Three years ago, Ford Motor Co. canceled its advertising in the New Yorker for six months after the magazine quoted sexually graphic rock lyrics in a column published next to an advertisement for Mercury.
Last year, IBM pulled all its advertising from Fortune--and refused to talk to any Fortune reporters--after the magazine published a not altogether flattering cover story on Louis Gerstner Jr., IBM's chairman and CEO.
The threat--and the reality--of canceled advertising has always been a risk of doing business for magazines and newspapers. But magazines have long been more vulnerable than newspapers to the consequences of their advertisers' unhappiness, and that vulnerability makes censorship--and self-censorship--more likely.
"Censorship deprives readers of information they should have and want to have," says Frank Lalli, senior executive editor of Time Inc. and president of the American Society of Magazine Editors. "The public doesn't want censorship. But there is more business-side pressure on editors now than ever before."
A New Concern
Magazine editors have to worry about revenue--about advertisers--in a way they didn't concern themselves with a decade or two ago.
With the exception of national newspapers--the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the New York Times--newspapers rely primarily on local advertising, and despite the recent growth of other media, most large local businesses still feel they have to advertise in their major local newspaper, even when disgruntled over something that appeared in that paper. But many magazines depend on national advertising, and there are so many national magazines--not to mention the four national TV networks and the three national newspapers--that it's a buyer's market; an aggrieved advertiser can withdraw from virtually any magazine and put ads elsewhere without risking the loss of a significant number of customers.
Moreover, there are many news stories that newspapers must cover, often on deadline, no matter who might be offended; magazines--with fewer "must" stories and longer lead times--are more susceptible to pressure from advertisers. Magazine editors have "more leeway to be good or bad," as Kurt Andersen, former editor of New York magazine and now a columnist for the New Yorker, puts it.
