An article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1997 explained communications professor Joseph Turow's attitude against advertising. Turow proposed that in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, "marketers, advertisers, and media companies developed a view of American society that was not only strikingly different from the grand theory that had preceded it but also opposed to the national interest" (Atlantic Monthly, 1997, pp. 113-120). No longer did they view the American marketplace as a single mass that was predictable in its reaction to various information and entertainment sou

The story did run, and on the front page. However, the punch had been removed from it, a boring lead applied, and any information about Tiffany moved to the 19th paragraph. Few people scanning a newspaper read more than the first paragraph or two of most stories, which is the reason news is written with the five (and sometimes six) elements in the first paragraph: who, what, why, where and when, and sometimes how. The lead did have all those elements: "A New York State Plan begun in 1968 to help small manufacturers create jobs in impoverished urban areas has evolved into a program awarding a broad range of corporations tens of millions of dollars a year in tax relief" (New York Times, quoted by Fleetwood, 1999, p. 40). It was just terminally boring and not likely to encourage readers to form opinions based on the facts.

Turow had, the article pointed out, discovered a "revolutionary shift" obviously unknown to Ogilvy when he wrote his essay. Turow believes that advertisers and the media companies they employ are forcing "a breakdown in social cohesion" (quoted by Atlantic Monthly, 1997, pp. 113-120), which will virtually end the American ideal. He predicted that alienation and anger would be the result, and that in the new media world, the citizen would lose out to the advertiser. That does seem a far cry from Ogilvy's concept of advertising as a relatively neutral activity that results in repeat sales when the product is worthy, or a single sale and death of the product if it is not.

Major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe and other big city newspapers "have a long history of publishing fearless muckraking articles. They set the industry standard" (Fleetwood, 1999, p. 40), but if they area often bamboozled by advertisers, the effect of advertiser pressure on smaller papers must be infinitely worse. Fleetwood contends, however, that even during Ogilvy's heyday, newspapers (and arguably magazines and radio and TV stations) were also intimidated by commercial interests. In the 1950s-in the Ogilvy era-women's and fashion editors were "required to come up every month with articles whose total column inches reflected the relative advertising strength of every story," (Nan Robertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The New York Times, quoted by Fleetwood, 21999, p. 40). And good advertisers were also 'paid' with mention in desirable and well-read informational articles. In fact, this practice was so common, Robertson called it

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