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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Commercials on Noncommercial TV By Janine Jackson A luxury car tools along a mountain road. A Citicorp bankcard gleams behind the slogan, "Anyhow. Anywhere. Anytime. Right Now." Chase Manhattan advises viewers: "We believe that helping our customers realize their dreams is the best investment we can make." Typical commercials? No -- because they're on "noncommercial" TV. According to PBS, these are not commercials, but "enhanced underwriter acknowledgements." According to the Communications Act of 1934, they may well be illegal. The law forbids noncommercial stations to accept compensation for broadcasting messages that "promote any service, facility or product offered by any person who is engaged in such offering for profit." But since the era of deregulation beginning in the late '70s, this law has been virtually ignored. In March 1984, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) officially "relaxed" the noncommercial policy to allow public broadcasters to expand or "enhance" the scope of donor and underwriter "acknowledgments" to include such things as "value-neutral descriptions of a product line or service," and corporate logos or slogans which "identify and do not promote" [emphasis in original]. In a 1986 public notice, the FCC explained that "enhanced underwriting" would offer "significant potential benefits to public broadcasting in terms of attracting additional business support." The "benefits" of making a public broadcasting system increasingly dependent on the same corporate sponsors that fund commercial TV seem dubious. Critics charge that corporate underwriting has led PBS stations to avoid controversial issues and focus too much on programming aimed at upscale audiences, to the neglect of the public they were originally intended to serve. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1554 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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