"Reconciling Economic and Non-Economic Perspectives on Media Policy: Transcending the 'Marketplace of Ideas'" is a hefty essay by Robert Entman and Steven S. Wildman. The essay was originally published in Journal of Communication in 1992 and went on to win the prestigious McGannon Center Communication Policy Research Award. As a consequece, it is often required reading for students studying media policy.

Entman and Wildman argue that most media policy (most specifically in the area of telecommunications) has come out of either the "market economics" or the "social value" schools of thought, and the lack of constructive discussion between the two sides has resulted in poor policy analysis and decision-making. In a nutshell, their essay is an effort to point out the strong points and deficiencies of the two schools of thought, define the authors' version of an ideal middle-ground philosophy, and reveal areas that need more research before the disputes between the two sides can be resolved.

In their introductory paragraphs, Entman and Wildman, who have PhDs in political science and economics, respectively, argue that the ideological division has resulted in conceptual fuzziness that hinders good policy analysis. They hold up the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor as one such fuzzy concept that needs revision:

It calls to mind an open forum to which all ideas have access and where all are fairly and judiciously considered. Yet a great many consumers of ideas might demand precisely the opposite ... they might want to avoid challenging ideas that violate conventional wisdom. (Or) limitations on individuals' time and intellectual capacity may preclude participation of the type envisioned.

We urge that communications policy researchers begin constructing a new analytical framework in which quantifiable economic efficiency criteria, the hallmarks of market school analysis, are weighed explicitly alongside the non-quantifiable social values that are ... concerns of the social school (p. 6).

In their first section, "Market Economics versus Social Value," the authors elaborate upon the arguments between the two schools of thought, noting that the market school has had the most impact on media policy. Though the authors don't define them in political terms, the market economics school almost precisely matches conservative econopolitical theory and the social values school mirrors modern liberal views.

At any rate, the market economics school believes that a free media market serves the people best because they will demand (and buy) what they need, and believes that the government is bound to wreck things if it interferes.

Conversely, the social values school thinks that if it was all left up to the market, lowest common denominator programming would come into play and we'd be seeing Jerry Springer, football and "Survivor" spinoffs 24 hours a day while more culturally and/or intellectually enriching fare falls by the wayside; some government intervention and regulation is necessary to preserve the social values of our society.

The two sides agree on one issue: that encouraging diversity should be a major goal for communications policymakers. However, this agreement rapidly breaks down into more arguing because the two sides can't agree on what "diversity" means. The authors go on to identify the classes of diversity dealt with in media policy analysis (product diversity, idea diversity, and access diversity) and outline several research questions that must be addressed before the debate can be resolved.

In their second section, "The Economics of Idea Production and Distribution," the authors argue that the process of idea transmission from sources through the media to consumers (gatekeeping) has been insufficiently studied. They call for more research on how cooperative ventures and conglomeration affect media gatekeeping and policymaking, on how media industries react to new technology, and on the relationship between the information and entertainment content of media products. They also point out that more research is needed on media consumers, specifically on how people's educational levels affect their tastes and choices and how to improve people's ability to process ideas.

The third section, "Toward an Expanded Policy Framework," deals with the insufficiency of standard neoclassical economic theory in describing media interactions.

One of the traditional theory's failings is that it assumes that consumers go into a market with fixed tastes they are trying to satisfy, whereas in reality people's tastes are often altered by the media they are exposed to. Furthermore, since information is a public good (like air, its consumption can't be limited, and one person's consumption of it doesn't limit others' consumption), it creates special analysis problems that aren't recognized by the social values school.

Conversely, the societal benefits the media imparts, such as a better-informed citizenry, are hard to quantify and are often dismissed as "externalities" by the market economics school and are not factored into their cost-benefit equations.

In "The Role of the First Amendment" section, the authors argue that the absolutist First Amendment stance can lead to negative externalities. They focus on the debate over the Fairness Doctrine as an example of the consequences of overemphasizing the First Amendment without judiciously weighing it against the negative effects of free expression. (The Fairness Doctrine existed from 1949 until 1987 and was established by the FCC. It stated that in order to keep their licenses, U.S. broadcasters had to devote a certain amount of air time to public policy and community issues, and they also had to provide the opportunity (not equal time, just the opportunity) for opposing points of view to be heard.)

They go on to argue that:

The basic requirements for improved media policy analysis are greater agreement on terminology, basic research on media industries and the role they play in society, an expanded agenda of explicit value considerations, and a more detailed understanding of the problems that arise when trying to satisfy the many goals of media simultaneously.

In their final section, "Supplementing the Marketplace Metaphor," the authors reiterate the need to come up with a new metaphor to describe media market interactions.

On the whole, I thought this article was good and worthwhile in that it seemed to nicely sum up the current problems and research needs in media policy, but somehow I wanted a little more. Everything the authors said made good sense, but it didn't break any new ground; they didn't tell me anything I couldn't have figured out on my own if I'd engaged in a little research and rumination. Also, I wished they'd dealt with the special problems of print media policy a bit, though I realize that the focus on television was necessary to keep the article from collapsing under its own weight (it's perilously dense as it is).

And finally, the marketplace they conjure up in their initial definition of "marketplace of ideas" is that of a buzzing, chaotic flea-market atmosphere, and it's a bit out-of-date (at least here in the U.S.). Our modern marketplace is the mall, a clean, pleasant place where you can spend hours wandering around, sampling different foods, buying clothes or hardware, receiving services from shoe shines to haircuts, and maybe even listening to atrium concerts or going into a movie theater for entertainment. If you're in a hurry or only want a specific item, you can run in through one of the stores' individual outside entrances, get your good and be out again in a flash. I think a "Mall of Ideas" metaphor meets the author's criteria for describing diversity plus easy, speedy, user-friendly access.

Labels: media theory

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Pesticide contamination. Poverty. Global warming. Illiteracy. Deforestation. Cancer. Advertising.

Advertising?

Yes, advertising ranks right up there with the major evils of the world in the minds of many political activists and environmentalists, particularly those who subscribe to Dependency Theory.

Dependency Theory is the new kid on the block in the field of international economics, and it is embraced by many educated Latin Americans (dependistas). Subscribers to this theory argue that developing nations are dependent on an international capitalist system, and that the rich, developed Northern nations (Japan, the U.S., members of the European Community) who control the system take unfair advantage of the developing countries at every turn, thus keeping them economically anemic and shackled in class conflict, poverty, and environmental degradation.

Take the case of Brazil, for instance. Like most other Latin American countries, Brazil has a host of severe social, political and environmental problems: rain forest destruction, illiteracy, widespread hunger, rampant human rights abuses, severe urban air pollution, political corruption, water pollution, ad nauseam.

A dependista would argue that all these problems can be traced directly to Brazil's past as a Portuguese colony, a land whose people and natural resources were ruthlessly exploited by European "discoverers." This exploitation is carried on today, both by the chronically corrupt political system that sprouted in the footprints of the old Portuguese robber barons and by the corporations of the North, who see the country as a source of cheap labor and cheap materials and as a market for second-rate goods.

The dependista view holds that Brazil gets the short end of the stick in any economic deal with the North. They argue that Northern countries conspire to keep down the market prices of raw materials such as timber and sugarcane, thus forcing Brazil to sell off its precious natural resources at unfairly low prices. The North gets the benefit of cheap raw materials while Brazil is left with a dwindling rain forest and the pollution left over from activities such as strip mining.

