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EDITORIAL
what we believe in and what we fight for
An outrageous and shocking speech
II you did not hear, or have not seen the speech delivered by Paul S. Willis. president of the Grocery Manufacturers of America, before the recent meeting ol the Television Bureau of Advertising in New York, we suggest that you read it carefully. It appears on the preceding pages.
In our opinion it contains some of the most outrageous and shocking statements ever delivered at an industry meeting.
Worse still, it betrays evidence of a type of mentality and type of thinking which, unless checked soon and hard and fast, can easily destroy the whole structure of the American free press and free broadcasting.
Mr. Willis, posing as a spokesman for an $80 billion industry, and waving the big bludgeon of a $1.2 billion advertising expenditure, told TvB members that the time has come for more editorial "cooperation" with food manufacturers.
Blandly, and with the kind of innocence usually seen only among the very senile or very infantile, he revealed the disgraceful fact that last year a GMA committee put the arm on 16 supposedly powerful publishers.
In Willis' words, "We wanted to discuss with them the facts of life about advertiser-media relationships." In the GMA's bright lexicon, this means seeing to it that editorial and advertising departments understand their "interdependency."
The magazine boys got the message. In the past year a flood of puffy, p.r.-type food articles have appeared in Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, This Week, Readers' Digest— name the proudest names in the mass magazine field, they've all knuckled under.
Gleefully Willis detailed the results of the GMA power play. But he went on ominously, "There's lots to be desired in our relations with top tv managements."
In other words, as one distressed TvB member remarked at the 'Waldorf, "He's telling us, 'We've ground the print boys under our heels; now we're going to start in on you'."
Misguided, fallacious thinking
Well, maybe that will happen. But sponsor believes that the time has come when all thoughtful broadcasters, publishers, and advertising men must stand up and challenge publicly the entire Willis-GMA concept.
It is based on fallacious, misguided, misbegotten thinking, and the sooner its GMA adherents get slapped down, the better off we all shall be.
Paul Willis is wrong, dead wrong. And the reasons why he is wrong have nothing to do with those old-fashioned, maudlin arguments about the need to preserve "editorial integrity" or proteel the pristine virginity of editors and program people from the lecherous assaidts of the advertising department.
The real evil in the GMA approach, as Tv Guide editor Merrill Panitt pointed
SPONSOR/26 November 1962