Freedom of the Press, Ronald K.L. Collins

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November/December 1991 | Contents

Freedom of the Press
The Most Serious Threat Is

CLUTTER

by Ronald K. L. Collins
Collins teaches law at the Catholic University of America and is a co-founder of the Center for the Study of Commercialism. He is the co-author, with David Skover, of The Death of Discourse (forthcoming), in which some of these ideas are developed.

America's marketplace of ideas is becoming a junkyard of commodity ideology. Each day of our lives, twelve billion display ads, two and one-half million radio commercials, an over three hundred thousand television commercials are dumped into the collective consciousness. Advertising, says industry expert Leo Bogart, consumes almost 60 percent of newspaper space, 52 percent of magazine pages, 18 percent of radio time, and 17 percent of network television prime time. During a lifetime, most people will devote a full year and half to watching commercials. Over $ 130 billion is dropped into advertising annually.

Product and service messages are plastered on everything from the painted sides of cows to food-dyed hotdogs; placed strategically in everything from books to movies; situated on everything from restaurant menus to the bottoms of holes on putting greens; pumped into everything from doctors' reception rooms to grade school classrooms; and zapped through everything from phones to fax machines.

In the process, communications -- personal, social, religious, political -- are increasingly infused with the objects the symbols, and the ideology of commercialism. We talk more and more about getting an spending; we describe our experiences more and more in terms of advertising slogans; we tend more and more to prize commercial values above all others. Meanwhile, political campaigns take on the look and feel of Madison Avenue pitches.

Those who value free speech in the abstract may approve of protecting all forms of commercial expression short of outright consumer fraud. For them, the campaigns of dissent and detergent are seen as equals in the First Amendment marketplace, be it one of ideas or items. They do not fear the consequences of a culture eager to commercialize political and radical expression. Consider, for example, the self-serving tobacco company ad championing the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Or recall how John Lennon's "Revolution" become a commercial cause celebre for peddling sneakers, even as the lyrics warned listeners to "free your mind instead." The new defenders of the new first Amendment feel no loss when political and radical discourse become obscured or when our value symbols are expropriated to promote profit.

We have reached the point, two centuries after James Madison left us his constitutional legacy, at which dissent and detergent may have much in common for Firs Amendment purposes. It is a sign of the times that many call this progress.