc. Why would a business undermine this courtship with negative consumer reporting?

Of course, even consumer reporters try to find complimentary things to say (medical breakthroughs, genuinely innovative products, etc.), but it is the nature of news to be negative (that Reason’s offices were not hit by an airplane is nice, but not news). For the most part, 1 spent 17 years insulting my employers’ most valued customers: I questioned their research, their promotion, their products, even their motives. For heaping such abuse on our customers, I was given promotions and extravagant paychecks.

To highlight this contradiction, let me give two examples. I’ll pick painkillers, since at the time these incidents seemed particularly painful-to me, and to my employers.

While working for WCBS-TV (CBS’s owned-and-operated station in New York City), I reported that the Federal Trade Commission had charged the makers of Anacin, Bufferin, Cope, Vanquish, and Arthritis Pain Formula with false advertising. Each company claimed its brand worked faster or killed more pain. In truth, they were all about the same, since aspirin was their only painkilling ingredient. The makers of Anacin even had the nerve to call Anacin “a tension reliever” even though its only ingredients are aspirin and, of all things, caffeine.

The government wanted the aspirin sellers to run “corrective’’ advertising, which would have been something like: “Contrary to prior ads, Bufferin will not relieve more pain.” The lawyers managed to keep this in court for six years, eating up your tax and aspirin-buying dollars, until a judge concluded that it was sufficient for the sellers simply to stop making the old deceptive claims. “Corrective” ads never ran.

None of my reporting on this story was ground-breaking or exceptional. Nevertheless, it inspired Bristol Meyers, maker of Bufferin and Excedrin, to sue me and CBS for $25 million.

I assume the company sued because of the language I used. The wire services carried similar stories but used the lawyer-driven language common to government press releases, something like: “The Federal Trade Commission today filed a deceptive trade practices action against the manufacturers of analgesics.” I didn’t find that clear, so I named the brand names and said, “Look, the ads are hogwash.”

This was my first lawsuit, and if its purpose was to terrorize me, it succeeded. I waited for CBS to disown consumer reporting- it was still a new field at the time-and fire me. To my surprise, CBS merely issued a statement saying it considered its “consumer reporting a valuable public service,” and told me, “Carry on.”

Lawsuits are not the biggest threat. They do carry the risk of bad publicity and destructive legal costs, but in practice the suits are seldom played out. After Bristol Meyers held a press conference to announce its complaint, it quietly let the lawsuit lapse. This is typical-in my 22 years of reporting, I’ve never made it to court.

The bigger threat is the loss of advertising. That brings us to the second example. On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” I explained that Sterling Drug’s heavily touted “discovery,” Panadol, was just an expensive form of acetaminophen, the painkiller in Tylenol. I suggested people buy store-brand acetaminophen, which cost half as much. Sterling Drugs took offense and pulled all its advertising from ABC.

You would think a commercial television network would say, “Who needs this? Who needs Stossel?” Instead, ABC never even told me about it. I learned of the cancellation months later, when someone at an advertising agency told me it cost the network $550,000.

Why does this happen? Why would the network executives go out of their way to protect reporting that criticizes the people who pay the bills? Everyone talks about that “wall” between sales and news, but who would think that when big money was at stake, the wall would be respected?

Comments

nike shoes UK|8.1.11 @ 4:14AM|#

is good

log in or register to reply