Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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Weinstein told us that the Journal was interested in the way we had developed this technique. However, when the story appeared on the front page, we learned he was a cagier reporter than we'd realized. While praising our work, he went to considerable lengths to reveal our misgivings about our conflicting roles. He cited my own anxiety at doing ads for an auto account, British Leyland Motors ( Rover, Land Rover, Triumph), at a time that I was making speeches that said automobiles were at the heart of so many problems.

Leyland didn't like this. Within two hours of the story's appearance we were fired. The next day's Journal carried the headline:

AD MAN NEED WORRY NO MORE ABOUT AUTO ACCOUNT

I could describe fifty less spectacular incidents similar to this one involving struggles with clients over corporate policies that I was beginning to see as antithetical to simple rules of human well being, or justice or planetary survival. They finally added up to a single generalization: Corporations are inherently uninterested in considerations aside from the commercial.

We began to feel that our balancing act was draining us personally. At last we saw that it was doomed to fail. Maintaining commercial accounts in the hope of using the income from them to finance other projects about which we cared more deeply was not going to work out.

We soon decided to dissolve the agency, and I began to work with a number of other people to establish a foundation-funded, non-profit advertising and public relations office. The first in the country, it was called Public Interest Communications and it was devoted solely to working for community. organizations which are largely excluded from media. The project was launched in 1972 with a grant from the Stern Fund. It succeeded for a little while in performing useful services for ecologists and farm workers, consumer groups, Indian rights activists and peace groups. But keeping it alive proved difficult. The problems were much like those we had faced at Freeman, Mander and Gossage.

Whereas I had formerly spent a major part of my day keeping the agency going by caring for the needs of corporations, at Public Interest Communications we spent a majority of our time seeking grants from the few foundations interested in media reform.

Even worse, there was a feeling that everything we were doing was ineffective. A nameless juggernaut was advancing unretarded. We felt as if we were throwing snowballs at tanks. Through enormous concentrated effort, we might stop a dam on one river; meanwhile, a dozen other dams would be built. If the production of an American SST was halted, European SSTs would land at American airports. If an energy crisis developed, rather than signaling the limits of planetary resources, or the absurdity of the way we lived, it produced new drives toward nuclear power and more strip mines.

We were not the only ones with this problem. The Vietnam War was halted, but the arms race and military aid to rightwing regimes advanced. Nixon was thrown out, but government reform came down to a lame Senate ethics bill. Unemployment was growing and welfare lines with it, yet in the end economic reform measures always seemed to hurt the very segments of the population they purported to help while the rich got richer.

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