Journalists and advertisers are bound together like squabbling conjoined twins. Advertising pays most of a newspaper’s bills, while journalists bring the readers the advertiser wants to speak to.
Anyone who has been in a media environment will be aware that it is a difficult relationship. Managed, in most cases, by keeping roles and responsibilities clearly separate.
This column’s brief is the Mail & Guardian‘s editorial content, not its advertising. Advertising falls under the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) of South Africa, which has a detailed code dealing with everything from false claims to advertising aimed at children and much else.
But several advertisements in the M&G have recently drawn complaints from readers. These provide a useful opportunity to discuss this relationship, particularly since they do impact in various ways on editorial content.
Dr Matthias Rath and his health foundation took the back page of the paper’s World Aids Day supplement to attack the anti-Aids drug AZT as toxic. A large number of letters objected to the ad, on the grounds that it was dishonest and based on false information. The editor, Ferial Haffajee, indicated, in print, that she accepted the criticism and that advertising of this kind would not be carried in future.
In the December 24 edition, the Traditional Healers Organisation took out an ad to praise traditional medicine and attack the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which it called a pharmaceutical interest group.
Reader L Starfield objects to the ad, saying the paper should not carry “this type of ‘hate’, giving the impression that by so doing it is virtually giving approval thereto”.
Most recently, an ad by SA Eagle drew criticism from two readers. It shows a man standing on a telephone booth as a flood rages around him. The payoff line is: “For life’s little inconveniences.” Dave Reynell says the ad is grossly insensitive in the light of the tsunami disaster, and asks whether it should not be shelved for
a few weeks.
The ASA code is a good place to look for guidance.
As much as journalists are keen to keep the distinction between advertising and editorial content clear, the ASA code does so too. “Advertisements should be clearly distinguishable as such whatever their form and whatever the medium used,” it says. The formats relate to audiences differently, and it is misleading to blur the distinction.
The paper is not endorsing the product for sale or the viewpoint set out, and it is, therefore, unnecessary to distance itself from an ad. In any event, in the case of the traditional medicine ad, the paper’s stance on the Aids pandemic has been made clear.
The code allows considerable latitude for advocacy ads that express opinions on matters of public controversy, as long as the material is clearly identified and indicates who is placing it.
The traditional healers’ ad falls neatly into this category, where the ASA code allows people to buy space quite freely to express their views and attack each other, even if they are unpopular or even fringe views.
The Rath ad is in a different category. While part of the same debate, it makes specific allegations about AZT that have been heavily contested. The head of the South African Medical Association points out major flaws in Rath’s data, and the TAC cites action taken in several countries against his advertising of his own products.
The ASA code pays particular attention to medical advertising, because people are vulnerable on questions affecting their health. Ads that mislead people by trying to stop them from taking life-saving medicines really are harmful, and should not be run.
The “man in a flood” ad would probably be judged against the clause of the ASA code that bars material that “offends good taste or decency”. It has been in use for some time before the tsunami hit, but it does now, in the changed context, come across as an inappropriate joke about the disaster.
The advertisers might do well to hold it back for a while, but this is a matter that falls outside this column’s brief.
In general, there are limits to what can be run in adverts — but they are set very wide. Freedom of speech extends to ads just as much as to other material. There need to be very good reasons before an ad is stopped.
The ASA code gives primary responsibility for an ad’s content to the advertiser, not the publisher. The M&G does have the right to refuse ads, and there are circumstances when it should do so. But they are not as many as the recent complaints might suggest.
Another reader, Shirley Mclean, objects to a throwaway comment by John Matshikiza in With the Lid Off (December 24), in which he pays tribute to the late Anthony Sampson. Matshikiza refers to a “thoroughly organised Irish mind (which you might think is a contradiction in terms)”.
Mclean writes: “No doubt Mr Matshikiza thought he was being witty, but being Irish myself I found his throwaway, jokey remark tiresome, racist and offensive.”
As South Africans, we are very sensitive to racism. Jokes about black people are now seriously frowned upon. But for some reason, jokes about other groups appear to be more acceptable.
Whatever its target, wit of this kind plays on common prejudices and thereby reinforces them. It is offensive stereotyping, and one doesn’t have to be humourless to object to it.