In return for all this, the dependistas say, the Northern corporations buy up bargain-priced air time on Brazil's TV networks and bombard the impoverished, illiterate, advertising-naive populace with exhortations to buy Northern products. And the Brazilian people believe what they see in the ads, believe that these Northern goods will lead to modernity and happiness. Well-to-do Brazilians discard their cultural values in favor of the glamorous lifestyles they see advertised on TV, and they start to conspicuously consume high-priced, foreign-made goods like automobiles and champagne. The poor strive to emulate the rich and use their meager wages to purchase products like Coca-Cola and Lucky Strikes instead of healthy, low-cost foods like beans and rice or other necessities such as medicine. As Brazilians at all income levels buy foreign consumer goods (and buy into foreign advertising), more money is siphoned out of the country into the pockets of Northern corporate executives. And so more trees are chopped down, more land torn up and poisoned in a hunt for gold to pay for more unhealthy Northern goodies, and the vicious cycle continues.

But is this really what's going on in Brazil? Are TV ads really helping to destroy Brazil's environment, stunt its economy, ruin the health of its people and drown its local cultures? And, if the ads do cause damage, can the blame be laid squarely at the feet of Northern corporations, as the dependistas claim?

Well, the first element of the problem is television, and the Brazilians do watch quite a lot of it. Brazil's preeminent network, TV Globo, is one of the largest networks in the world; virtually everyone in the cities has a TV; in fact, some who have televisions do not have more necessary appliances such as refrigerators. Nightly Brazilian-made soap operas, telenovelas, have been hugely popular, and writers such as Alma Guillermoprieto have noted that the these shows have influenced Brazilians' social and political behavior. Furthermore, as Guillermoprieto also observed, the line between reality and TV fiction is blurry in the minds of many Brazilians, and so it is even more likely that Northern commercials, which (unlike the telenovelas) are specifically designed to influence consumer behavior, are even more likely to have an impact.

And the Brazilians are exposed to a huge number of advertisements during their favorite telenovelas, far more than would be allowed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission; as advertising researchers Richard Tansey and Michael Hyman have noted, commercials take up about 25 percent of TV Globo's air time. So for every three minutes of soap opera, Brazilians see at least two thirty-second advertisements.

But, contrary to the dependista argument, these commercials aren't exactly a bargain for advertisers. In an article in the August 16, 1993 edition of The New Yorker, Jorge Adib, the managing director of TV Globo's international division, stated that the network charged advertisers the equivalent of $53,000 U.S. dollars for a 30-second spot during popular prime-time telenovelas. While advertisers have to shell out far more money to U.S. networks for ads shown during special programs such as the Super Bowl, $53,000 per commercial is hardly small change.

And since U.S. advertisers are willing to spend that kind of money to attract Brazilian consumers, obviously Northern goods are selling quite well down there.

So what are Brazilians buying? And are the products in question as damaging to the nation's economy, environment, and public health as the dependistas claim?

For one thing, Brazilians seem to love automobiles as much as Americans and Italians do. And while the social and economic effects of car buying and driving are hard to gauge (more on that later), automobiles definitely have negative environmental consequences.

The most obvious problem with cars is air pollution. According to annual monitoring reports from the United Nations Environment Programme, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo already have some of the worst air pollution problems in the world. Much of this pollution comes from coal-burning factories, but a significant portion comes from cars. Gasoline combustion produces a host of noxious chemical by-products, mainly hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, ozone, and peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN).

All these chemicals are components of photochemical smog, although as far as direct harm to human health is concerned, ozone and PAN do the worst damage; both chemicals are toxic at very low levels, causing lung irritation that can be fatal for people with asthma or emphysema. Plants are even more sensitive to ozone and PAN, and the chemicals can cause serious crop losses to farmers who have fields near urban areas.

Hydrocarbons such as methane and nitrogen oxides do more than contribute to smog, however. Methane is a known "greenhouse gas" that can contribute to global warming. Nitrogen oxides mix with atmospheric water to create fish- and tree-killing acid rain.

The particular composition of Brazilian gasoline creates other problems. Lead, a heavy metal that causes mental retardation in children and neurological problems in adults, is still used as an additive to prevent "knocking." Brazil uses a 20% alcohol/80% gasoline mixture in an effort to reduce oil imports, but unfortunately the annual production of the sugarcane-derived alcohol creates about 100 to 120 billion liters of vinhoto, a pollutant that interferes with water's ability to carry oxygen, thereby killing fish and other aquatic animals. Furthermore, many social activists and environmentalists worry that the fields used to grow sugarcane for alcohol production would be better used to grow food crops for Brazil's hungry populace.

The disposal of certain automobile parts causes other pollution problems. The main problem comes from cars' lead-acid batteries, which are difficult to recycle properly and are more likely to be carelessly dumped in fields or roadsides where they disintegrate and contaminate the ground with lead. Tire disposal presents another problem, not only in the landfill space they take up but because tire piles are notorious for catching fire. Such fires are long-burning, hard to put out (fire fighters usually have to use chemicals that are themselves potentially dangerous pollutants) and produce plenty of thick, black smoke and noxious fumes.

Automobiles are beyond the financial reach of many Brazilians; environmental researcher Roberto Guimaraes estimated that only 8% of the people own cars. However, Brazil has a big population, and the wealthy and middle class are buying autos at a great rate. In fact, an article in the May 16, 1994 edition of Advertising Age dealt with an unusual problem for General Motors: the Brazilians loved GM's Corsa, a sleek $7,000 subcompact, so much that people were buying them faster than GM could make them. In response to this overwhelming demand for and subsequent shortage of the little cars, GM launched a $1.5 million TV ad campaign that featured General Motors do Brasil Vice President Andre Beers urging consumers to wait a few months before they went out to buy a Corsa.

A big Northern-owned corporation telling customers to not buy its product? This seems to fly in the face of the dependista assertion that corporations are interested solely in economic rape and pillage. On the other hand, one could argue that GM was simply exercising good business sense, trying to keep the price of the Corsa down so they could sell more cars and make more money in the long run.

At any rate, Brazilians buy a lot of cars, all of them from foreign owned companies. According to the aforementioned Advertising Age article, Brazilians purchased 869,170 cars in 1993: 325,629 came from Autolatina's Volkswagen division, 217,714 from General Motors do Brasil and 209,071 from Fiat, and the remaining 116,756 car sales were to other Northern companies such as Chrysler and Volvo. Economy-priced cars like the GM Corsa comprised 40% of all the car sales. Brazil has no nationally-owned car companies, although they have a few companies that make auto accessories, such as Companhia Siderurgica Belgo Mineira, which produces steel auto parts, and Pirelli Pneus, the world-renowned tire manufacturer.

This situation seems to follow with the dependista argument that the North is dominating the Brazilian market and siphoning money out of the country. However, one also has to consider the fact that General Motors do Brasil and Autolatina Volkswagen have manufacturing plants within the country. Thus, the major portion of the cars Brazilians buy are made by Brazilians, and so a portion of the proceeds of the car sales are cycled back into the country in the form of worker wages and local executive salaries. By the same token, a Brazilian auto assembly line worker makes far less money than his or her U.S. counterpart, so no doubt GM and Volkswagen pocket a tidy profit, but it is not the wholesale thievery that many dependistas depict.

