ADVERTISING IS AN INDUSTRY DEDICATED TO SELLING LIES, when it's lies that will get its customers what they want and I'd be willing to bet that lying does in a clear majority of its cases. A good short descriptions of how that works is in a piece by Charles Pierce about how the football industry is mounting a campaign of easily sold lies about head trauma peddled to the American People in ways the tobacco industry peddled its lies about the harm of using tobacco.
In December of 1953, the American tobacco industry was in deep trouble. Research into the deleterious health effects of cigarette smoking was beginning to pile up ominously all over the country. So the industry did what American industries do—it hired Hill and Knowlton, a power in the advertising industry even then, to spin itself out of trouble. H&K earned every nickel it made from this particular client. Its strategy included buying its own scientists to cast doubt on the mounting evidence. As medical historian Allan Brandt put it in his magisterial study, The Cigarette Century, “[This] strategy for ending the ‘hysteria’ was to insist that there were ‘two sides’ … This strategy would ultimately become the cornerstone of a large range of efforts to distort scientific process in the second half of the 20th century.”
“Hysteria” has been a weaponized word, useful when large industries don’t want to face up to the damage they may be doing. We saw it used with cigarettes. We’ve seen it used in regards to the public health crisis currently facing football at every level.
If there is going to be chronic denialism on this issue, it may not come from the NFL, although some of it surely will. It’s going to come from the people in the game, the fans of the game, and many members of football’s kept national press, who are unwilling or unable to change their moral calculus and who become aggravated when somebody suggests that they should. For example, in 2015, Jim Harbaugh, the coach at the University of Michigan, suggested that American football was “… the last bastion of hope in America for toughness in men, in males.” (So much, one supposes, for the SEALs.) Coach Bruce Arians of the Arizona Cardinals expressed concern that America’s mothers were refusing to let their sons play football because of the head injury issue. (Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be safeties.) Danny Kanell, then of ESPN, called attention via Twitter to the peril he perceived from the folks he called “concussion alarmists.” (Kanell also managed to work “the liberal media” into his tweet, thereby winning that week’s game of wingnut rhetorical bingo.) In support of Kanell, Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports bellowed his contempt for what he called “the media-driven concussion hysteria.” Hill and Knowlton would have been proud of that one.
To be fair, Whitlock later in the same piece admits that football is “barbaric,” which is better than other Football Under Attack pieces I’ve read. Let us be clear: I am not suggesting that we ban the game. That kind of thing never works in America and, generally, the attempts to do it end very badly for society at large. But I do find myself wondering if the shift in the moral calculus is profound enough to shake the purchase that American football has on the culture in so many different places—from high schools in Texas to the gambling floors in Las Vegas. And I think of John Urschel again, and I’m happy he was strong enough to give up something he loves in order to pursue something else that he loves. And I think of my father, who could swim for hours, when he was still who he was born to be.
Notice something about this situation, one industry hired another industry to lie about its product that was a. addictive, b. sold to new smokers through advertising, c. harmful to the health of those who believed what they were told about their addictive product. The power of the concerted and magnified power of corporations is an intrinsic part of the problem, using that power to do essentially what the peddlers of heroin and other addictive drugs do to people. The tobacco and alcohol industries are the most successful pushers of addictive, debilitating drugs in our history and the advertising industry whose product is ubiquitous have shaped the acceptance of both and their consequences, it is the most successful medium for peddling lies in our history.
But while the football industry may hire outside advertising liars on its behalf, they don't really need to because every network, almost every newspaper, many other journalists are entirely ready to carry the ball for them and it's called, not advertising, but "journalism." The corrupt part of the media in his example is as clearly built in as the movies of the 1930s through today which willingly and profitably place smoking and alcohol as paid promotion in what they produce. Him using advertising as the main feature of his argument rather buried what I'd have made the lede.
