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85 Tex. L. Rev. See Also 1 (2006-2007)

handle is hein.journals/seealtex85 and id is 1 raw text is: Hidden Agendas David A. Anderson* You may have suspected long ago that movie makers get paid to show certain brands of cars or vodka or toys in their films, but you probably were surprised to learn recently that even some novelists accept payment for using brand names in their books. You should know that when you use a search engine to find information, the sites that come up at the top of the list may have paid to get there. If you were paying attention, you found out not long ago that television news reports about federal programs may in fact be videos furnished to the stations by the agencies, and the reporters touting the programs are actually employees or public relations agents for the agencies. The newspaper columnists you read may have been paid by the government to applaud the government activities they write about. Not that these practices are entirely new. Many years ago, newspapers had special pages on which a business that bought an ad got a small story lauding the business and its owner. Most readers understood that these weren't legitimate features, but the advertisers didn't, or didn't care-and that's why these pages were known in the trade as sucker pages. These are examples of the phenomenon Ellen Goodman exposes in her article, Stealth Marketing and Editorial Integrity. The article couldn't be more timely. The conception of media we have held for at least a century takes for granted that media speech is their own unless it's identified as someone else's. We know, of course, that media outlets and the individuals who operate them have blind spots and sacred cows, and favored causes and pet peeves. But we assume they are expressing their views, not positions they've been paid to take. Professor Goodman draws an analogy to bribery, which I think is apt. We know politicians' votes will be influenced by friendship, prejudice, ignorance, pressure, and campaign contributions, but we don't expect them to exchange their votes for bribes. Likewise with journalists and filmmakers and novelists: we know they're subject to influences other than the search for truth and beauty, but we don't expect them to secretly sell their voices to advertisers. We expect editorial independence, and generally we've been given that, despite some exceptions of the sort mentioned above. But that paradigm is on the cusp of dramatic change. In the world of commercial messages, advertisers are in an escalating contest with the audience. Television packs more commercials into each hour, and viewers respond by embracing technologies that filter them out, such as TiVo, or make it easy for viewers to * Fred & Emily Marshall Wulff Centennial Chair in Law, University of Texas School of Law.

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