And, going back to the advertising element of the situation, it turns out that many of the people who make the ads that sell the cars are in fact Brazilians. Multinational corporations are becoming more and more culturally savvy; they know that nobody knows a market like the people in that market. According to Advertising Age, GM's price-control Corsa ads were created by Colucci & Associados Propaganda, and Fiat also uses local advertising talent to produce their Brazilian commercials. So, when you come down to it, Brazilians are equally if not more responsible for the images and ideas projected in the commercials than are the Northern corporate executives who run the companies from afar.

In fact, the state of Brazilian advertising as a whole contradicts the dependista argument that Latin American governments are helpless to counteract the effects of Northern advertising. The largest single advertiser on Brazil's airwaves is not one of the multinational corporations -- it's the Brazilian government. In 1984, media researcher Sergio Mattos found that Brazil spent over a billion dollars in media advertising every year, and most of that went to purchasing TV air time. The Brazilian government has never hesitated to use TV to promote its agendas, and so one would think that if it objected to the content or message of the ads Northern companies broadcast over TV Globo, the government would not hesitate to do something about it.

After all, up until 1985 TV Globo was a puppet of the Brazilian government (this contradicts the dependista claim that Latin American media outlets are controlled by the North), and researchers such as Sergio Mattos and Joseph Straubhaar believe that the government consistently shielded the network from unwanted Northern influence.

Brazilian television got started in 1950 and was based directly on U.S. models. And, as in the U.S., at first only rich Brazilians could afford TVs, and because there were so few viewers most programs were made in Brazil. But in the late 50s, the cost of television sets started to go down, and by that time TV had become a status symbol, a way to show one was modern, even if one was illiterate.

With the increasing viewership and increasing potential for profit, Brazilian media mogul Roberto Marinho decided to found a new network, TV Globo, in 1962. Though Marinho ran other successful media enterprises such as the newspaper O Globo, he decided that TV was too new to risk running it alone. So he signed a deal with Time-Life Corporation in which Time-Life agreed to provide financial backing and technical assistance in exchange for a share of TV Globo's future profits. However, in 1964 the military took control of the government, and although the regime was nominally U.S.-friendly, it decided the deal between Time-Life and TV Globo was of questionable legality. In 1968, the deal was called off, and although TV Globo paid back Time-Life's loans (essentially interest-free) by 1971, the Brazilian network gained far more from the deal than did the U.S. conglomerate. In fact, Time-Life's financial advisor Joseph Wallach, who helped set up TV Globo's financial and corporate organization, defected to Globo, obtained Brazilian citizenship, and became a Globo executive.

The whole episode between TV Globo and Time-Life turns the standard dependista depiction of North-South economic deals inside out. Because of TV Globo's maneuvering in the Time-Life deal, by 1968 the network was clearly the dominant force in Brazilian television.

The Brazilian government continued to dominate TV Globo, however. The military use the network to present a peaceful, homogenized picture of Brazil to the people. TV was used as an electronic sedative; the dictatorship censored anything that might prove to be the least bit inflammatory.

Because the U.S. was on friendly terms with the regime, canned American shows dominated the airwaves for a time. But in the 1970s the military, apparently gripped with a new nationalistic ideology, encouraged TV Globo to develop local programming, and the U.S. imports began to be phased out. Soon, Brazil was exporting its home-grown shows, and by 1984, 90 other countries were buying TV Globo programming.

In 1985, Brazil went through a period of political upheaval, and the military dictatorship crumbled, but TV Globo skillfully avoided being pulled down with it. In fact, the network was instrumental in the election of the new president, who, unfortunately, proved to be almost as corrupt as the military who preceded him.

And that essentially captures the true nature of Brazil's problems: the worst threats to her environment, economy and public health come from within the country. As writers such as Alma Guillermoprieto and Roberto Guimaraes have documented, even now that Brazil has a democratically elected government, politicians still lead the country into environmentally disastrous projects such as the Trans-Amazon Highway Project (which hugely increased the rate of rainforest destruction), refuse to deal with social problems constructively (witness the government's decision to "clean up" Rio for the 1992 UN environmental conference by rounding up and shooting street children) and steal public monies with impunity. Whatever negative impact Northern TV commercials have, it is a bit like a bad case of ringworm in comparison to the metastasizing lung cancer that is Brazilian government.

Of course, ringworm is ringworm, and Northern corporations try to make money as they can in the Brazilian marketplace. But dependistas cannot claim that this is a sign of a Northern conspiracy to keep the country economically subservient. After all, those corporations try to take any advantage they can within their own countries' markets, with the same potential for damage. U.S. communications researchers regularly debate the ethics of advertising practices in this country. While people have called for increased regulation of commercials (again, a power that the Brazilian government has mostly chosen not to exercise), nobody has seemed willing to hold advertising designers and marketers to any kind of professional moral code, as are other communicators such as newspaper reporters (but this is a subject best explored in another writeup).

So, there is no evidence to indicate that Brazil has been singled out for Northern oppression via TV commercials. But even if the country was subject to some kind corporate conspiracy, it is still Brazilians who design and produce a significant portion of the commercials, and so the Brazilian people must share a portion of the blame for whatever harm befalls them and their country as a result of those ads.

And on a more basic level, Brazilians must take responsibility for their consumer choices. Businesses sell what they think people want to buy. If the Brazilians decide they want to buy into a wasteful consumer culture they will indeed suffer negative consequences. Their forests will continue to burn, their urban air will get worse, their children will suffer from malnutrition and environmental diseases. By the same token, though, if the Brazilians refuse to buy Pampers and Marlboros Corsas and demand healthier, more environmentally-sustainable products, then that is what corporations will sell them.

And if the Brazilians are too advertising-naive, too enamored of Northern lifestyles to choose the road to sustainable development, it is not the job of General Motors or Volkswagen to give them the right map.

That duty belongs to the dependistas and other concerned Brazilians; they are the ones who must work to see that their people get the education they need to make the right social, environmental and political choices. They are the ones who must help the Brazilians take ownership of their country's problems and learn to master their own government. It will be extremely difficult to do all this, of course, and enlisting the help of TV Globo's executives is vital, but if Brazil is to develop properly, it must be done.

Of course, it's a lot easier for Brazilian dependistas to stay in their universities and non-profit organizations writing angry essays about Northern advertisers. It's easy, and it won't help their country very much at all.

---

References

Besas, Peter. "Globo Grabs the TV Jackpot in Brazil." Variety, Vol. 346 No. 10, March 23, 1992, p. 82.

Bunce, Nigel. Environmental Chemistry. Wuerz Publishing Ltd., 1991.

Guillermoprieto, Alma. "Obsessed in Rio: Letter from Brazil." The New Yorker, Vol. 69 No. 26, August 16, 1993, pp. 44-56.

Guimaraes, Cesar, and Roberto Amaral. "Brazilian Television: a Rapid Conversion to the New Order" in Media and Politics in Latin America: The Struggle for Democracy, Elizabeth Fox, ed. Sage Publications, 1988, pp. 125-137.

Guimaraes, Roberto P. The Ecopolitics of Development in the Third World: Politics and Environment in Brazil. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1991.

Mattos, Sergio. "Advertising and Government Influences: The Case of Brazilian Television." Communications Research, Vol. 11 No. 2, April 1984, pp. 203-220.

Straubhaar, Joseph D. "Brazilian Television: The Decline of American Influence." Communications Research, Vol. 11 No. 2, April 1984, pp. 221-240.

Tansey, Richard, Michael R. Hyman and George M. Zinkhan. "Cultural Themes in Brazilian and U.S. Auto Ads: A Cross-Cultural Comparison." Journal of Advertising, Vol. 19 No. 2, 1990, pp. 30-39.

