San Francisco Examiner used restaurant reviews to bring in advertising

The great journalism watchdog weblog, Romanesko, links to this expose in Grade the News.

The San Francisco Examiner and Independent agreed Friday to label as advertising a regular restaurant news column the newspapers had used to reward advertisers and solicit ads from eating establishments.

The announcement, by Executive Editor Vivienne Sosnowski, came in response to queries by Grade the News about George Habit, a dining columnist whose articles appeared several times each week in the newspapers. Mr. Habit's columns were presented as news and he was identified as a journalist under the byline "special to the Examiner," or just "Independent Newspapers."

In reality, Mr. Habit is an ad salesman, not a journalist. His column, he said in an earlier interview, is designed not to help consumers make informed dining choices, but to reward advertisers and entice new business from restaurants that have yet to sign an ad contract. "Yes, I use the column as an initiative to get advertisers to run
an ad," Mr. Habit said. "The paper gives me a free rein."

George Habit's column on Aug. 24 paid homage to his advertisers. In the Aug. 24 edition of the Examiner distributed on the Peninsula, Mr. Habit lavished praise on 29 restaurants, bars and attractions; 25 had ads on the same pages across which Mr. Habit's column was spread. Two more establishments had advertised the previous week.

"We do favor the accounts that are advertisers," he explained. "Even if the food is no good, the atmosphere is good. You can always find nice things to say about a restaurant." Apparently Mr. Habit will still get to write nice things about restaurants, but readers now will be warned that his comments are advertising, not news.

Obesity and preschoolers

When we moved from the Columbia Heights neighborhood in DC to an inner suburb of Boston two years ago, I spent a lot of time thinking about playgrounds. One thing I noticed in Columbia Heights was that fear of violence really didn't keep children indoors. Random violence and stray bullets were memorable and terrible but rare, and so unpredictable that countermeasures didn't matter much. Violent muggings happened disproportionately at night and were not a major deterrent to outdoor play during the day. Even the drug and prostitution trades were so predictable and quiet on 19 days out of 20 that families with children were happy to walk right on by with a polite nod. One couldn't let young children play outdoors without adult supervision, but that is true in most suburban and urban areas these days. Broken glass and the smell of urine in local playgrounds made a bigger difference in hindering our children's outdoor play than fear of violence did. I notice their absence every time I take my children out in our neighborhood today.

So, I am less surprised than some folks may be at the conclusion of this month's study in Pediatrics by Hillary Burdette and Robert C. Whitaker: "A National Study of Neighborhood Safety, Outdoor Play, Television Viewing, and Obesity in Preschool Children." From the press release from their employer, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.:

Do preschool children have a higher prevalence of obesity, spend less time playing outdoors, and spend more time watching television when they live in a neighborhood that their mothers perceive as unsafe? This study of three-year-olds in 20 U.S. cities found that if mothers perceive their neighborhood as unsafe, their children tend to watch more television, but they are no more likely to be obese and do not spend any less time playing outdoors than children in safer neighborhoods. Researchers used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a birth cohort study of nearly 5,000 children born in 20 large U.S. cities from 1998 to 2000.

Ruskin and Schor: Who's to Blame for Childhood Obesity?

From Gary Ruskin and Juliet Schor's recent article in The Nation:

In recent months the major food companies have been trying hard to convince Americans that they feel the pain of our expanding waistlines, especially when it comes to kids. Kraft announced it would no longer market Oreos to younger children, McDonald's promoted itself as a salad producer and Coca-Cola said it won't advertise to kids under 12. But behind the scenes it's hardball as usual, with the junk food giants pushing the Bush Administration to defend their interests. The recent conflict over what America eats, and the way the government promotes food, is a disturbing example of how in Bush's America corporate interests trump public health, public opinion and plain old common sense.

The latest salvo in the war on added sugar and fat came July 14- 15, when the Federal Trade Commission held hearings on childhood obesity and food marketing. Despite the fanfare, industry had no cause for concern; FTC chair Deborah Majoras had declared beforehand that the commission will do absolutely nothing to stop the rising flood of junk food advertising to children. In June the Department of Agriculture denied a request from our group Commercial Alert to enforce existing rules forbidding mealtime sales in school cafeterias of "foods of minimal nutritional value"--i.e., junk foods and soda pop. The department admitted that it didn't know whether schools are complying with the rules, but, frankly, it doesn't give a damn. "At this time, we do not intend to undertake the activities or measures recommended in your petition," wrote Stanley Garnett, head of the USDA's Child Nutrition Division.

Rebuttal welcome.

