Is the total frenzy over post-Thanksgiving shopping a recent creation? That's what David Carr writes in the New York Times today:

Media and retail outfits are economic peas in a pod. Part of the reason that the Thanksgiving newspaper and local morning television show are stuffed with soft features about shopping frenzies is that they are stuffed in return with ads from retailers. Yes, Black Friday is a big day for retailers--stores did as much as 13 percent of their holiday business this last weekend--but it is also a huge day for newspapers and television.

In partnership with retail advertising clients, the news media have worked steadily and systematically to turn Black Friday into a broad cultural event. A decade ago, it was barely in the top 10 shopping days of the year. But once retailers hit on the formula of offering one or two very-low-priced items as loss leaders, media groups began to cover the post-Thanksgiving outing as a kind of consumer sporting event.

TV reporter Michael Schneider updates us (Variety, 11/25/08) on Fox's race to the ethical bottom of media programming. The real losers? Kids, as usual:

In an unprecedented move, Fox will program two hours of longform commercials on Saturday mornings starting in January. That's believed to be the first time a major network has slated full-blown, program-length advertisements on its schedule.

Move follows an out-of-court legal settlement with children's TV producer 4Kids, which had been programming Fox's Saturday morning kids block under a time-buy agreement.... Fox opted to return two hours of the block to affiliates, and program the other two with infomercials.

Not that your average kids TV fare is something so great anyway...

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Abandoned Children: Networks Passing the Buck on Educational Responsibilities" (7-8/02) by Janine Jackson

Analysts have projected that Barack Obama's ad spending would this week "surpass the $188 million Mr. Bush spent in his 2004 campaign."

During the last two weeks of the election, the Obama campaign has budgeted $30 million for ads in contested states, according to MSNBC. Last week alone, he also spent about $12 million on national networks and national cable channels.

While Obama's ad spending has far outpaced McCain's, McCain and the RNC have also been doing their bit to line corporate media coffers. Last week, McCain spent $9.4 million on ads in key battleground states, and this week MSNBC reports that he's spending more than that. The RNC is spending about $1 million a day between now and election day on pro-Republican/anti-Democrat ads.

Expanding on her blog post of October 8, FAIR Communications Director Isabel Macdonald details (Common Dreams, 10/13/08) "one small glitch" in "the Obsession campaign's marketing plan [that] has been quite slick":

The public doesn't seem to be buying it. Newspapers that carried the DVD have faced floods of complaints from readers, and the past week has seen protests and press conferences denouncing the film. The problem, it would appear, is that many readers simply do not accept the notion their newspaper should provide a cover for hate propaganda. (more...)

An Inter Press Service piece (9/24/08) on the U.S.-press-distributed anti-Muslim video Obsession gives kudos to

major metropolitan newspapers solicited to insert the paid advertisement into their product [that] have refused to do so.... "Despite the perilous state of American newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch advertising department took an ethical stand and refused to distribute the DVD of a film that... has troubled American Muslims."

Reporters Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton then go beyond "initial press reports about the mass distribution [that] focused on the Clarion Fund's financing role," (more...)

Ecology blog LiveGaia posts another entry (10/8/08) in the annals of corporate media's poor advertising ethics:

Last night in America, after the presidential debate the ads shown were as follows. ABC had Chevron. CBS had Exxon. CNN had the coal lobby. But you know what happened last week? ABC refused to run WeCanSolveIt’s Repower America ad--the ad that takes on this same oil and coal lobby. (more...)

In an update on the furor over U.S. newspapers' distribution of a virulently anti-Muslim DVD supplement, Anick Jesdanun of the Associated Press reports (10/4/08) that "the New York Times distributed it on the grounds that rejecting it would violate the sponsor's right to free speech." Left unexplored is corporate outlets like the Times' history of notoriously feckless attitudes toward the ethics of advertising. (more...)

Reporters of integrity quitting their jobs over what amount to unidentified ads in local news has prompted journalist groups to condemn "broadcast outlets using video news releases that are produced by pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers to look like news reports." Emily Udell of In These Times has (9/18/08) more on the matter: (more...)