Let's put a tax on TV advertising

By JOHN LAIRD*

Questions persist over whether Television New Zealand can mix its new charter's commercial imperative with goals to produce quality programming that develops cultural and national identity. The charter appears a half-hearted, compromised attempt to introduce public service TV broadcasting: laudable for its intention but hostage to a schizophrenic broadcasting policy that may make TVNZ even more dependent on advertising.

Television here falls far short of international best practice. There is apparently the highest occurrence of advertising in the developed world, and complaints about the low quality of programming across all channels are common.

Ten days before the charter was introduced, TVNZ's chief executive Ian Fraser told Parliament's commerce select committee that TVNZ would oppose a Ministry of Health proposal to ban the advertising of fast food during children's viewing times.

Mr Fraser said TVNZ had to maintain commercial performance under its charter and "would not want to be subject to any further constraints than we are already under".

Last year there was an outcry by health professionals against the advertising of unhealthy foods on television. Constant consumption of food and beverages with high fat and sugar content is contributing to epidemic obesity and type-2 diabetes among children.

Areas where some other countries set high broadcasting standards but where our television fails are: complete banning of advertising aimed at children; banning of liquor advertising; banning advertising of prescription drugs; freeing television news from being an advertising-driven commodity; and banning or limiting violence portrayed on television.

We follow voluntary restraint in advertising aiming at children but other countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Belgium ban TV advertising to children under 12.

Over the past few months, senior academics at the country's medical schools have called for a ban on the advertising of prescription medicines. Such advertising is rapidly increasing. Promoting medicines as consumer items undermines the doctor-patient relationship and benefits mainly the profits of pharmaceutical companies.

The state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recognises that making television news an advertising-driven commodity compromises the public's right to know. It bans advertising from its regular news programmes.

Here, TV news is a big money-spinner. Commercially motivated competition for news audiences leads to entertainment branded as news, to emotive rather than informative items; and a focus on sensationalism, crime and disasters at the expense of news about public affairs, a necessary service in a participatory democracy.

The issue of violence on television is under scrutiny here through a research project which is due to report to the Minister of Broadcasting in September.

TV programmes that rely on violence to hook viewers generally involve little intellectual content.

Violence and confrontation capture viewers though a kind of emotive fascination - the reason advertisers sponsor them.

Dr David Walsh, an American anti-violent media campaigner based in Minnesota, has noted that the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the Surgeon-General's Office agree there is a link between violent entertainment and violent behaviour.

Those are high-profile issues. Another crucial one for New Zealand is debt-driven overconsumption spurred on by huge, intrusive TV advertising and easy credit.

New Zealand continues to lead the OECD in levels of household indebtedness, which grew again last year by about 9 per cent after a slight improvement in 2001.

This is unsustainable and if New Zealanders continue to borrow heavily to fund a consumption binge, overstretched families are in for economic shocks should the global and national economic downturn become ugly.

No counterbalancing information is going out to the public to offset advertising's persuasiveness towards indulgent spending.

We ought to apply best practice and principles of sustainable development as our guide. We need to prohibit unhealthy advertising and compel the commercial system to finance public broadcasting through taxes.

This is the philosophy of eco-taxation that is rapidly gaining ground internationally - tax the problem and subsidise solutions.

The best-known example is the carbon tax, to discourage the consumption of fossil fuels and thus mitigate global warming. It has already been introduced by several European countries. New Zealand has committed to do it in 2007.

New Zealand long ago banned tobacco advertising, bumped up the tax on cigarettes and used the additional revenue partly to fund anti-smoking messages.

Let's apply that same strategy to the ills created by widespread, intrusive and unhealthy advertising on television.

A plan for such a tax was mooted two years ago by then Broadcasting Minister Marian Hobbs to fund the TVNZ charter, but was abandoned after Treasury objections.

Among other reasons, Treasury said a tax on the advertising revenues of TVNZ and TV3 could threaten the two broadcasters' viability. We need to look again at such a tax, and get our priorities right.

We should aim for a commercial-free public broadcasting channel supported by an advertising tax, and let commercially sponsored programming find its own level.

* John Laird, formerly a UN official promoting sustainable development, lectures in journalism at the Auckland University of Technology