ALLIANCE BETWEEN GOVERNMENT, MEDIA A BAD MOVE

Christina Simmons of the San Diego Zoo assures us that a camel’s breath will faithfully reflect his most recent meal. So, if you and your tentmates are about to doze off and suddenly notice a distinctive odor, you should quickly establish who ate what at dinner. If no one admits to the alfalfa and red fescue combo plate, grab a flashlight and check around. There’s a camel’s nose inside the tent.

If you consider mass marketing the tent, the nose in this instance belongs to a camel named Uncle Sam. On July 9, President Clinton announced a $2 billion, five year media blitz to convince young people not to take drugs. Half the money will come from the taxpayers; the rest, it is hoped, will be donated by various media organizations.

Much of the discussion following the announcement focused on whether the ads will have any effect. Any marketing expert will tell you that changing deeply embedded behavior patterns through advertising isn’t easy. And other analysts point out hat over the past decade or so television networks have donated more than $3 billion worth of air time to the anti-drug messages, with underwhelming results.

Still, it might work. The old advertising program was dependent on public service announcements that television stations tended to air during the "insomniac hours." It was also dependent on the public spirit and generosity of the networks. Whatever one thinks of the current state of those virtues at the networks, the hard fact is that at-risk young people don’t watch much network TV.

The new anti-drug effort, with its $200 million annual budget, will purchase time on television including cable TV, in specific time slots and on specific programs that the target market—young people of middle-school age—actually watch. There will also be advertisements placed in print media, on billboards, and on the Internet.

What is far more important is that the fundamental structure of the anti-drug campaign is changing, and government’s relationships to the media industry, and to the public, are changing with it. The feds have suddenly become a player in the media industry, a "client" with a $200 million a year budget. Even with today’s bloated media budgets, that will earn VIP treatment by the media moguls.

The real question is whether we want our government to get VIP treatment by the media moguls. And if it does get this treatment, how will that change things? To start with, a client relationship is different from a regulatory relationship. It is shaped by the needs and the character of the client. Big advertising clients are legendary for being capricious, demanding and difficult to please. (Just think of the clients Darren and Samantha had to deal with in "Bewitched."}

A regulatory relationship, by contrast is shaped by the law that creates it. For many years, the federal government’s relationship with the broadcast media was directly influenced by the laws that spelled out how radio and TBV licenses would be granted and how, generally, the public interest in broadcasting would be represented. Over the past two decades, though, the federal government has become less interested in regulating broadcasting, and has increasingly viewed it as something that the market should and would take care of. Whether or not that was a good idea is a matter of opinion.

Starting a new relationship, that of "client," however, is another matter. Money buys influence. Newspapers and broadcasters frequently wrestle with this problem when it comes to their own advertisers. Particularly when dealing with bad news of any sort, it is a natural instinct to treat a client differently from a stranger. Still, it’s one thing for the local weekly to give its major advertiser, "Vlads House of Garlic," the benefit of the doubt with its health inspection results, and quite another for the national news media to give a positive spin to its "client’s" latest tax plan or foreign policy adventure.