Slapping Down Dangerous Information

After reading the first draft of my book Adventures in Misplaced Marketing (2001), the publisher insisted that I disguise or otherwise hide the names of the companies whose practices I ridiculed or otherwise criticized. I could make fun of one presidential candidate's political advertising or another one's inability to pronounce "subliminal," but must not say anything negative about a business identified by name unless I could cite someone else saying it. As a result, it was the holder of an unnamed corporate credit card who discovered while overseas that his card had been improperly cancelled, forcing him to be away from home without it. It was the store clerks of "an electronics store" who responded to a customer with a demeanor of "Like I Care" while wearing buttons that repeated an advertising slogan of personal caring for customers. I could not identify the computer store whose clerks were repeatedly found huddled around a terminal in a corner of a customer-filled store and responding to requests for help by saying "customer service isn't my job." Nor could I name the bookstore whose clerks in several cities appeared illiterate or the grocery store whose people weighing fish products could not convert simple fractions to decimals. Fortunately, most of these stories did not require a company name to make a point. I was describing consumer frustrations, not marketplace malfeasance, and where a company name was needed, the publisher was not difficult to assuage if I could produce a citation or other documentation. Other authors, however, have not been so fortunate. One author told me that his first book got killed by a respected academic publisher after a news organization described in his manuscript wrote to him to threaten legal action if he published his well-documented research on the company's international practices. In another instance, a paper by one of my former students was accepted at an academic journal but was then summarily rejected by the employees of the journal's for-profit publisher because it named the companies engaging in sweatshop-like operations in third-world countries. The article referenced the newspapers that had carried articles about these heavily reported manufacturing practices, but the author was told that the references such as the Boston Globe are not authoritative sources. Such reporting fear and news suppression are not unknown in the world outside of academic publishing. And examples can be found at the largest of news organizations. A highly regarded 1999 movie, The Insider, provides a fictionalized account of how corporate managers of CBS News caved in to pressures from Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company and suppressed an interview scheduled to run on the news magazine "60 Minutes." Fearing that a lawsuit would bankrupt CBS, and as some had speculated, would derail a pending purchase by Westinghouse, the network's lawyers and top executives refused to allow the show to broadcast an interview with a former B&W vice president of research in which he described how the company manipulated nicotine levels and the executive lied under oath to Congress about the product's addictive power (Grossman 1999). The story finally appeared on the network after The Wall Street Journal reported the story, creating a scandal of news suppression well beyond the original story itself. Ralph Nader has said that you can't have equal protection before the law when it is the typical consumer versus Exxon. And this he knew first hand. General Motors responded to Nader's now-classic Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) by hiring private detectives to follow him, presumably in an effort to discover personal information that could be used to discredit the author of a negative book about the automobile industry. Fortunately for Nader, because he was at the time a Congressional witness General Motors' actions were seen as harassment and were therefore in violation of existing laws. …