Washington Focus: No Simple Answers
Daniel L. Jaffe, ANA Washington Office.
For many years, a wide range of advertising as well as the entertainment media have been attacked, often from opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Critics from the left or the right have charged that children were being harmed by advertising, by consumer products themselves, or by the media content that advertising helps support.
In the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) went so far as to seek to ban childrens advertising. This represented an extreme swing of the pendulum. The Reagan revolution, reacting to such government...