The National Association Of Broadcasters And Problems Faced By Regulators

By Author: Ray Allen
Total Articles: 24
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The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) adopted a radio code in 1929 and a television code in the early 1950s. Positions for code authority directors and a limited staff were established in 1952. In the early 1960s, when the payola and quiz-game scandals such as the rigged $64,000 Question triggered Omega Replica fears of stringent new regulations, the staff was enlarged, and the function of overseeing the two codes was combined under a single code authority director.

In March 1982, U.S. District Court judge Harold Greene ruled that the section of the NAB code barring a sponsor from advertising more than one product in an ad shorter than sixty seconds violated antitrust laws. The NAB responded by suspending enforcement of the advertising standards of the code. The code has not been reinstated. Under pressure to clean up the broadcast airwaves, however, the NAB's board adopted voluntary guidelines in June 1990. The guidelines urged that depictions of "physical or psychological" violence be responsible, that the details of violence not be "excessive, gratuitous, ...
... or instructional," and that violence for its own sake be avoided. The guidelines also recommended that "the use of illegal drugs or other substance abuse should not be encouraged or shown as socially desirable." The NAB statement reiterated that the guidelines were purely advisory and carried no enforcement mechanism.

That stations and networks did not rush to air ads for contraceptives and hard liquor and did not solicit ads for palm readers and phrenologists in 1983 revealed the extent to which the NAB norms had been adopted by the industry. Indeed, in many instances the networks, whose screening of ads remains, impose more stringent criteria than the NAB. Also, the restraining power of public sentiment continues to operate.

The print media also have policies governing acceptance of advertised material, al-though these policies are less uniform than those governing broadcast ads.

By acknowledging that audiences cooperate in acts of influence, we raise an important and troublesome problem for regulators. Once regulators admit that an ad may induce the audience to draw a false conclusion even though the ad itself is explicitly truthful, the regulators must examine the ad's implied content. Because that content resides not in the ad but in audience interaction with it, a regulator concerned with monitoring any implied deception is forced to study the audience.
The audience of concern to regulators is the general public. The courts have characterized the general public as that vast multitude which includes the ignorant, and the unthinking, and the credulous, who, in making purchases, do not stop to analyze but too often are governed by appearances and general impressions. . . . The ordinary purchaser . . . is not an "expert in grammatical construction" or an "educated analytical reader" and, therefore, he does not normally subject every word in the advertisement to careful study. Because the law was established to protect "the trusting as well as the suspicious,"16 an ad can be deceptive if it deceives persons who are naive, uncritical, or even careless. Consequently, when a claim has two possible interpretations-- one accurate, the other misleading-- the advertiser can be found guilty of deceptive advertising.

To determine what an ad promises, officials of the FTC and the courts must rely on the testimony of experts such as scholars who have studied certain types of advertising, consult surveys of consumers to determine whether or not they were deceived, and trust their own common sense.
In its review of a claim against the makers of the pain reliever Anacin, the court dismissed the testimony of two experts in marketing research and relied instead on tests of consumer reactions that the court Omega Seamaster Replica called "the best evidence of what meaning consumers take from advertising." Customers had concluded from a television commercial for Anacin that the product was a superior analgesic. The ad claimed that "for pain other than headache, Anacin reduces the inflammation that comes with pain. These [Tylenol and Datril] do not. Specifically, inflammation of tooth extraction, muscle strain, backache, or if your doctor diagnoses tendinitis, neuritis." The court concluded that the makers of Anacin had misrepresented its properties by claiming that their product was an analgesic superior to Tylenol. A permanent injunction was issued restraining the makers of Anacin from making such claims in other ads.