Tansey, Richard and Michael R. Hyman. "Dependency Theory and the Effects of Advertising by Foreign-Based Multinational Corporations in Latin America." Journal of Advertising, Vol. 23 No. 1, March 1994, pp. 27-42.

Turner, Rik. "GM Tries to Put Brakes to Corsa Success in Brazil." Advertising Age, May 16, 1994, pp. I-1, I-21.

Zandpour, Fred. "Global Reach and Local Touch: Achieving Cultural Fitness in TV Advertising." Journal of Advertising Research, September/October 1994, pp. 35-63.

Labels: media theory, publishing

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Ever since the case of Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, advertising has been the unpopular stepchild of the First Amendment. In that 1976 case, commercial speech, typified by ads that promote a product or service, was nudged under the umbrella of protection afforded by the First Amendment. But the Supreme Court did not give commercial speech full constitutional protection. As a result, advertisers can get soaked in trademark and copyright infringement cases.

Such cases get particularly muddy when parody is involved. Commercials based on parody, such as the Energizer Bunny ads, can be hugely successful. But the legal stakes are high. A parody, by its nature, has to remind the audience of the original; otherwise, the spoof falls flat. In the process of "conjuring up" the original to the audience, an advertisement can violate copyright and trademark laws.

And by their nature, parodies can carry a devastating sting. In 1987's L.L. Bean v. Drake Publishers, Judge Bownes wrote:

Since parody seeks to ridicule sacred verities and prevailing mores, it inevitably offends others, as evinced by the shock which Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Voltaire's Candide provoked among their contemporaries.

Companies that make ads spoofing other companies' products and commercials are walking into a legal mine field. Consumers may love a good parody, but the companies whose products are the butt of the joke get mad. The angered companies then try to get even in court, suing for copyright and trademark infringement, injurious falsehood, trademark dilution, misappropriation, and even defamation. Even when the offending advertiser wins in court, the legal battle can cost huge sums of money.

So, legally speaking, what can advertising parodists get away with? Right now, there is no firm answer to this question; the legal status of an advertising parody is often in the eye of the beholding judge. A good way to understand the current legal thought in this area is to look at some of the more important advertising parody cases of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The first case from this period is L.L. Bean v. Drake Publishers (1987). High Society, a pornographic magazine, published a two-page parody entitled "L.L. Beam's Back-To-School-Sex-Catalog" in its October, 1984 issue. The sexually graphic article, which was clearly labelled as being a fictitious parody, depicted a facsimile of L.L. Bean's trademark.

L.L. Bean sought a restraining order to take the offending issue out of circulation. Bean's suit accused Drake Publishers of a variety of trademark related violations, including trademark dilution. The district court ruled for Drake on many of Bean's complaints, but the court did grant Bean a summary judgment in regard to its claim of trademark dilution. The district court ruled that the crude and sexually offensive nature of the parody had "tarnished Bean's trademark by undermining the goodwill and reputation associated with the mark." The court then issued an injunction barring further publication of the parody to prevent additional damage to Bean's trademark.

Drake appealed on the grounds that the injunction violated its First Amendment rights. The appeals court ruled that the district court had dismissed Drake's First Amendment rights too easily. First, the court stated that the use of Bean's trademark in the parody was an editorial and artistic use, since the parodied trademark wasn't used to promote any goods or services. Second, the court stated that while the parody was vulgar and offensive, it was still entitled to First Amendment protection. Chief Judge Bownes wrote,

Trademark parodies, even when offensive, do convey a message. The message may be simply that the business and product images need not always be taken too seriously; a trademark parody reminds us that we are free to laugh at the images and associations linked with the mark.

In sharp contrast with this case is Mutual of Omaha v. Novak (1987). The Novak ruling came close on L.L. Beans's legal heels, but the Novak majority almost completely ignored the precedent.

In 1983, Franklyn Novak began selling T-shirts and other items emblazoned with a parody of the Mutual of Omaha "Indian Head" logo. Novak's parody depicted the head of a wasted human in an Indian war bonnet and had the phrases "Mutant of Omaha" and "Nuclear Holocaust Insurance" incorporated into the parody logo. Mutual of Omaha sued on the grounds that Novak had disparaged and infringed on its trademark. The district court rejected the disparagement claim but found for the insurance company on the trademark infringement claim and issued an injunction barring Novak from selling his parody merchandise.

Novak appealed the decision. In a majority decision, the court of appeals affirmed the lower court's ruling. The court ruled that Novak's parody would create confusion among consumers as to whether or not Mutual of Omaha was sponsoring Novak's merchandise and therefore violated both federal and state laws. The majority stated that although the parody had political content, Novak could have expressed his views in many other ways besides parodying the Mutual of Omaha logo. Thus, the court did not consider the injunction to be a violation of Novak's First Amendment rights. The majority ruling only mentioned L.L. Bean in a single footnote, stating that Novak did not violate Bean's precedent, since the Bean ruling was based on the "editorial or artistic" use of a trademark and the Novak case was based on the confusion issue.

Circuit Judge Heaney vigorously dissented with the majority:

The majority's holding sanctions a violation of Novak's first amendment rights. The T-shirts simply expressed a political message which irritated the officers of Mutual, who decided to swat this pesky fly buzzing around their backyard with a sledge hammer. ... We should not be party to this effort.

Heaney expressed serious doubts that anyone would confuse Novak's "Mutant of Omaha" parody with the real Mutual of Omaha. Furthermore, the insurance company had not given any evidence to prove that the parody had hurt its sales or reputation in any way. Heaney stated that nobody could doubt that Novak was using the parody to point out the folly of nuclear war, and he pointed out that scholars have rejected the idea that parodists must use "adequate alternative means of communication." And finally, Heaney argued that a trademark is "a form of intangible property that itself conveys or symbolizes ideas." Therefore, an attempt to enjoin a trademark parody censors the content of the expression more than the manner of the expression and so violates the First Amendment.

In comparing L.L. Bean and Novak, it is worth noting that the rulings in the cases run counter to intuitive logic. An offensive, sexually-oriented parody that could conceivably "tarnish" a company's image was found to be protected, whereas a milder, fairly non-offensive parody was enjoined.

In 1988, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell reaffirmed part of the L.L. Bean decision and put offensive parody firmly under the protection of the First Amendment. In 1983, Hustler ran a parody of a liquor ad that featured a fictitious interview with preacher Jerry Falwell. In the parody interview, Falwell was portrayed as having had a "drunken, incestuous rendezvous with his mother in an outhouse." Falwell sued the magazine for libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

After several years of litigation, the case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court noted that the main legal knot of the case was whether a public figure (such as Falwell) could recover damages for emotional harm caused by a parody that most people would consider to be gross and repugnant. The court concluded that, based on the history of the political cartoon, a parody or caricature of a public figure, even when it is deeply offensive, is protected under the First Amendment.

In the early 1990s, a pair of cases involving beer companies set forth new standards concerning parody in advertising.

The first case, Tin Pan Apple Inc. v. Miller Brewing Co. (1990) dealt with both copyright and trademark infringement issues. Miller Brewing ran a humorous TV ad that featured three black rappers and comedian Joe Piscopo. The rappers in the ad dressed and performed like the Fat Boys, a rap group that encouraged its underage audience to abstain from alcohol and other drugs. The Fat Boys sued, accusing Miller Brewing of copyright, trademark, and privacy violations.

