the trouble with advertising

I spotted this little incongruity this morning, reading the Guardian online:

It’s from the sidebar, and shows two features – one from the environment section, and one from the business section. You should be able to guess which is which. It might still be up, if you want to go and laugh/cry at it in context.

I understand that the media relies on advertising to do what it does, and that without auto and aviation industry ad money a number of our media outlets would probably fold, but surely we can do better than this?

The trouble is, as long as the media is indiscriminating in placing adverts, it can promote environmental responsibility all it likes and it will make no difference to people’s actual behaviour. If a newspaper advocates a low carbon lifestyle, and offers free long haul flights to the ecologically suicidal state of Dubai on the same page, then its words ring hollow.

The two things in this example are completely at odds with each other, but both are presented as desirable. They are given equal weight, they both represent choices that you can take or leave. In the end, your actions are only ever consumer choices.

Because it never actually forces anyone to act – it merely makes suggestions, presents options – advertising is often considered to be morally neutral. I disagree, because that would assume that the way we spend our money is morally neutral, and that is demonstrably untrue. Our individual choices all play into wider stories to one degree or another – a clean and stable environment, liberty and equality, health, education and equal opportunity. For the sake of simplicity, you could bundle all those collective hopes together and call them the common good.

As we regularly tell ourselves in our highly individualised culture, we all have ‘the right’ to buy what we like, but plenty of our purchases are against the common good. Look up from our own individual experience, and the way we spend our money suddenly affects the lives of others in ways we may not expect. Other people are made richer or poorer, healthier or sicker, more or less free, through every consumer choice we make.

Advertising is not morally neutral either. That doesn’t mean it is evil – it could be promoting good things – but cannot be assumed that it is harmless. Those who carry advertising need to be discerning. Advertising is so pervasive, and we seem resigned to a ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ attitude, but it is not mere idealism to suggest there are other ways. George Monbiot wrote in the summer:

“While it is true that readers can make up their own minds, advertising helps to generate behavioural norms. These advertisements make the destruction of the biosphere seem socially acceptable. If there is a case for banning ads for tobacco and unregulated gambling sites on the grounds of the social harm they cause, then there is a stronger case for blocking ads that promote the greatest social hazard of all.”

If we’re agreed that climate change is something preventable, isn’t it time we stopped promoting the things that cause it?