…But I Play One on TV
Feb 11th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentaryby Ethics Newsline® editor Carl Hausman
Calvin Coolidge called it “the life of trade.” George Orwell said it was “the rattling of the stick inside the swill bucket.” Very few people are neutral about the subject of advertising, but I’m siding with Coolidge on this one.
As irritating as advertising may be, the industry pumps the blood through the veins of media and journalism. In the United States, the vast broadcast television and radio system is essentially free for anyone who can buy the receiver, with commercials carrying the freight. Most print media is heavily subsidized by the presence of ads: A $4 magazine could cost you $25 if the publisher were counting on revenue from sales of the publication alone to turn a reasonable profit.
Having said that, advertising raises an array of ethics issues that complicate the calculation. I’ve thought about those issues for some time, and last week’s news once more brought them to the surface.
Some background: Decades ago, when I was scrambling for a job in TV news, I worked as a jack-of-all-trades television and radio announcer. As part of my job, I would do commercials for products or services I didn’t particularly like or had no occasion to use. Some commercials involved taking on a role or persona, which in turn created what struck me as a mild degree of deception. I praised a certain type of children’s car seat, for example, even though I had no children at the time. In one series of commercials, I dispensed investment advice from behind an oak desk, imitating a trustworthy banker of some sort. (I can only note that friends and family familiar with my numerical and financial acumen characterized my casting as somewhere between “ludicrous” and “criminal.”)
Is such deception unethical? I learned to live with it by rationalizing that generally we’re accepting of some confection of images in advertising, and often prefer the image to reality. That was a lesson taught to advertisers by the Hathaway shirt man, who showed that the image of a mysterious fellow sporting an eye patch and wearing a Hathaway shirt sold a lot more shirts than the previously employed tactic of actually describing the attributes of the garment.
We’re also aware that many of the people we see on TV are actors, even if we still mix up image and reality. The confusion may have reached its self-referential peak in the 1970s when actor Robert Young, who had portrayed a physician on a TV drama, appeared in commercials wearing a lab coat and hawked a nonprescription drug. (The line attributed to him, “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV,” has been conflated into our social memories.)
The ethical aspects of playing somebody on TV as well as the attendant image tinkering made news last week after a page-one article in the New York Times scrutinized a series of commercials in which Dr. Robert Jarvik, who invented the artificial heart, appears on camera and praises a prescription drug. Jarvik is depicted in various athletic pursuits, reports the Times, including rowing a racing shell across a lake. His pitch line: “When diet and exercise aren’t enough, adding Lipitor significantly lowers cholesterol.”
But (and I suspect you knew this was coming) all is not as it seems. While Jarvik does have a medical degree and is clearly a distinguished inventor, he is not licensed to practice medicine and has never actually practiced. Moreover, he doesn’t really row a boat. Producers hired a double, an accomplished rower who physically resembles Jarvik, to enact the scene.
Jarvik says he takes Lipitor himself, but a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives wants to know when and why Jarvik began to take the drug, and is expected to call him to testify. The committee also wants to look at the whole concept of advertising for prescription drugs, a controversial practice that, despite some voluntary industry guidelines, has skyrocketed in recent years.
Jarvik, who reportedly earned more than a million dollars for his endorsement, defends his role in the commercials, writing on his website that he is dedicated to the battle against heart disease and was motivated to become a doctor after heart disease killed his father.
But Dr. David Triggle, a pharmacologist who has written about drug advertising, tells the Times that the ad is fundamentally deceptive. “In the case of a physician of significant reputation and renown, and Jarvik is well known for his artificial heart, I think it’s sending a rather dishonest message — that he himself taking Lipitor is healthy enough to row up and down whatever stream he was rowing…. Since he used a body double, that’s dishonesty.”
I tend to agree. While the line between acceptable puffery and deception isn’t clear, it’s clear that there must be a line somewhere. The Jarvik ad transfers his shining reputation as an inventor to a vaguely authoritative testimonial for a drug treatment. While testimonials, even illogical ones, are not unethical per se — a sports figure recommending a breakfast cereal comes to mind — the stakes in this case are high. And when Dr. Jarvik offers himself up as (literally) living proof of a drug’s effectiveness, the ersatz footage demonstrating his athletic prowess is misleading. He’s not an athlete, even if a stunt double helps him play one on TV.
What’s your opinion? Did the Jarvik ad cross the line? (You can view the commercial on the New York Times website, listed below.)
Let us know what you think. If we collect enough responses, we’ll provide a synopsis next week.
©2008 Institute for Global Ethics
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