"Citizen's Screwed by High ATM Fees" - Barbara Ehrenreich on Advertising and Media

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A few years back, as a columnist for a national magazine, I wrote a piece about direct-to-consumer drug advertising, leading off with a description of the Claritin commercials: blue skies, flowers, and the instruction to ask your physician about this wonder product. The column, which I will admit was a tad sarcastic, was rejected without intelligible explanation. At least there was no explanation until I saw the magazine’s next issue, which featured a two-page advertisement for Claritin.

And note: My column was not called the Schering-Plough Healthcare Products Inc. Column. It would have been separated by many pages from the Claritin ad. But that apparently wasn’t far enough. As Gloria Steinem reported in 1990, advertisers can be very finicky about the editorial content that might appear in the same magazine as their ads. Ms. magazine ran into trouble because it often contained the dangerously upsetting word “lesbian.”
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