FC: How the White House anti-drug czars influenced network TV shows

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

********

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/01/13/drugs/index.html

Drug money
How the White House secretly
hooked network TV on its
anti-drug message A Salon
special report.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Daniel Forbes

Jan. 13, 2000 | Advertisements
urging parents to love their kids
and keep them off drugs dot
urban bus stops across America.
Anti-drug commercials fill
Channel One in the nation's
schools and the commercial
breaks of network TV -- most
notably a comely, T-shirt-clad
waif trashing her kitchen to
demonstrate the dangers of heroin.
We've come a long way from Nancy
Reagan's clenched-teeth
"Just Say No."

Few Americans, however, know of a
hidden government effort to shoehorn
anti-drug messages into the most
pervasive and powerful billboard of
all -- network television programming.

[...]

With this deal in place, government officials and their contractors
began approving, and in some cases altering, the scripts of shows
before they were aired to conform with the government's anti-drug
messages. "Script changes would be discussed between ONDCP
and the show -- negotiated," says one participant.

Rick Mater, the WB network's senior vice president for broadcast
standards, acknowledges: "The White House did view scripts. They
did sign off on them -- they read scripts, yes."

[...]


Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project,
a public interest law firm, says, "This is the most craven thing I've
heard of yet. To turn over content control to the federal
government for a modest price is an outrageous abandonment of
the First Amendment ... The broadcasters scream about the First
Amendment until McCaffrey opens his checkbook."

Former FCC chief counsel Robert Corn-Revere, now at the law
firm Hogan & Hartson, calls the campaign "pretty insidious.
Government surreptitiously planting anti-drug messages using the
power of the purse raises red flags. Why is there no disclosure to
the American public?"

[...]



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