Since I have repeatedly mocked Charles Pierce's idolization of James "Jemmy" Madison, idolized because of his role in the adoption of the dangerously aphoristic First Amendment, I'll use his piece as an example. But, considering that idolatry on that basis, it is odd that the equally problematic and aphoristic Second one is never credited to him in the circles I travel in. I will point out that blaming the advertising industry, as spot on as that is, lets off the "press" and the role it plays in this. Though Pierce mentioned them he didn't come out and call it what it is, lying. The advertising industry, an industry which has no deep and notably important devotion to truth is a symbiotic entity which lives on and in collaboration with "the press" which now, thanks to ACLU elicited Supreme Court dictates, includes all electronic media, "entertainment" probably most dangerous, and all print no matter how malignant the content and how obviously death dealing and bigotry promoting it is. If you want to put it in terms of "speech" as well, you can include strippers and the epic battle to allow them to dispose of pasties and movie directors and producers putting alcohol, tobacco, etc. in their entertainment, getting paid to do that by the advertising industry. Both, as they are in the United States in 2022 are saprophytes that live and thrive on what destroys egalitarian democracy.
Certainly the role football plays in American culture is maintained through presenting it in reverential, sappy, dishonest, sentimental presentations that cover up what is obviously a vicious, violent, pantomime of violent sex which regularly kills those who play it and whose players are entirely more like a crime gang than pillars of virtue. I'm always wishing I could ask those former players who are presented as pillars of virtue about the actual character of the game that made them famous. The enormous amount of the media devoted to sports and sports alleged reporting has certainly contributed mightily to the bizarre attribution of virtue to what is at base a murderous, exploitative industry that feeds on the brains and bodies of the drugged up boys who are suckered into playing it, as Pierce certainly knew when he wrote that piece. He mentions the role that sports journalists played in denying what the science was revealing about the brain damage that is ubiquitous, it happening before the public in every game they watch. That damage was certainly entirely in evidence for the entire history of American football, the roll of those who died as a result of the game extend back to its beginning well back into the 19th century. So do the fan riots which start in the aftermath of the first recorded inter-collegiate game in New Jersey.
Much as I admire much of his work, Pierce's personal history, what he experienced through his father and his father's family history of dementia, what he learned from that isn't strong enough to shake the purchase that America's free speech-press absolutism has on his own mind. He buys into the 20th century myth that it is impossible to outlaw dangerous behavior or, rather, to importantly suppress it even when outright prohibition is not possible. I think it would be quite simple in this case. If legislation which made it possible for those whose brains are damaged or destroyed by playing football and their survivors to sue those who maintain the football industry and entice those it convinces to play it, it would disappear. Football isn't like the making and drinking of alcohol which can be done at home or in a back-woods still or smuggled over the border, it is an organized activity. Certainly it would disappear at its most insidious levels, in high school and younger when the boys who are injuring their brains are suckered into playing it by grown men and women, a number of them quite brain damaged from that before they become adults, I would be some before they become teenagers.
I know that mind-set, the mind-set of the typical secular liberalish, libertarian sort American of our generation nurtured on tales of the failure of Prohibition and the idiotic cult of liberal free speech absolutism. I was as suckered by it as anyone until I realized the price that was paid was typically not paid by affluent,white males who can pass as straight.* The price paid is paid by Women, People of Color, other minority groups, certainly LGBTQetc. the economic underclass and others who are the target of hate speech and debilitating stereotypes and social roles sold by the media. Thought a lot of that would be impossible to regulate through laws it could succumb to widespread refusal to continue buying it, the absurd notion that we owe it to the corporations that are "the press," the media to tolerate them without push-back is one of those dopey post-WWII notions peddled by the media and entertainment.
But my criticism of the Sullivan Decision and its ever fouler successors, Buckely vs. Valeo, Citizens United, etc. is that something which in our history before that was very actionable, lawsuits over libel and slander of individuals and non-profit groups, is protected by the idiocy of those rulings, starting with the landmark addicted Warren Court's 1964 permission given to the New York Times to lie about public officials with impunity. As I've been pointing out recently, anyone who, even in 1964, couldn't predict that would be used against Democrats on behalf of Republicans was too stupid to be sitting on any court. The really effective media, the electronic media, has always been owned by rich, conservative corporate gangsters who use it to enhance their own wealth and control. It is exactly the result of that huge giant step in "freedom of the press," how creating a "right" to lie has been used for most of the past sixty years.
I wouldn't venture that the NFL and football fetishists would give up their addiction to brain destroying, self-denying subliminal sexual spectacles before the journalists face the fact that when they are bemoaning the death of democracy through lies, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for someone like Pierce to face that glaring reality. It is exactly those "free press" rulings that made the careers of the FOX-fascists and the rest of the liars of Republican-fascist style media possible.
The Warren Court could have let the ruling against the New York Times stand and required that they pay a small fine and court costs and maybe the New York Times would not have helped lie us into four years of Trump. They might have instituted fact checking of what they carry, whether by their staff of reporters, those shifty and loosely attached to the truth "opinion journalists" or the paid ads they carried and may have produced far better journalism than they have in the era of anything goes. That the guy they carried lies about in a paid ad about was a piece of racist shit who I'm sure those voting for the great gray rag wanted to shaft but the price the country has paid for that temporary satisfaction has been incalculable. FOX wouldn't be what FOX is without that freedom to lie and the protection of those idiotic rulings. We may never have had a Nixon without it, we may never have had a Reagan, we certainly wouldn't have had a Trump. It is remarkable that the man who did so much to destroy the power of the truth in America's democracy was probably the greatest beneficiary of lies in the history of American politics. And the media is still addicted to carrying his lies, even as he is entirely more discredited that Aaron Burr was, than Benedict Arnold was. Only as a TV star he has a cult of addled followers which, if Burr or Arnold had had, may well have changed the course of history, such is the power of, especially, the entertainment media which is seldom safely innocuous.
The great free press never learns, it's not capable of learning, it is an artificial, man made entity, made to generate profits and to peddle the most profitable political lines, an artificial entity that has no natural rights but which employs those willing to carry its profitable lies, even if they, personally see through the lies and don't especially like them. Corporations exist within the market economic system, if they don't maximize profit through doing evil, they die, almost any media which tries to tell difficult truth is attached to a church or non-profit entity, sometimes an educational institution. There was a time I'd take something like The Nation magazine as an exception to that but I both have a far lower estimate of that publication and a knowledge that it is sustained as a hobby by wealthy people. There are a few tiny media entities that are maintained by the sincere honesty of individuals and a desperate need to try to rescue us from lies and ignorance. They generally last as long as those individuals can keep it up, they often die with their owners. I don't have a very high view of "journalists" since they allow liars to call themselves that. I don't trust any of it without fact checking them, ever. It is a dangerous magnification of the power to lie that overtakes and overpowers whatever power it has to tell the truth. Like the ad agency, like the football industry, like some sci-fi psychotic computer-robot, its prime directive has little to do with telling the truth and less to do with promoting the common good. Jefferson and Madison's time when a man with a page-at-a-time printing press could publish the truth which, nevertheless, would have to compete with publishers of lies is gone forever. Their naive faith in the ability of the truth to win out is exactly that, naive. We don't have that excuse, ours is willful self-deception, journalists, self-deception in service to their own professional self-interests. Our history of post-Sullivan freedom of the press and free speech absolutism shows us what you get with that, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump, the Mitch McConnell Senate, the Rehnquist and now Roberts Courts, as the Republican party, the party of the big media owners and the owners of pro-football, has become an active and explicitly fascist party who are reviving our indigenous form of fascism.
* This area in which a number of those who are destroyed being straight-white-males is not typical of how the victimization of such libertarian lying is handed out. Though, since a very large percentage of those victimized by football are men of color, perhaps not too much should be made of that distinction.
As to passing as straight. Never have done that since I was liberated from high school and first went to college and I never did date girls as cover even before then. A while back I had the experience of a younger person who is a friend of one of my nieces meeting me for the first time, having been told I was an old gay man, he expressed surprise that I'm no where near as nellie as his imagination of me was. He was disappointed that I seemed so "straight." I was able to point out to him that I regularly make pies. It didn't make up for it. I can sew patches on my clothes, too but I forgot to mention that.
