VH1, ESPN ARE ALSO DRUG OFFICE BENEFICIARIES

More on Your Brain on Drugs-gate: The White House's Office of National Drug
Control Policy gave back to TV networks ad time worth millions of dollars
not only in exchange for those "very special episodes" about the evils of
drug use in your favorite sitcoms and dramas, but also for shows whose
basic topic is drugs: VH1 bios of drug-addled rock stars, Fox's reality
show "America's Most Wanted" and ESPN's coverage of baseball player Darryl
Strawberry's cocaine woes.

Wasn't this media campaign supposed to be about getting more anti-drug
messages on the air?

This information came to the attention of The TV Column at a Senate
subcommittee hearing yesterday to grill the ONDCP about its ad-giveback
arrangement with the networks. The ONDCP, you'll remember, is under fire
for reviewing scripts of TV shows in its effort to dramatically increase
the number of anti-drug messages being delivered on TV to American youths
during hours when they're actually watching.

Congress mandated that for every minute of ad time the ONDCP bought on a
network, the net had to kick in a minute of public service announcements to
the campaign. But in spring '98, the ONDCP decided that if a network put
anti-drug messages right into its programming, it would give the network
credit toward its pro bono obligation and the net could then sell the PSA
ad time to a paying customer or use it to promote its own lineup. In
exchange for slipping those messages into programming, the networks were
relieved of $22 million in public service advertising requirements over two
years.

Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), who called yesterday's hearing,
chairs an appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding of the 1997 law
giving the ONDCP $1 billion over five years to buy ad time for an
aggressive anti-drug campaign.

He says he didn't know about the credit-for-content arrangement until the
news media dug it up in January. (His office really ought to start reading
the Los Angeles Times, Ad Age and USA Today - all of which ran stories that
referred to the ONDCP's cash-for-content arrangement between August and
November '98 - though it's true that all three stories did kind of bury the
lead.)

Now that he knows about it, Campbell doesn't like it; neither does Sen.
Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), who was the only other committee member at the
hearing. Both senators said they didn't think the overall ad campaign
should be scrapped, but Campbell said the cash-for-credit relationship
needs either to be more carefully regulated or eliminated.

Alan Levitt, the director of the ONDCP's National Youth Anti-Drug Media
Campaign, who had defended the campaign at the winter TV press tour in
California last month, was at the hearing, again representing the drug
czar's office. He had nothing new to say, but this time he brought
audiovisual material, which listed the shows for which the broadcast
networks received pro bono credit during the 1998-99 TV season.

For instance, the ONDCP gave VH1 credit for running biographies about rock
stars who abused drugs.

Are there any rock stars that didn't do drugs? Does no one at ONDCP know
that the only reason anyone watches "Behind the Music" and "Legends" is for
the drug stuff? At The TV Column we call it the VH1 Bio Formula: Rocker
becomes megastar ... Rocker gets into some serious drugs ... Rocker's
career takes a dive ... Rocker learns his/her lesson ... Rocker gets into
rehab ... Rocker makes a career comeback ... and they all live happily ever
after ... The End.

And ONDCP gave ESPN credit for covering the recent drug encounters of the
New York Yankees' Strawberry and University of Connecticut basketball star
Khalid El-Amin. Apparently the ONDCP thought that ESPN was not going to
cover these two stories unless the drug czar dangled a financial carrot.

An ONDCP rep said afterward that these programs were not news coverage,
they were feature stories. "Sports news is a guy shooting 40 points in an
NBA final or batting over .500," the rep said. "It is not an athlete
reflecting upon whether and to what extent drugs played a role in the
demise of his career in a feature piece."

Apparently Strawberry did a lot of reflecting, because ESPN got credit for
seven segments on him; El-Amin reflected only five times.

And, according to Levitt's document, the Fox network somehow was credited
for an episode of "Chicago Hope" - which airs on CBS. True, it's produced
by David E. Kelley at the Fox network's sister company, 20th Century Fox
TV, both of which are at the 20th Century Fox studio.

Fox also got credit for eight broadcasts of its reality show "America's
Most Wanted: America Fights Back."

But my personal fave: ONDCP gave NBC credit for episodes of its Saturday
morning shows "Hang Time," "Saved by the Bell," "One World" and "City
Guys." These are shows that NBC uses to fulfill another federal
requirement, that its stations provide a certain amount of educational or
informational programming for children each week. It appears that NBC was
fulfilling that requirement and getting the federal government to pay for
it. Way to go.