Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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Twenty-five billion dollars is nearly as much as the whole country spends on higher education every year. I began to realize that a distortion was taking place in the quality and kind of information offered to the public. To a larger and larger extent, people's minds were being occupied by information of a purely commercial nature. As an advertising executive, I was instrumental in furthering this distortion.

The ecology movement pushed me over the edge. Our agency was hired first by the Sierra Club and then by Friends of the Earth and other organizations. Unlike most other do-good groups, these at least had a little money to buy an occasional one-shot ad on some critical issue. (During the early 1970s, all environmental groups together spent about $500,000 per year in advertising in order to offset an average of about $3 billion in corporate expenditures on the same subjects. This ratio was relatively small, only 6,000 to 1, which may help explain the early success of the environmental movement.)

I found myself writing ads about keeping dams out of Grand Canyon, halting the overdevelopment of cities, stopping the development of SSTs, and urging people to stop buying and wearing furs.

The ads attacked the prevailing lifestyle of the country, which certainly included my own. They spoke of an inevitable conflict between corporate growth and the health of the planet. They encouraged a habit of mind which could grasp the interrelationships between all natural systems, including humans. They described a growing environmental destruction which reflected itself in individual lives as well as in economic policies.

As I wrote these ads and thought about them, it got harder and harder to separate my new perspective from an awareness that it was in conflict with our corporate work. On Tuesday, I was writing about the impact cars and other technologies had upon the environment, and on Thursday I was promoting the sale of cars.

The crunch came one day in 1969 when a young Wall Street Journal reporter named Henry Weinstein called about doing a story on our agency's public-service work. By that time we had gained public attention for having invented a new style of advocacy advertising. Our ads were characterized by coupons urging changes in policy. The coupons could be torn out by readers and sent to corporations and government agencies. They produced enormous volumes of mail on conservation issues that until then had been considered the province of bird watchers and little old ladies in tennis shoes.

The ads had not only affected policy, they catalyzed and organized the public, because they allowed a new level of involvement. By mailing them, people became more committed to the issue. For once they were doing something more than feeling bad. A number of senators and congressmen publicly gave the ads credit for determining the outcome of several issues, and in The New Advertising Robert Glatzer went so far as to credit them with "starting the whole ecology boom."

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