Labor conditions for California's farm workers

From the Economist this week (no link to the actual story), a report on new rules in California, providing somewhat improved conditions for farm workers. Can anybody corroborate the following anecdote? If true, this is evil:

Farmers rarely hire their migrant workers directly; instead, they use labour contractors who will supply workers as and when they are needed.... The problem is that there are few safeguards against unscrupulous contractors who cheat their workers, for example by denying them their legal break-times or by underpaying them. And what compounds the problem is the understandable reluctance of undocumented workers -- the polite term for illegal immigrants -- to complain, even though federal agencies exist to protect all workers, legal or not. The AFL-CIO recalls that in July in North Carolina the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency arranged a phoney "mandatory" meeting of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration -- and, to the dismay of the genuine OSHA, promptly arrested the illegal immigrants who dutifully turned up.

What's the harm in promoting dairy weight loss?

In the comment section of a previous post, Mark from Calorie Lab offers a helpful link to a new study on dairy weight loss, which fails to support the dairy weight loss claims. Still, Mark has doubts about the harmfulness of dairy weight loss messages: "[G]iven that dairy is a good source of calcium, and is not soda pop, why not just let it ride and go on to more important battles?."

I give great weight to the importance of clear government communication about the best science on diet, nutrition, and healthy weight. When more burdensome regulatory policies seem unwise or politically infeasible, clear communication stands out as a key arena for good policy. At the very least, the government should not directly sponsor unhealthy consumer messages.

Why are dairy weight loss messages -- especially for high-fat dairy products -- unhealthy? First, there is the problem of fad diets. I'll quote the Federal Trade Commission's report written by Harvard scientist George Blackburn: “By promoting unrealistic expectations and false hopes, [fad diets] doom current weight loss efforts to failure, and make future attempts less likely to succeed” (Blackburn, 2002). Second, fat is more calorically dense than other foods: it has 9 calories per gram, whereas protein and carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram. Third, the saturated fat in high-fat dairy products contributes to heart disease. After all, weight loss is not the only measure of good health.

There is nothing wrong with promoting skim milk and lowfat yogurt. Most cheese is high-fat, but if there were product or advertising innovations that developed a market for low-fat cheese, that would be fine also. Indeed, I think it would be sound policy for the checkoff programs to promote any messages consistent with the Dietary Guidelines. If promoting low-fat dairy received a large fraction of milk and dairy board spending, I would support these boards myself. But these federally sponsored messages spend most of their $200 million plus dollars per year to support high-fat dairy products with misleading health claims. Federally sponsored advertising on this scale swamps healthier messages. We shouldn't just ignore it and "let it ride."

[Update later that morning: See also the curious report by Kate at Accidental Hedonist. Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) is the operating arm of the federally sponsored dairy checkoff program, and it incorporates other previously independent organizations such as the National Dairy Council. There is more information than I can immediately process, including budget information, about this web of organizations in the USDA report to Congress released this week.]

Charlotte's Web

My son has been loving Charlotte's Web, reported to be the best-selling children's paperback of all time. He listens to the whole book on tape over and over. Whole scenes now come into my head unbidden at random times. The scene where the girl realizes why her father is going to the barn with an axe, and then wears him down gently with her simple moral clarity, is priceless.

As you probably remember, the pig, after surviving the usual fate, is befriended by Charlotte, an atypically literate spider. Charlotte weaves comments about the pig into her webs: "Some Pig" and other words of praise. In the passage most likely to cause me to draw stares in a crowded subway car, by suddenly laughing out loud to myself, the farmer and his wife discuss their prodigious animals. The wife, quite astutely, thinks that the spider is the clever one. The farmer, however, is more literal minded: the web says very clearly that this is Some Pig.

The attack machine in the restaurant industry's fake public interest group, the Center for Consumer Freedom, specializes in demonizing those who come to think animal agriculture could be more humane. But what does it mean if the Center must expand its list of villains to include George Will, Henry Thoreau, and E.B. White?

New USDA report supports controversial dairy weight loss advertisements

The July 1 report from USDA to Congress, which I have been seeking, finally appeared today without fuss on the website of the department's Agricultural Marketing Service. This report describes the activities of the fluid milk and dairy commodity promotion programs, known as "checkoff" programs. While the Dietary Guidelines for Americans encourage increased consumption of lowfat milk and dairy products, they discourage excessive consumption of high-fat milk, cheese, ice cream and butter by recommending reduced consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol and total calories. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee specifically considered claims that dairy consumption accelerates weight loss, but rejected these claims as having insufficient scientific support so far (see this earlier post).

Because fad dairy weight loss diets have been a major part of the checkoff programs' promotions in the past year, I wondered how the new report would square the circle. The report's authors came out swinging in the first paragraph, proudly proclaiming the central role of dairy weight loss in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's dairy promotions:

In 2004, the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board (Dairy Board) and the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board (Fluid Milk Board) continued to develop and implement programs to expand the human consumption of fluid milk and dairy products. While each promotion program has many unique activities, both programs used the role of calcium-rich dairy products in successful weight loss as a central theme and focal point for its activities in 2004.

It simply makes no sense that these dairy weight loss promotions and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are both "government speech."