If you don’t diet, refuse to exercise and continue to eat high-sugar, high-carb snacks morning, noon and night, what else are you going to do? And so an outfit called the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has joined forces with another group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood in order to sue Kellogg’s and the media conglomerate Viacom for pushing sugary cereals on children.
Yes, it’s always children. At least that’s where you start your campaign to intimidate companies who have the audacity to create legal products and actually market them to potential customers. Once you have shown that children are vulnerable to the evils of advertising, it’s a small step to arguing that adults are as helpless as well. Our inner children and all that. And given the expansive size of today’s Americans and Brits, I mean inner.
You can see the logic of the legal strategy. These kinds of campaigns have worked brilliantly against smoking and cigarette advertising. Demonising “Big Tobacco” has been one of the most successful puritanical campaigns since prohibition. Millions of Americans, completely unaware that smoking might actually harm them, have been forced to seek redress through the court system. What else were they going to do? Read the massive-print warnings on the cigarette boxes? But at least you could argue that someone else’s smoke physically harms, or at the very least irritates, a non-smoker. It’s a little harder to argue that an obese teen somehow makes a non-obese teen fatter. If anything the image of larger and larger Americans waddling breathlessly through the heartland is enough to make even the slouchiest of snackers throw down their packet of crisps and rush to the nearest gym.
Alas, that argument implies that adult human beings are rational and responsible for their own health and their own lives. And that, as we all know now, is an outrageous calumny on the helpless victims of market capitalism.
The campaign against sugary cereal was given a huge boost last month when a government body called the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies produced a report surveying 120 studies purporting to find a link between television advertising and fat children. A direct link between a particular ad campaign and a particularly fat child was impossible to prove.
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The studies didn’t claim false advertising either: there was no attempt to pass off sugar-laden frosted cornflakes as All-Bran. But there was a plethora of cartoon characters associated with yummy snacks, jazzy ads designed to make certain sweets look cool, and campaigns clearly designed to get children to beg their parents for certain brands and products.
The CSPI exulted that the report was “a milestone that marks the beginning of the end of junk food marketing to kids. The report sends a clear signal to food company executives and advertisers that the industry needs to completely rethink the way they do business”.
Now, the lawsuit. In Massachusetts, where liberal busybodies are as plentiful as conservative busy-bodies in Alabama, the groups sued Viacom — which owns several kiddie television channels — for damages. The CSPI claims that Viacom owes every child who sees an ad linking a cartoon character to a fattening food a grand total of $25 in damages.
“The injury continues . . . each time a parent purchases one of these items,” the group announced. The ads, even if they make no nutritional claims, are nonetheless pernicious. Because of them, children “are intrinsically deceived and abused by encouragement to eat unhealthy junk foods”. So they’re trying to force an injunction to stop the advertising.
Of course, this doesn’t come out of nowhere. Kiddie advertising can be a nightmare for parents trying to keep their children healthy. A friend of mine explained the dynamic he deals with as a harried dad: “Many parents would welcome bans on advertising targeting our kids because you just get sick of being the killjoy ‘no’ machine. ‘No, you may not have that cereal, it’s crap’. ‘No, we’re not getting pizza from Pizza Hut for dinner ’.
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“On days when he gets to watch TV, our relationship is instantly transformed from that of child and provider to child and denier. The kid is being manipulated and you know it and you are too, as a parent, because the advertisers know that if you are pestered enough, you will eventually cave.”
He has a point. But parenting always involves being a “no” machine. There will always be things a child wants that he or she shouldn’t have, and the pressures will come as much from peer groups as television or the internet.
A free society means that we are all being tempted by all sorts of things all the time — and many of them won’t be good for us. Would we rather live in a Soviet-era world where choice was limited to what was good for us, and groups such as the Institute of Medicine would decide in advance what we can and cannot be allowed to be tempted by? Three words: count me out.
Mastering the art of the “no” is simply what it takes to survive in freedom. If anything, we should thank advertisers for giving us an opportunity to educate our kids in the art of the “no”.
It’s invaluable training for a life of countless little “nos”. Of course, that requires a repetitive series of acts of something called responsibility. And nobody will give you $25 for any of those.