Sunday, March 30, 2008

Do broadcasters have any moral responsibility when advertisers are selling snake oil, and the broadcasters know it?

A lot of the cable channels are carrying commercials for over-the-counter "weight loss" products, particularly one called Lipozene. These snake oil products are being produced by companies that are under investigation, or being sued, or in some way are being questioned for fraudulent claims by the Federal Trade Commission. It only takes a look at Wikipedia or Google search to figure this out.

And yet the advertising continues. So the question has to be why are broadcasters willing -- nay, enthusiastically, ecstatically happy -- to be complicit in these efforts to sell largely worthless products to the American public?

Has broadcasters' sense of morality and the notion of operating in the public interest become so diffuse that they don't care that someone is damaging their reputations by selling useless products on their airwaves?

Are they so interested in revenue that they have no problem taking money for advertising time because they themselves are not making claims for these products?

Whatever happened to truth in advertising, and what happened to the spines of media companies when it comes to rejecting deceptive or fraudulent ads?

I guess we all know the answer to that!

1 Comments:

Blogger Moby Dick said...

The real question is why doesn't the FDA or FBI crack down on these scammers and arrest them and send them to prison where they belong?? They are stealing billions from the public every year and the Government has always turned a blind eye to this.

May 22, 2008 1:06 PM  

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