Features
Outlaw advertising?
It's hard to imagine a world without advertising. 
But that's the story Inger Stole, a professor in the Institute of Communications Research in Urbana, tells in her 2006 book, "Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s" (University of Illinois Press).
As the nation's population grew in the 1930s and the first seeds of consumer culture began to sprout, a nascent truth-in-advertising movement arose in the United States. Stole writes that these early reformers saw advertising as "flawed" and "undemocratic" because of its dependence on emotion instead of factual product information.
But
the fight between reformers and advertisers was never really fair in the
first place because those profiting from advertising bought their ink by
the barrel and owned the new radio broadcasting airwaves to boot.
"The media basically did not write or say much about the issue," Stole says. "Thus, most people were unaware of the issues at stake."
The advertisers, publishers and broadcasters didn't take any chances, though. They used new-fangled corporate relations tools and even charged the reformers with being communists to defeat the do-gooders.
In 1938, Congress passed the watered-down Wheeler-Lea Amendment, and Stole writes: "Advertising never again faced a direct challenge to its legitimacy."
Stole says it didn't have to be that way then, and it doesn't have to be that way today. In her view the reformers had a good point because commercial speech does not merit Constitutional free-speech status.
"In our self-governing society, the role and nature of advertising and commercialism should be determined by the citizenry," she writes. "If we want, we have the power to regulate it back to a way we find more suitable to the way we want to govern society."
In that brave new world, "Cut to commercial" would be replaced by "Cut the commercial."
Reporting by Craig Chamberlain, Urbana News Bureau
Learn more>> News
Bureau release; Institute of
Communications Research in Urbana; University
of Illinois Press web page on Ingrid Stole's book