Getting the Government Out of the Madison Avenue Ad Business

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial Observer: Getting the Government Out of the Madison Avenue Ad Business

December 7, 2004
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
Getting the Government Out of the Madison Avenue Ad Business
By HELENE COOPER

hen was the last time you were overwhelmed by an urge to go out and buy some cotton clothing to wear?

If the answer to that is "never," you're probably among a vast majority of Americans who base their purchase decisions on specific needs and desires. You don't respond much to those feel-good ads from industry groups that push beef, pork, milk and cotton down your throat or onto your body. Yet the federal government is locked in a battle with small farmers who don't think they should be forced to contribute money to these industrywide ad campaigns.

Over the years, the ads have ranged from the ridiculous (Buzz the Bee reminds you it's Mother's Day, so go buy some flowers) to the really ridiculous (a peaches ad says, "Remember the taste ... so cool, juicy," as a young girl in a wet bathing suit runs through a sprinkler).

The Supreme Court will hear arguments tomorrow from small beef producers who say they should not be forced to pay for an expensive marketing program. Under the Beef Promotion Research Act of 1985, the Agriculture Department collects a fee of $1 per head of cattle sold by beef ranchers. Like similar programs for pork, cheese, fruit or you name it, the beef checkoff arrangement turns the fees - $80 million a year in the case of the beef folk - over to industry groups to spend on marketing, commercials and research. Those groups, for their part, would like to believe that when beef shows up on your plate for dinner, it's because they told you to put it there.

That twisted logic is probably why so many small farmers and ranchers - raising things from cotton and watermelon to avocado and Louisiana alligators - are all lining up to cheer the beef producers who want to get out of the program. The hope is that the Supreme Court will put the kibosh on the whole checkoff system, which is a relic of the Great Depression, when growers and packers paid for the ads, produced by government-supervised industry committees, through a tax on their sales. Today, these programs cost about $1 billion.

Given that the Bush administration routinely claims that it wants smaller government, you would think the Agriculture Department would happily wash its hands of the whole checkoff program. But no. Spurred by big agribusiness companies that like the programs, the Agriculture Department is fighting hard to keep the checkoffs alive.

The small farmers rightly claim that the checkoff program is a violation of their right to free speech because it forces them to pay for ads they may not agree with, or may not want. To combat that, the government has come up with the ludicrous idea that the ads are actually "government speech" - whatever that is. The government also says that if the payments aren't mandatory, farmers and distributors who don't advertise will get a free ride at the expense of those who do. Of course, there's an easy answer to that argument: kill the programs.

Farmers and others who have to pay into checkoffs have been trying to get out of these programs for years, and United States courts have thus far been erratic in their decisions. Ditto for the Supreme Court; it kept the program for tree fruit back in 1997, but killed the one for mushrooms in 2001.

Now, with the beef case, the court has the chance to shut down this odious system for good. At the very least, the Supreme Court should rid us of the latest cotton commercial, which showcases a stack of "make him pant like a dog" blue jeans. Well, tight low riders may be a civic asset, but I firmly believe that the government should be spending its time on things I can actually fit into.