Drug War Sneak Pitch: How the White House and the Media Dose the Public
by Jon Elliston

Mass media scares of the past have a funny way of cycling back in subtler and more insidious forms.
Take the case of the Clinton administration's drug war propaganda project. It hearkens back to 1957, when a startling technological feat hit the American public like a slap in the face from an invisible hand. James Vicary, a New Jersey marketing specialist, unleashed a technique he called "subliminal projection," flashing too-brief-to-be-seen ads like "Drink Coke" and "Hungry? Eat Popcorn" in the midst of feature films.

Claiming that he achieved a substantial jump in concession sales, Vicary introduced foreboding speculation about the use and abuse of hidden messages: could they brainwash the unsuspecting? His anecdotal evidence seemed to confirm the Big Brother-ish power of messages that go unnoticed by the viewer, yet slip surreptitiously -- "beneath the threshold of awareness" -- into the subconscious.

Years later, Vicary downplayed the effectiveness of the technique and admitted to Advertising Age that his research data on subliminal advertising was "too small to be meaningful." And even today, most cognitive scientists remain unpersuaded that subliminals have an impact on behavior in any fashion similar to what Vicary claimed at first.

But the damage had been done. Subliminals quickly became the stuff of urban legend as people began to wonder, "What do I see that I don't notice, and what can it do to me?" Soon a full-fledged subliminal scare was underway, and Rep. William Dawson, a Republican from Utah, launched a failed drive to ban subliminal broadcasting, which he called the "sneak pitch." (Another commentator called it "phantom plug" and "psychic hucksterism.") In impassioned speeches before Congress, Dawson warned of the "frightening aspects" of the technique. "Put to political propaganda purposes," subliminal persuasion "would be made to order for the establishment and maintenance of a totalitarian government."

The subliminal menace eventually died off, despite continued anxieties about hidden messages that surface from time to time. Now, fast-forward forty years to 1997, when the Clinton administration launched a quiet campaign to lace popular television programs with anti-drug messages, an initiative that stayed under the threshold of public awareness until it was exposed in a January 2000 article by Daniel Forbes in the Web magazine Salon (www.salon.com).

This time the device isn't literally subliminal, at least not in the traditional sense -- but it is every bit a sneak pitch, and it reaches millions more people than James Vicary ever did.

Forbes details how the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has been offering financial credits worth millions to TV networks in exchange for program plots that carry anti-drug themes. It's an unprecedented and complicated arrangement, one that has both drug policy officials and network executives insisting that nothing untoward is going on. Sure, the ONDCP is, in effect, sponsoring plotlines that satisfy the government's controversial drug war agenda. Sure, the networks are not notifying viewers that their favorite shows are now conduits for official propaganda themes. But, who can take issue with public financing of anti-drug messages that appear in the medium where kids are most likely to soak them up?
Plenty of people can. Scriptwriters, journalists and media analysts have slammed the drug war TV program since Salon broke the story. They say that this form of government intervention in pop culture is so clandestine that it crosses the line into unacceptable propagandizing by the government.

Here's how it works. Back in the fall of 1997, Congress authorized the ONDCP to wage a giant anti-drug ad campaign that would cost $1 billion over the course of five years. The legislation that funded the campaign included an unusual stipulation: the TV networks that ran the ads would be required to run an equivalent portion of ads -- a "match" -- for free. This way, the government would get a 2-for-1 deal on the ONDCP's ad buys.

Six networks, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, the WB and UPN, signed up for the ads, and a torrent of "this is your brain on drugs"-type messages began pouring through the tube. The networks were happy to get on the drug war gravy train, but the match deal started to chafe at them. Those free spots were lost ad time that could have been sold to other paying customers, after all.
The ONDCP, led by anti-drug czar Barry McCaffrey, had a creative (and now controversial) plan to assuage the networks' gripes about the free match ads. "The office would give up some of the precious ad time it had bought -- in return for getting anti-drug motifs incorporated within specific prime-time shows," Forbes reported. "That created a new, more potent strain of the anti-drug social engineering the government wanted. And it also allowed the TV networks to resell the ad time at the going rate to IBM, Microsoft or Yahoo."

The networks jumped at the chance to recoup the ad space, and in the spring of 1998, popular programs began receiving match credits for storylines that met the ONDCP strategy to "'denormalize' drug use and accurately portray the negative consequences of drug use," as one White House official put it. The shows included "Beverly Hills 90210," "Chicago Hope," "The Drew Carey Show," "ER," "Seventh Heaven" and "The Smart Guy." According to Forbes, about 130 episodes have been credited for match content thus far, in deals that total about $25 million.

What does this mean to viewers? Well, the last time one of your favorite TV characters overdosed and wound up in the gutter, he or she may have met that sad fate because the network stepped in to craft the content in line with ONDCP's prescription.
"When you get involved in this kind of subterfuge of messing with content, it is a horrifying, scary, overall trend, because the only thing that networks care about is money," said TV writer Merrill Markoe on a CNN program that recently examined the arrangement. "So it opens the door wide to trading for money any type of content."

Here's the scary part: According to Forbes, some network producers actively sought out approval and assistance from the ONDCP contractors that administered the content match valuations. In some cases, TV scripts traveled back and forth between the contractors and the producers as the networks sought to ensure that their programs would be sufficiently anti-drug to garner the match credits.

Here's the scarier part: the print press, which you might think is above this sort of cashing-in on content, is also in on the act. Under a similar arrangement, which Forbes described in a follow-up report for Salon in March 2000, publications including Family Circle, Parade, Seventeen, Sporting News, U.S. News & World Report and USA Weekend have likewise submitted articles and editorials for ONDCP ad credits. While some editors have been critical of these match deals, others have said they have no problem with it, so long as the government does not review and approve the material in advance of publication.

But even if the drug war credits are doled out in a retroactive evaluation, the government is still offering an unsettling incentive for reporters and editors to address drug policy debates according to ONDCP's criteria. Readers, like the viewers of the TV match content, will be left in the dark about the pay-offs that may have influenced the news and views they see in mainstream publications.

So the drug war sneak pitch is fully underway, and the round of scrutiny sparked by Forbes' reports appears to have done little to stem the ONDCP's zeal to "embed" media themes into program plots and magazine pages. For their part, the major media outlets have shown little inclination to "Just Say No" to government drug warriors pushing credits for content.