We should bombard the media for their smutty ads

I received a telephone call recently from a lawyer friend in Johannesburg asking about any recourse pro-life organisations could take through industry regulators against newspapers that ran misleading classified advertising for abortion clinics.

My answer to him was, quite sadly: “No”.

The problem is that while an advertising industry regulatory body does exist, for some strange reason it cannot rule against classified advertising.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) does an excellent job in coming down hard on misleading advertising that appears on television, radio and everywhere in newspapers, except for the classified section.

The mass media clearly have a problem self-censoring advertising because they, like any other business, have to give profit a lot of priority, and it is difficult indeed to turn away advertising, particularly advertising that has drawn objections on moral grounds or that some people might feel is offensive.

When there are complaints about advertising on moral grounds, it is mostly a tiny minority that complains. Most people might well be offended, but as we know only too well, that majority is generally very apathetic, and rarely bothers to complain about anything. As a result, decisions have to be made on the assumption that only a tiny minority finds an advertisement offensive or immoral.

Yet while there is no simple or self-regulatory recourse to classified advertising, if it is patently misleading it can be challenged in a court of law. It has been my experience, however, that if the editor of the newspaper concerned is made aware of misleading elements, it is highly likely that the ad will be removed or changed. And the more people complain about it, the more quickly the editor will take action.

It has always been a source of amazement to me that classified advertising has managed for so long to escape self-regulation by the media industry. One has only to look at your average daily newspaper classifieds to see that prostitution is blatantly advertised along with explicit pictures which leave little to the imagination.

While I respect freedom of speech and the right of any newspaper to publish any advertisement it likes, as long as it is legal and not misleading, allowing this sort of smut in the classified section is short-sighted from a purely business point of view.

Taking a long view, accepting such advertising is self-defeating because the one thing newspapers are desperately trying to do is to regain 16-25 year olds as readers. Such young people simply don’t read newspapers anymore. And the way to get them into the habit of doing so is to expose them to newspapers in schools from an early age. But nowadays few school librarians and teachers want to promote newspaper readership when the classified sections carry explicit smut.

Regulating advertising is extremely difficult because ultimately a somewhat lunatic fringe tends to do most of the complaining. One only has to look at some of the bizarre complaints that are received by the ASA to fully understand the difficulties faced by regulators.

Take this complaint about the new Renault Scénic motor car television commercial featuring a family going on holiday with a computer generated baby elephant in the back behaving like a complete nincompoop. I suspected that the complaint would simply be that it is one of the most stupid TV commercials ever made. Instead it was a lone consumer voice complaining about animal cruelty—against a CGI pachyderm!

Interestingly enough, five years ago the ASA might have given serious thought to banning it if it had been flighted back then. After all, the ASA did ban some posters in a Johannesburg deli illustrating how healthy their chickens were by depicting them in hand drawn cartoons happily running on a treadmill in the form of a tumble dryer and doing pull up exercise on the blades of an overhead fan.

These were all simple drawings, yet the ASA upheld a complaint of cruelty to animals on the basis that maybe kids would get the wrong idea and start feeding their pet bantams into tumble driers. I am told that these days, the ASA would not even think about banning something like this.

Other complaints the ASA have turned down recently included one about the Chevrolet Spark TV commercial which featured animated cartoon cars flying through the air, break-dancing, and doing all sorts of entertaining little tricks. The complaint: “A motor vehicle cannot possibly do all those things without causing accidents or damage to people or property.” And so another illusion is shattered.

But getting back to misleading abortion clinic advertising in newspaper classifieds, Catholics need to stand up and be counted. And inundate the editor of that newspaper with well-reasoned complaints.