The case went before the district court. In the matter of the copyright violation, the Fat Boys claimed that the ad had copied parts of their rap songs. Miller claimed that the ad was a parody, and as such constituted "a fair use which prevents a claim of copyright infringement." The court agreed that parody usually qualifies as a fair use, but it also stated that using copyrighted material for solely commercial purposes was illegal. Judge Haight wrote:

This commercial's use is entirely for profit: to sell beer. Even if the concept of parody is impermissibly stretched to include this commercial, it does not qualify as fair use . . . the commercial in no manner "builds upon the original," nor does it contain elements "contributing something new for humorous effect or commentary."

The court then turned to the issue of the alleged trademark infringement. The Fat Boys had stated in their complaint that their group name had been registered as a trademark. The Fat Boys and Tin Pan Apple had entered into licensing arrangements with merchandise companies to use the group's name and image in making clothing and toys. In essence, the group had the trademark status of a company.

The Fat Boys argued that the beer commercial misled consumers into believing that they endorsed Miller's beer and encouraged drinking. Miller Brewing again used parody as a defense. And, again, the court used the logic it had used with the copyright infringement issue to decide that Miller had violated the Fat Boys' trademark.

While Tin Pan Apple was an important ruling, the most important case of the period was Eveready v. Adolph Coors Co. (1991). This case provides an new perspective on several advertising parody issues, since it pits advertiser against advertiser, parodist against parodist.

Eveready is well known for its ad-within-an-ad "Energizer Bunny" TV commercials. But some people may have forgotten that these ads began as a parody of Duracell TV ads. The original Duracell battery ads displayed a room full of toy rabbits playing snare drums. As a voice-over talked about Duracell's batteries outlasting those of its competitors', all the rabbits but the one run by Duracell batteries stop playing.

In the first Eveready spoof, the ad displays a similar group of toy rabbits playing snare drums. A voice-over says, "Don't be fooled by commercials where one battery company's toy outlasts the others." At that, one of the rabbits turns its head, and its eyes widen as the Energizer Bunny strolls out in front of the other toys, beating its bass drum. At the end of the ad, the voice states Eveready's now-familiar pitch, "Nothing outlasts the Energizer. They keep going and going and going .... voice-over fades out as ad ends" The Energizer Bunny pauses in the middle of the screen, leans back, and exits the screen during the fade-out.

This ad started a very successful ad campaign for Eveready. The series of ads involved the Bunny intruding on fake commercials for fictitious products such as "Sitagin" (a hemorrhoid ointment that spoofs "Preparation H") and a wine called "Chateau Marmoset." The Bunny also became more boisterous, typically knocking over props, and spinning around once and twirling his drum mallets before exiting the screen.

In late 1990, Coors Light's marketing department decided to give Eveready a taste of its own parodic medicine. Coors' advertising agents had been told to design a set of ads involving Leslie Nielsen, a popular actor who has starred in slapstick movie parodies such as Airplane! and The Naked Gun. The agents designed an ad in which Nielsen would parody the Energizer Bunny. Coors accepted the design, produced the ad, and scheduled it to air in the six weeks immediately before Nielsen's new movie, Naked Gun 2 1/2, was released.

The parody commercial starts with a visual of a beer pouring into a glass with a voice-over accompanied by classical music. The voice and music grind to a halt and Nielsen walks onto the scene, beating a bass drum and wearing white rabbit ears, a fuzzy tail, and pink rabbit feet with a dark business suit. The Coors Light logo is emblazoned on the drum head. After a few beats on the drum, Nielsen spins around several times. And after recovering from an apparent dizzy spell, he says "thank you" and leaves the screen.

Eveready caught wind of the ad before it was sent to the networks and wrote letters to Coors demanding that the commercial not be aired. The two companies met and were unable to resolve their dispute, so Eveready filed suit in an attempt to keep the commercial off the air. The complaint argued that the Coors commercial violated Eveready's copyrights and diluted and infringed on its trademark.

The district court stated that it was obvious that Coors had "copied" something from the Energizer commercials, but pointed out that Eveready had to prove "substantial similarity" between the two ads to win its copyright infringement claim. The court then examined the nature of the Coors commercial. The court cited Tin Pan Alley's precedent that appropriating copyrighted material for a solely commercial use could not constitute protected parody.

The court then refused to follow this precedent on the grounds that although TV ads are designed to sell a product, this does not mean that they are "devoid of any artistic merit or entertainment value." Furthermore, the court pointed out that since the original copyrighted material and the parody were both advertisements, Eveready couldn't argue that its creation deserved especially strong protection. And finally, the court ruled that the Coors ad only used as much of the Energizer commercial as was necessary to make a decent parody of it. District Judge Norgle wrote,

Mr. Nielsen is not a toy (mechanical or otherwise), does not run on batteries, is not fifteen inches tall, is not predominantly pink, . . . . He by no means copies the majority of the Energizer Bunny's "look."

The court consequently ruled that Eveready had not established that Coors had violated its copyright, and then turned to the trademark infringement issue. The court stated that Eveready had to prove that Coors' ad would create confusion among viewers as to which company sponsored the ad. The court pointed out that Eveready's strength in this issue was also its weakness: Eveready had a strong trademark in the Energizer Bunny, so strong in fact that viewers would be unlikely to think the Coors ad was anything but a parody. And, given the commercial power of that trademark, the court did not see how the Coors ad could dilute or erode the mark's strength or distinctiveness.

Given the Energizer ruling, it would seem that advertising parodies would get slightly more First Amendment respect in the courts. But Vanna White v. Samsung Electronics America Inc. (1992) proves that things are not as they seem.

Samsung ran a series of humorous magazine ads set in the near future. These ads poked fun at current pop culture while implying that Samsung's VCRs would be around in the next century.

Samsung's problematic ad was a spoof of the "Wheel of Fortune" game show. The ad portrayed a robot that had been dressed and posed to resemble Vanna White, the show's hostess. White had not been consulted about the ad. She felt that her image had been unfairly used, so she sued Samsung on the grounds that the ad gave a false impression that she endorsed Samsung's VCRs and that the company had unlawfully appropriated her likeness and had violated her common law right to publicity.

One of the defenses that Samsung used was that its "Vanna White" ad was a parody, and as such was expression protected by the First Amendment. The majority of the court agreed that the ad was intended as a spoof, but it felt that the ad might mislead consumers into thinking that White endorsed Samsung's VCRs. Because of this, the fact that the ad was a parody was no defense. "The difference between a 'parody' and a 'knock-off' is the difference between fun and profit," wrote Judge Goodwin.

Judge Alarcon disagreed with this view, however. In his dissent, he stated:

The majority gives Samsung's First Amendment defense short shrift.... The majority's attempt to distinguish this case from Hustler Magazine v. Falwell ... and L.L. Bean v. Drake Publications is unpersuasive. The majority notes that the parodies in those cases were made for the purpose of poking fun ... But they fail to consider that the defendants in those cases were making fun ... for the purely commercial purpose of selling soft core pornographic magazines.

Alarcon also stated that "no reasonable consumer could confuse the robot with Vanna White or believe that ... she endorsed Samsung's product."

In First Amendment protection terms, the White ruling seems to be a throwback to Novak. White shows that advertising parody's status in the courts is still at least partially at the mercy of individual judges' legal interpretations (not unlike many other areas of current communications law). Will advertising parodies ever be given more First Amendment protection? Only future cases will tell.

---

References

Eveready Battery Co. v. Adolph Coors Co., 765 F.Supp. 440 (1991).

Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell, 14 Med. L. Rep. (BNA) 2281 (1988).

Langvardt, Arlen W., "Protected Marks and Protected Speech: Establishing the First Amendment Boundaries in Trademark Parody Cases," The Trademark Reporter 82 (September-October 1992): 671-764.

L.L. Bean Inc. v. Drake Publishers Inc., 13 Med. L. Rep. (BNA) 2009 (1987).

Mutual of Omaha Insurance Co. v. Novak, 836 F.2d 397 (1987).

Rodin, Rita A., "Parody Protection Under The Fair Use Doctrine-- The Eveready Standard: It Keeps Going, And Going, And Going..." St. John's Law Review 66 (Fall-Winter 1993): 1169- 1192.

Tin Pan Apple Inc. v. Miller Brewing Co. Inc., 17 Med. L. Rep. (BNA) 2273 (1990).

Vanna White v. Samsung Electronics America Inc., 20 Med. L. Rep. (BNA) 1457 (1992).

Labels: copyright, humor, media theory, publishing

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Introduction

Authors such as Marcel LaFollette and Dorothy Nelkin have documented how the mass media has portrayed scientists and how these portrayals have affected public perceptions and government policies. But comparatively little research has been done on the portrayal of scientists in science fiction.

Many people dismiss or ignore science fiction, perhaps because they see SF as being irrelevant to what happens in the real world. But many scientists and science enthusiasts consider SF to be "their" fiction. SF fans naturally have an interest in science, and a significant minority of SF writers historically have been scientists themselves.

Over the years, SF has been a sort of gateway through which young people have been introduced to the excitement of scientific discovery. In this way, SF has encouraged people to learn about science and, in some cases, to become scientists. In his 1990 article "Scientists in Science Fiction: Enlightenment and After," Patrick Parrinder recounts astronomer Patrick Moore's suggestion at the 1955 UNESCO conference that "scientifically sound" SF would be a good recruitment tool for countries to use to encourage young people to pursue careers in science.

Going beyond the scientific circle, SF affects how people view science. While relatively few people read SF books, SF movies and TV series are hugely popular. And, current SF influences aside, our more deeply-rooted cultural attitudes toward and fears about scientists have been shaped by SF characters such as Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, and Dr. Strangelove.

Discussion and Methods

It is difficult to figure out exactly how much SF's portrayals of scientists affect public perceptions, mostly because little research has been done to even figure out how scientists are portrayed by SF authors. The main research in this area was done by Walter Hirsch in 1958.

Hirsch analyzed 300 stories published in science fiction magazines between 1926 and 1950. He noticed a steady decline in the number of stories that featured scientists as main characters. He also noted that there was a marked decline in the portrayal of scientists as heroes as opposed to their portrayal as villains, although on the whole heroic scientists still outnumbered the villains 18 to 2.

Hirsch's study was a good one, for its time. But the problem is that nobody has done a qualitative/quantitative follow-up study on Hirsch's findings. Parrinder's 1990 article "Scientists in Science Fiction" was the only substantive recent treatment of the subject that I was able to find.

And I found it to be lacking quite a bit in the way of real analysis. Parrinder frequently cites Hirsch and states matter-of-factly that "One of the most striking features of the science fiction of the last twenty years is that scientists are far less commonly represented in it than they used to be." Later on, Parrinder asserts,

Not only do scientists in science fiction often appear as lurid, melodramatic and evil, but they frequently ... evoke the pre-scientific past. That is, the evil scientist -- or the future scientist surviving into a post-industrial society -- carries with him the trappings of sorcery, wizardry, and alchemy.

Parrinder does not qualify which science fiction he was referring to; while his comments are perfectly valid descriptions for the SF written as late as the 60s and 70s, they do not mesh well with what I have been reading in more recent SF magazines.

My doubts about Parrinder's research increased when I reached his comments on cyberpunk at the end of the article. He argues,

It would seem that the image of the hero as discoverer has given place to the hero as information-processor, operating on knowledge that already exists. The hacker's function is not to increase knowledge but to keep it circulating, sapping the power and wealth of the corporations which monopolise it. Science as social currency is taken for granted in these novels, but it is no longer seen as a disinterested pursuit and the age of the great discoverer has long vanished. Science-fiction writers under fifty no longer seem to believe that scientists have the future in their bones. It could be that this message is getting through to the readers, too.

Oh, the gloom! Parrinder completely misses the fact that cyberpunk hackers are no more portrayed as scientists than were the old time rocket jockeys like Buck Rogers. The fact that the hackers in William Gibson's Neuromancer are referred to as "cowboys" should have tipped Parrinder off to the fact that hackers "ride" the data stream, making them analogous to the old-time astroheroes who ride faster-than-light spaceships. Hackers are not scientists and no reasonably intelligent SF reader sees them as such.

My grumpiness with Parrinder increased as I scanned his notes and bibliography. He primarily took notes from secondary sources, and I saw no sign of him having done a lick of original qualitative/quantitative research of the type that Hirsch had done. It seems like awfully sloppy methodology to have extensively cited thirty-year-old research (Hirsch) to make critical comments about a constantly-changing genre like science fiction.

Once my irritation subsided, I decided I'd do my own research to see how far off mark Parrinder's article is when it comes to more current SF.

I decided to examine current science fiction stories in the top three SF magazines (based on circulation and the amount they pay writers): Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and Omni. I decided on SF shorts instead of novels or movies because:

1. most SF fans agree that SF movies and TV shows are not representative of cutting-edge SF, and
2. short fiction provides the same diversity in subject matter and authorship as do novels in a much more manageable format.

Comparing my results to Hirsch's seemed like a reasonable thing to do, but I also realized that his research might have been flawed by bias or incompleteness. So I decided to do a brief comparison analysis of SF shorts from the 50's by looking at two "Best Of" anthologies from 1952 and 1956. I picked the SF from the 50's as a comparison partly because this is when Hirsch did his research and partly because this was the time of the big post-war government push to funnel huge amounts of money into scientific research all over the country.

Results

In The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1952 anthology, the stories are filled with gloomy predictions of the future, often predictions of nuclear holocaust (27.7% of the stories). This is to be expected, since it had only been seven years since Fat Man and Little Boy ended World War II. Stylistically, the stories are fairly primitive (but are still a good read). The characters seldom rise above the first dimension, and sophisticated descriptions and internal metaphors are pretty much non-existent.

Of the 18 stories in the anthology, six (33.3%) featured scientists as main characters. Of these scientists, four were physicists (probably more fallout from the Manhattan Project), one was a physician, and the other two were physical scientists. And of the six stories, three portrayed the scientists in a distinctly negative light.

The most damning story was "Balance" by John Christopher. In "Balance," the world is controlled by competing scientific factions who resort to spying, theft, and murder to keep or gain power. The main character, a retired chemist, is ordered by his bosses, United Chemicals, to find and murder a super-genius child who has been created by the Geneticists to insure and increase their power. All the scientists in this story come off as greedy, evil, crude, paranoid beings who are barely evolved from apes. This theme of governmentalized scientists destroying the world was echoed in the other negative stories, though not to this degree.

The Best Science-Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956 was another story, however. The 14 tales in this anthology were more complex than their 1952 counterparts. These stories show more fleshed-out characters (though they're not completely three-dimensional) and spend more time on description.

In agreement with Hirsch's findings, the 1956 anthology has a smaller percentage of scientific characters than does the 1952 anthology: in the 1956, four (28.5%) of the fourteen stories feature scientists as prominent characters.

