Tonight's broadcast of ABC-TV's "20/20" will include a segment on the joint Disney/Cameron Mackintosh production of Mary Poppins. Regular readers will recall what I thought of the London production of this show.
Now the Broadway production of Mary Poppins and the road that the show traveled to get to this point hardly qualify as genuine news, but these TV news magazines feature non-news items all the time in the hopes of catching the viewers' interest with more entertaining segments.
But notice that "20/20" is an ABC show, and also notice that ABC is owned by Disney. Now I'm not saying that the producers were ordered to do a segment on Mary Poppins, but it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility.
What's wrong with Disney using one of its shows to promote Mary Poppins? Because it's marketing being presented in the guise of independent editorial. Now, I'm not naive: I know this happens all the time, and a good portion of the general public are savvy to when they're being marketed to.
But many of us like to think that our media are free and independent, but it's just not the case. Magazines and newspapers are beholden to their advertisers. TV networks have to answer to the corporate higher-ups. Even NPR has corporate underwriters that it needs to be careful not to offend. As a journalist, I have seen the line between editorial and promotion get progressively blurrier, and it's distressing.
Of course, I feel like a hypocrite, because a edit a magazine about marketing, and I have written about "branded entertainment" many times as a "legitimate" way for advertisers to get their message through in an increasingly cluttered marketplace. But I guess it takes something like this Mary Poppins segment to remind me that the gradual erosion of the separation between "church" (editorial) and "state" (marketing) is a slippery slope, indeed.
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