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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: Putin Is Right: Russia Belongs in NATO (August 8, 2001) The potential prize is breathtaking: the erasure, once and for all, of the East-West divide in Europe. By Jonathan Rauch. Political Pulse: Personality Politics Conquers Japan (August 8, 2001) Can Koizumi transfer his popularity to his sweeping reform plan? By William Schneider. On Books: Whose Democracy Is This? (August 8, 2001) A review of Direct Democracy or Representative Government? and The Battle Over Citizen Lawmaking. By Keith White. Political Pulse: Is the Mandate of '94 Finally Running Out? (August 1, 2001) GOP likely to have trouble holding on to its advantage in governorships. By William Schneider. Media: Goodbye, Insecurity (August 1, 2001) Katharine Graham was a kind of bridge between Washington's old and new establishments. By William Powers. On Books: At War Over the Balkans (August 1, 2001) Gen. Wesley K. Clark criticizes America's attitude towards NATO. By Patrick B. Pexton. More from National Journal. |
Media 
The Art of ExploitationWe pressies have created a system in which notoriety is everything, celebrity trumps dignity, and the spoils go to those who sell themselves out—to us by William Powers ..... In the past few weeks, two remarkable stories have danced lightly across the feature pages of America's newspapers. So lightly that if you weren't watching closely, you probably missed them, and that would be a shame. The first is about two teenage boys from New Jersey named Chris Barrett and Luke McCabe. Last year, the boys came up with a novel idea to pay for college, according to The New York Times. They offered to be the "spokesguys" for any American corporation that would pay their tuition and expenses. More than a dozen companies made offers, and the boys chose First USA, the gigantic credit card outfit, which agreed to pay each more than $40,000 a year for tuition, books, room, and board. Barrett will enroll this fall at Pepperdine University, McCabe at the University of Southern California. On campus, each will be a walking, talking symbol of First USA and all the good things it is doing for American youth. According to The Times, "Mr. Barrett and Mr. McCabe have the First USA logo on their surfboards, surf shorts, camp shirts, indeed, an entire wardrobe's worth of clothing, blurring the line between their life as average college students and their role as pitchmen. And that is just how the company wants it." "We thought we had a powerful message, and we were looking for the best way to spread it," First USA's head of marketing told the paper. "'What better way than to have two cool students, two normal guys, spread it for us?'" An old-fashioned reader, someone who remembers the days when it was cool to be suspicious of corporations, might find this story a little troubling. But The Times framed it as an amusing and even somewhat inspiring tale. "And Now a Word From Their Cool College Sponsor," says the playful headline, which sets the tone for the story that ran on the front of the Metro section. The article opens with a scene of the boys at the beach, in which they "emerge from the surf" with their corporate-logo surfboards and are approached by "two bikini-clad young women" who find their message "cool." "They are smart, smart kids," says the head of marketing. Not until the very bottom of the story does the piece note that there might be something disturbing here. "Not everyone, though, sees this as a good thing," it says, quoting an activist who opposes the encroachment of advertising into education. But after everything we've read about Chris and Luke, media-savvy babe magnets, the guy comes across as a party pooper. The second story is about a boy born last month to a young couple in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He doesn't have a name yet because his parents are auctioning off the naming rights to the highest corporate bidder. They want $500,000, enough to buy their dream house. After they put the naming rights up for auction at eBay.com and Yahoo.com, the press jumped on the story, which arrived as another fun head-shaker. "Will he be 'Heinz' or 'Microsoft,' 'Coke' or 'Kraft'?" asks an Associated Press story. "Only time—and money—will tell." The New York Daily News ran a big, heartwarming picture of the baby with his smiling parents and two sisters, with the caption: "Looking for a Buyer." The story began, "He's home, but what to call him?" Maybe the stories of Chris and Luke and little [Your Name Here] are, as the media suggest, just benign bits of fluff, oddball items for our summer amusement. Or maybe they're something more—dark fables about what we're becoming as a culture. But then, news people can't admit this, not without implicating themselves in the calculation. The media are in a bind with stories such as these, because we're not just innocent observers of this kind of self-exploitation. We created the system that these poor souls are trying to turn to their advantage, a system in which notoriety is everything, celebrity trumps dignity, and the spoils go to those who sell themselves out—to us. The Times observes that even before they arrive on campus, the First USA spokesguys are "attracting millions of dollars in free publicity with an image that is cool, blond, and young." The paper doesn't note that its own story, the one you're reading, is a case in point. Or that, after cutting its deal with the boys, First USA issued a triumphant press release, hoping to score exactly this kind of coverage. There's nothing new in this cycle. Not long ago, The Times published an obituary on Yvonne Dionne, one of the Dionne quintuplets born in Canada in 1934. The five identical girls were the world's first surviving quintuplets, a heartwarming news story that became a worldwide sensation. The coverage made the quints a hot property, so hot that they wound up at Quintland, an amusement park where visitors could buy tickets and watch them as they grew up behind glass. For a while, the park was Canada's biggest tourist attraction, outdrawing Niagara Falls. The quints were also used to advertise cod liver oil, soap, and Lysol. Naturally, the Dionnes grew into miserable adults. "Multiple births should not be confused with entertainment, nor should they be an opportunity to sell products," they wrote in a letter to the parents of the McCaughey septuplets born in 1997. "Our lives have been ruined by the exploitation we suffered." It's an old story line, and we'll keep telling it in the same way—pretending it's all for fun, though in fact, it's all for profit.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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