But the scientists are of a distinctly different sort. Of these four stories, one portrays a white male physicist, one portrays a beautiful, alien, female psi-therapist (a psychologist who uses psionics to heal her patients -- perhaps a forerunner of Star Trek's Deanna Troi?), and two others portray psychiatrists. With all this focusing on the mind, it is no wonder that the stories have better-developed characters.

Only one of the four stories portrayed its scientist negatively, but this story was supremely negative. "Judgement Day" by L. Sprague de Camp is a character study of Dr. Wade Ormont, a physicist working at a nuclear research facility who discovers that a particular type of nuclear chain reaction would blow the crust off the earth. The physicist is portrayed as a cold, bitter, socially inept, slightly psychotic man: in other words, he is a stereotypical mad scientist, harking back to turn-of-the-century science fiction. But de Camp crawls inside the stereotype, explores it, and makes it chillingly believable, perhaps in an effort to explain the mentalities of the physicists who willingly created the atomic bomb.

In summary, the 50s anthologies I sampled portrayed scientists as main characters in 10 out of 32 stories (31.3%), and out of those ten, 4 were negative portrayals. This basically matches what Hirsch and Parrinder claim SF is like.

But once I started to look at recent SF, Parrinder's claims seem much less valid.

I went through six consecutive months of Analog and analyzed the stories in the same way that I had the 50s anthologies. Of the 36 total stories in these issues, sixteen (44.4%) featured scientists as main characters. And of these portrayals, none were negative except in the fact that scientists were shown to be fallible human beings.

The scientists who behave heroically are typically young and a little reckless, while those who are meek and perhaps a little cowardly are older and are shown to have good reasons for their behavior. The only scientist who does something shocking and nasty (hunting down a beautiful tree faery and ripping it open and eating it raw and perhaps alive) is shown to be acting from deeply-ingrained human instinct. On the whole, the scientists portrayed in Analog are likeable, highly intelligent, and occupy a sort of moral high ground. There is also a much greater diversity of scientists in these stories as compared with the 50s anthologies. In addition to the traditionally-portrayed medical doctors and physicists, the stories featured liberal doses of paleontologists, ecologists, and other biologists.

Science is portrayed as the key to advancing (and perhaps saving) humanity, and a running theme in the stories is the unfair, irritating, and potentially dangerous confinement of science by the government or corporations refusing to fund what scientists need. Two stories especially highlighted this theme.

The first was "Tide Pools" by Kevin J. Anderson. In this tale, the main character is a woman who travels through alternate times to locate medical cures that scientists in other realities have discovered. She brings back the formulas for the drugs, and her company markets them as their own. The protagonist's husband is dying of a rare neurologic disease, and her company refuses to let her try to find the cure on the grounds that the time she spent searching for it wouldn't be cost effective (only eight people in the country have the disease). She tries to find a cure in her native time, but discovers that the only neurologist who researched the disease stopped being able to get funding and abandoned his research. The heroine decides to break company rules and searches for a cure in other time lines. She eventually finds one, but by this time his disease is too advanced to be curable.

The second Analog story that deals with the dangers of under-funding is "Pibloktoq" by Paula Robinson. This black comedy is set on a cramped station on the moon in which all the inhabitants have gotten short-tempered and are prone to what look like brief fits of relatively non-violent insanity. The protagonist, a psychologist named Morgan Diersing, comes on board to try to help the inhabitants. The space station inhabitants need more room to cure their madness, but no one on Earth will send them the materials to build additions to the station.

In summary, the Analog stories are distinctly pro-science and pro-scientist. The scientists are protagonists, not heroes; the reader sympathizes with them and likes them and roots for them in their struggles against governments and corporations (businessmen, bureaucrats, and military figures are the most frequent antagonists). But these scientists do not behave "heroically" in the traditional sense: they never do anything as dramatic as saving the world a la Dr. Zarkov in the old Flash Gordon serials.

The six months of Asimov's SF stories I examined showed several similarities with the Analog stories, but there were also some interesting differences.

Of the 49 total Asimov's stories, 32 (65.3%) were what I consider to be SF. The remainder were fantasy, ranging from speculative fiction about Picasso to a tale about medieval vampires. Of the 32 genuine SF stories, thirteen (40.6%) featured scientists as major characters. This percentage is similar to what I saw in Analog, and it contradicts Parrinder's assertion that fewer and fewer scientists are being portrayed as mains in SF.

As I mentioned, there were some distinct differences between the portrayals of scientists in Analog and Asimov's, and I think that this is related to the willingness of Asimov's editors to include obvious fantasy in a SF magazine. First of all, Asimov's featured an even greater variety of scientists. Physicists were outnumbered by both biologists and social scientists. Medical doctors also outnumbered physicists, and the stories also featured computer scientists and an oceanographer.

These diverse scientists were more completely humanized than the scientists in Analog. While the scientists are mostly portrayed as doing good for the world, and three are portrayed as being geniuses, they are also shown to have basically the same mundane problems as everybody else. The scientists have family problems and wants and needs that have nothing to do with science.

In "Chemistry" by James Patrick Kelley, the protagonists are two female medical students who decide to go out to a futuristic singles bar to have a fling before finals. In "The Facts of Life" by Brian Stableford, the main character is a teenaged boy named Benjy who, when faced with a mentally abusive father and a disintegrating home life, escapes into his hobby of doing ecology/evolution experiments with microbes. In "Guardian of Fireflies" by Patricia Anthony, the protagonist is an AIDS-infected physicist who is standing watch in a field where a man has been trapped in a freakish quantum bubble. The physicist knows that the trapped man is sure to suffocate before he can be freed, and he spends much of the story contemplating this and his own impending death from AIDS.

Analog's theme of "everything would be better if they'd just give us more money" is absent from the six months of Asimov's that I examined. The stories in Asimov's portray science as a basically good and necessary thing, but it doesn't receive the same kind of unconditional love it gets in Analog.

For one thing, Asimov's features two negative portrayals of scientists. The first negative portrayal is in "Blind" by Robert Reed. The antagonist in "Blind" is Dr. Jefferson, an oceanographer whose whole life has been consumed by his lust to be the first to find a deep-sea descendant of the pleiosaur. The reader sees Jefferson as a fat, slovenly, abrasive, humorless, obsessed guy you'd generally want to choke. But at the end of the story, when another team beats Jefferson to the pleiosaur find and he is reduced to tears, the reader begins to see Jefferson as pathetic rather than malicious.

The second negative story is "A Hand in the Mirror" by Sonja Orin Lyris. The main character is a computer scientist named Reskin. Reskin is doing advanced research to develop a form of virtual reality that reads the user's mind. Reskin is portrayed as a cold, unethical jerk, and he even demonstrates a hidden sadistic streak near the end of the story.

But the portrayals of Jefferson and Reskin are a far cry from the mad scientists of the 50s anthologies. Both Jefferson and Reskin are shown to have some good qualities, and, more importantly, neither of them is likely to kill or physically harm anybody, much less endanger mankind as was de rigeur for the old-time mad scientists.

And there was one Asimov's story in which the scientist acts as a genuine hero. "Kahmehameha's Bones" by Kathleen Ann Goonan charts the life of Cen, a homeless Hawaiian teenager who is visited by what is apparently the ghost of Kaiulani, the last Hawaiian princess who tried to keep Hawaii independent and died a tragic death in her twenties. Cen is befriended by a math professor who teaches Cen math and science. Cen has a remarkable talent for physics, and he realizes that Kaiulani is not a ghost but a manifestation of some kind of temporal disturbance. He decides that he must try to figure out some way to save Kaiulani from dying young.

