From Gray Panther to National Nanny: The Kidvid Crusade and the Eclipse of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 1977–1980
This article chronicles the FTC's proposal to significantly limit children's advertising in 1977, a controversial episode for advertisers and corporate America alike that has come to be known as the “kidvid crusade.” As a comprehensive political economic analysis, this article relies on dozens of trade press articles, archival sources, government documents, and oral histories. In 1978, the U.S. Congress launched a retaliatory attack on the FTC; failing to renew the FTC's funding, it shut down the agency for the first and only time in U.S. history. The kidvid crusade is a lens through which to understand the broader political and economic shift toward neoliberalism in the coming years and, indeed, portended the rise of deregulation and new forms of corporate public relations in the political sphere.
Shame on You: An Analysis of Guilt-Based Advertising Strategies Directed at Parents
lbis thesis examines print advertisements in Parents, a popular parenting magazine, for a period of two years. lbis study uses critical discourse analysis to find meaning in these print advertisements. Through this analysis, three prominent themes were found in the two-year data collection period. The first of which is the #1 Recommended, a theme that highlights the cultural importance of using only products that have been recommended by medical professionals or hospitals, thereby emphasizing the social power of such persons or establishments. The second is comfort, care, and the good stuff, a theme that highlights a maternal desire to provide comfort, care, and the good stuff for one's child, doing so by purchasing the products that promote being able to best comfort and care for children. The third is fun and imagination, a theme that highlights a contemporary desire for children to be children, in which fun and imagination is fostered, done so by again, purchasing products that taut being able to foster this fun and imagination in children. All three themes subsequently underscore the oftentimes manipulative wording and phrasing used in advertisements. Manipulative wording and phrasing which is used specifically because it is effective to sometimes guilt viewers into becoming consumers. lbis thesis makes connections between the themes discovered through this analysis and the themes seen in previous analyses, while at the same time answering questions such as, what are guilt appeals really communicating, what are the larger cultural assumptions, how have advertising messages changed since the 1920s, and more. lbis thesis looks at advertisements and the emotional appeals within them, yet the wider suggestion this thesis makes about these advertisements is that emotional appeals, and the overall messages in advertisements as a whole are much deeper in meaning than simply using guilt as a means to get moms to buy products.
Continents of Liberty: Emerson and Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears
Ralph Waldo Emerson protested what came to be known as the Trail of Tears in a public letter to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. Th e Cherokee Nation, he argued, had been cheated by a “sham treaty” (Emerson, “Letter” 50), the will of the people ignored, and a false acquiescence to removal written into law. In making a passionate appeal to the highest “chair” of the land, Emerson underscored the great political and moral stakes involved: