anti-drug messages into primetime
Salon: Networks gave feds crack at scripts
By Jeff Bercovici
Have you noticed more anti-drug-themed plots on network television in the last couple years? Maybe you thought that you were imagining it, or that the television industry had suddenly developed a social conscience?
Well you weren’t, and they haven’t.
The networks really have been sticking more anti-drug messages into their primetime shows, but not on their own initiative. They’ve been doing it because the federal government has been making it well worth their while, in an arrangement they concealed from their own writers and producers--and their viewers.
That’s the conclusion of an investigation by reporter Daniel Forbes, published this week in online newsmagazine Salon.
Forbes details how the government has reviewed, and in some cases, imposed changes upon scripts for such high-profile shows as "ER," "Chicago Hope," "The Practice" and "Beverly Hills 90210."
Though the networks all claim that they never yielded up creative control, substantial revisions to plots and characters were sometimes made at the suggestion of government contractors, and producers were persuaded to shoot scripts they had previously rejected without being told why.
Civil libertarians are incensed at what they see as a gross abuse of power and a potential incursion upon the First Amendment. Though anti-drug messages are widely seen as beneficial to society, the workings of this deal amply illustrate how easy it would be for the government to fill the airwaves with more insidious forms of propaganda.
Forbes says the number of anti-drug themed shows has more than tripled in less than a year, an increase he suggests is largely attributable to the government’s influence.
The networks, when they’re saying anything, are by and large denying or downplaying Forbes’ accusations. An ABC spokeswoman says her network was never in a position to make such a deal, and an official CBS statement said merely, "At no time has the independence or the creative integrity of our programming been compromised." Other networks echoed the sentiment.
Forbes disputes such claims in his report. He spent six months teasing apart the threads of this unlikely alliance between the private media and a government office. The resulting document is a damning portrait of collusion, with unseemly overtones of payola and propaganda.
Why the government—more specifically, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, or ONDCP--would want to fill primetime programming with negative images of drugs and drug users is straightforward enough.
Why the networks would agree to play ball is another story. The answer, of course, says Forbes, is money.
In 1997, Congress voted to buy a billion dollars worth of advertising on network TV and other media to use for anti-drug ads. In order to persuade them to spend such a large amount, the TV industry had to promise to match that purchase with another billion dollars of free ad time.
Never thrilled about the arrangement to start with, the networks regretted the deal still more once the economy took off and the price of TV ads shot up, says Forbes.
Alan Levitt was running the campaign for the ONDCP, working with Richard Hamilton of Zenith Media. The two of them came up with a solution acceptable to both sides.
The networks would not have to deliver on their promise of free ad space.
In return, in lieu of commercials, they would weave anti-drug messages into programming—into the plots, subplots, and characters of sitcoms and dramas, says Forbes.
According to his report, the ONDCP would evaluate a script or a tape of an episode and rate it for how well it articulated the anti-drug message. They would then assign it a value, say three 30-second commercials’ worth. The network would then be forgiven the cost of three commercials from its overall debt to the government.
The networks had strong incentives for carrying anti-drug messages in even their top-rated shows: the higher the ratings, the more expensive the commercial time, the faster the network could redeem.
It wasn’t long, says Forbes, before the ONDCP had moved beyond merely approving and rating programming after the fact to influencing it in the production stages.
Forbes cites the example of an episode of the WB’s "Smart Guy." At the insistence of the ONDCP, two characters who originally appeared in the script as cool, popular underage drinkers were changed to social outcasts. Other changes were also made to the episode, changes which Forbes details in a separate Salon story.
At least one network explicitly denies that the government had any hand in its programming.
"We never submitted scripts ahead of time," insists Julie Hoover, a spokeswoman for ABC. Hoover contends that ABC had overdelivered with anti-drug ads and public service announcements; thus it had no debt to make up. She says that any anti-drug messages contained in ABC shows were a sign of the network’s "longstanding commitment to the war on drugs."
But Hoover’s claim is at odds with the words of an anonymous ABC public relations executive quoted in Forbes’ article saying that ABC did use programming to redeem promised ad time.
Exactly who did what isn’t the issue, though. The real question is who is at fault: the government, the TV industry, or both?
And who, if anyone, has been hurt?
It’s pretty clear that it’s the viewers who’ve been the losers in this shady bargain. Tuning into their favorite programs, they’ve been subjected unwittingly to covertly government-sponsored messages, many of them pure "Reefer Madness"-style hysteria.
But is the ONDCP really to blame? Surely, Levitt would not have been so forthcoming to Forbes if he were trying to put one over on the American public.
As easy as it is to blame the government, ultimately it is the networks that practiced to deceive. Just as the Los Angeles Times-Staples Center fiasco reminded us that a newspaper must make a clear distinction between advertising and editorial, so must a TV network make it clear to viewers--not to mention to its employees--just who its sponsors are and what, exactly, they’re sponsoring.
-Je
ff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.