In contrast with the complex portrayals of scientists in Asimov's, the stories in Omni were little help to my research. For a magazine whose non-fiction articles were all about slick science and futuristic gadgets, their fiction section was astonishingly low in real SF content (by "real SF" I'm referring to stories that deal with believable scientific/futuristic extrapolations rather than magic). In the 14 issues I examined, a grand total of three stories portrayed scientists, all of whom were physicists (possibly excepting a butterfly collector who I guess might have qualified as a scientist had he actually collected any butterflies in the course of the story.)

One of the three stories, "The Relativity of Chaos" by Michaela Rossener, portrays the physicist Erwin Schrödinger as a cat hater who uses the family cat in his famous cat-in-the-box observer-effect experiments (really, he's just trying to kill the cat.) This portrayal is a distinctly negative one, but since the story is told from the cat's perspective, Schrödinger doesn't get much characterization beyond all the nasty things the cat thinks about him.

Basically, it was hard to figure out if Omni's stories supported or contradicted Parrinder's claims because the magazine's stories were mainly modern fantasy and magic realism rather than SF. If somebody were to do a more in-depth analysis of current SF than I have done here, it would probably be necessary to sample the last few years of Omni to get a feel for what their fiction editors and writers were doing.

Conclusion

If an in-depth study were to be done, the smaller fantasy, horror, and science fiction magazines would need to be sampled in addition to the top SF magazines. I attempted to look at a few of the "little" SF/F/H magazines, but the library I used for my research did not subscribe to them (not even the regional ones) and I lacked the funds and time to purchase them on my own. But my general impression of these magazines is that when they feature horror as well as SF, the SF stories tend to run more negative portrayals of scientists.

The smaller magazines and Omni aside, it seems that Parrinder's gloominess over the status of scientists in SF is unfounded. The stories I sampled from Analog and Asimov's show about a ten percent increase in the portrayal of scientists as main characters over the stories in the 50s anthologies I examined. Even if scientists do not appear as main characters as frequently as they did in the SF of the 1920s and 30s, the mad scientist has been virtually banished from the pages of the best SF magazines. Scientists are now portrayed as real people instead of scary stereotypes.

And that's got to be worth more than numbers.

---

References

Parrinder, Patrick. "Scientists in Science Fiction: Enlightenment and After," in Rhys Garnett and R.J. Ellis, eds. Science Fiction Roots and Branches. NY: St. Martin's, 1990. 57-78.

"The Changing Political Image of Scientists in the United States" by Marcell LaFollette. Available at http://www.aaas.org/spp/yearbook/chap25.htm.

Walter Hirsch, "The Image of the Scientist in Science Fiction: A Content Analysis," American Journal of Sociology, Volume 63 (1958): 506­512.

Nelkin, Dorothy. Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology. WH Freeman & Co., 1995.

Labels: media theory, science fiction

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While many people believe that the media are inherently biased, those of us who've gotten degrees in journalism have had it drilled into our skulls that bias is A Bad Thing^TM.

Hard-nosed, old-school newspaper reporters are particularly touchy about bias: in their world, good reporters should be neutral, non-participatory observers. A good reporter must be objective above all else. If you're a reporter, you aren't allowed to have an opinion or to take a side on a debate or issue ... unless you're writing for the Op/Ed page or the Sports page (sports writers are freely allowed to root for the home team, of course).

In the hardcore journalistic world, advocacy reporting -- writing to promote something one believes in -- is verboten. And this is where things get tricky for those who have chosen a career as science reporters. Not only are the vast majority of jobs for science writers going to be advocacy reporting jobs (such as writing for most nature magazines, which take a strong environmentalist political stance), there has even been a lot of suggestion that a reporter who is highly educated in the sciences may automatically lose his or her objectivity.

Academic Dorothy Nelkin writes in her book Selling Science:

"While agreeing that there is a need for greater technical sophistication, some journalists argue that too much science education can handicap the reporter ... journalists trained extensively in science may adopt the values of scientists and lose the ability to be critical."

Her beliefs were echoed by many speakers at a Society of Environmental Journalists conference I attended. I believe there was even an informal session scheduled to discuss whether or not people with science degrees should be allowed to cover environmental beats or not.

To me, the idea that reporters will be intellectually biased by having a substantive science education is silly, and potentially dangerous. First of all, science and journalism value the same things: an objective, unbiased search for the truth. The procedures and products of science and journalism are different, but their value systems are much the same.

I agree that some science-educated reporters may develop such a deep respect for science that they are less willing to ask hard questions. But I take issue with the idea that such science students will learn to love all scientists. I respect the men and women who taught me biology at ASU, and I think biology is too cool for words. But, on the other hand, many of my experiences with physics, geology, and math professors have been negative, to say the least. I loved the subject matter, but I didn't care much for those who taught me (let's just say I experimented with pins and voodoo dolls on a few occasions).

Even if I am biased (and I don't think I am) towards not wanting to journalistically rough up biologists, this bias certainly does not extend to physicists. And now that we are talking about a journalist's "formative years," what if a given reporter's father is a police chief, and that reporter grew up with a deep respect for policemen? Is this reporter too biased to cover crime?

And in a larger sense, what about the intellectual socialization that goes on in journalism programs around the country? Every journalism professor I've met has had a different idea about what the "ideal journalist" thinks and does, and teaches accordingly. Might not budding journalists be "biased" if they listen to and emulate a favorite professor?

And I do think that the idea that a highly educated reporter is biased is a dangerous one. As an undergrad, I hung out at the journalism department, and I worked with lot of j-majors. And in the main, they didn't exactly strain themselves to do well in in their classes. Sometimes this was because their whole existence was centered around the school paper or yearbook. But a few of them seemed to have an attitude of "Why do I need an education? I'm a reporter! Reporters don't need to know all that stuff!"

And hearing professionals say that education is a bad thing reinforces this lazy, cheeseball attitude. A reporter who scorns education has a mind that is already halfway closed, and the rest of it is liable to snap shut whenever the reporter is faced with a difficult technical issue he or she cannot easily comprehend.

In fact, the whole discussion of bias at the SEJ conference (mostly in a panel discussion on ethics) made me feel a little seasick. Casey Bukro of the Chicago Tribune was particularly hard-nosed about ethics: he stated that journalists should be strictly neutral and non-participatory. He basically said that if you've given five bucks to Greenpeace, you have no business on the environment beat. Bukro seems to believe in the "just the facts, ma'am" brand of reporting.

All good and well, but the "facts" are seldom that obvious in environmental issues. If anything, environmental issues are even stickier than regular science issues because of the messy intersection of hot politics and scientific debate. Others argued with Bukro, saying that being an advocate for environmental reform is not the same as being an advocate for a political platform. I tend to agree with them, and I feel that Bukro's proposed ethical standards are unworkable. The environmental issue is so murky in spots, I think some level of synthesis and value-judgement on the part of the reporter is necessary to serve the needs of the reader.

Another panelist, Robert Engleman of Population Action International, explained why he had "turned" from reporting to advocacy. He seemed terribly embarrassed, and I sensed unspoken scorn for him in the room.

How useless. I realize that fairness, balance, and accuracy are important, but if SEJ is really going to follow Bukro's lead in trying to stamp out "bias," their reporters are going to be turning out a whole lot of dull, superficial stories.

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