TV ANTIDRUG MESSAGES ARE NO SCANDAL

It's a form of "mind control," protests Harvard media eminence Bill Kovach.
"Insidious," shudders former Federal Communications Commission counsel
Robert Corn-Revere. "The most craven thing I've heard of yet," hollers
Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Media Access Project. The New York Times
editorial page says the "deeply unhealthy" practice "should disturb anyone
who believes in the need for all media. . . to remain free from government
meddling."

Good heavens, what could this insidious, deeply unhealthy form of
governmental mind control possibly be? It's nothing more than broadcast
television networks working with the Office of National Drug Control Policy
(familiarly known as the "drug czar's" office) on an entirely voluntary
basis to coordinate antidrug messages in their shows.

Don't worry. Big Brother isn't programming prime-time.

In 1997, when the government program in question started, drug use was
increasing, especially among teenagers -- not surprising, given the
country's stewardship by a president who joked about how he "didn't inhale."
In this atmosphere, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the private
consortium that promoted Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" message and made the
famous fried-egg "This is your brain on drugs" commercials, was having
increasing difficulty getting free TV time from the networks and raising
money in general.

So the Partnership began a lobbying campaign that ended with the Republican
Congress committing $1 billion over five years to disseminate antidrug
messages in mainstream media. The responsibility for spending that money was
given to the drug czar's office, under the leadership of the popular Gen.
Barry McCaffrey.

Lest the idea of the federal government buying advertising time of any kind
raises your First Amendment hackles, consider this: One of the major
advertisers on American television in the past 25 years has been the U.S.
military, which needs to reach possible recruits, and will spend more than
$300 million on ads this year.

But there was one catch to the antidrug ad money--to get it, Congress
insisted, the networks had to give away an equal amount of time free. (Think
of it as a dollar-for-dollar match, the kind of thing they talk about during
pledge drives on PBS, when some corporation agrees to equal every
contribution made during the course of the evening.) That meant the networks
would be selling their time to the government at a 50% discount.

They didn't have to accept the ad buy. No law forced them to sell the time.
They could have told the drug czar to stuff it. Instead, as they were in the
midst of an ad slump and eager to get their hands on big tranches of money,
they leapt at the arrangement.

Flash forward to 1998. Suddenly the ad slump has ended, what with the
white-hot economy and a whole new class of dot-com advertisers hungry for
prime-time space. The networks are sorry they sold their time too cheaply,
but what can they do? A contract's a contract. At which point the drug
czar's office makes an offer: It's only interested in getting its antidrug
message out. If the networks want to get back some of the free time they had
promised, the office would be willing to count appropriate messages in the
prime-time shows themselves as meeting the network's matching obligation.

Once again, the networks could have said no, and stuck to the original
contract. But they leapt at this idea as well. So a system was devised
whereby the networks would get a certain amount of advertising credit for an
antidrug message (30 seconds for a half-hour show, 21/2 minutes for an
hour-long show) deemed appropriate by the drug czar's office.

In order to ensure they would get the credit they wanted--in some cases
worth almost $1 million--the networks (including the Fox network owned by my
employer, News Corp.) sent some scripts to the drug czar's office for
approval. There's an argument now about whether the drug czar's office
insisted on seeing these scripts before the shows aired or whether that
practice simply developed over time. Alan Levitt, the official responsible
for this program at the drug czar's office, says he made no such demand. ABC
President Patricia Fili-Krushel says as of last year it became a
requirement. Mr. Levitt says that was a "miscommunication."

Whatever. The fact remains that nothing untoward happened here. Quite the
opposite. The drug czar's office is a federal agency entrusted with $1
billion of taxpayers' money, which means it must exercise responsible
oversight. It offered an incentive to private businesses with whom it had an
airtight contractual arrangement to do something of redeeming social value
that cost the taxpayers nothing and fulfilled Congress's intention to get
antidrug messages on the air. Once again, the networks were under no
compulsion to agree to this. They could just have fulfilled their end of the
bargain to the letter.

Even so, the Hollywood creative types contacted by Salon (which uncovered
this arrangement) reacted as though they have been turned into functionaries
of a totalitarian government. "I'm so caught off guard, so stunned,"
"Chicago Hope" producer John Tinker, one of whose episodes was vetted
without his knowledge, told Salon. "All of this is disturbing."

Come now. As Mr. Tinker surely knows, federal agencies and offices vet
Hollywood scripts all the time whenever filmmakers seek to use their
facilities and equipment. The military, in particular, goes through scripts
line-by-line to determine whether a script conveys an attitude the Pentagon
finds congenial before it will consent to rent out planes and aircraft
carriers and the like.

The only real "miscommunication" here is that the networks kept the
arrangement secret from the people who make the programs. That's a matter to
be negotiated between those two parties. Otherwise, the First Amendment
watchdogs can curl up and take a nice nap-the Constitution is safe.