The Australian Communications and Media Authority is in danger of losing all credibility as an independent regulator; the draft children’s television standards that it recently released suggest it is prepared to put industry interests ahead of the health and wellbeing of children and the community.
The ACMA set an unrealistic goal of “unequivocal evidence of a causal link between advertising and obesity”; they wanted it to explain a large amount of the variance in obesity rates; and they wanted evidence that the bans will reduce obesity.
These goals are just laughable — the reason that marketing explains so little of the variance in obesity, for example, is because it is ubiquitous. Smoking would explain none of the variance in lung cancer if everyone smoked.
Setting the bar so high has allowed ACMA to ignore the following arguments which a variety of health organisations put to their review:
- The evidence of a link between junk food advertising and obesity is far stronger than for any other single environmental influence on obesity rates. The evidence that “marketing works” is enormous. Most of it is proprietary — focus group results, sales responses to promotions etc — but it gets translated by highly intelligent people in businesses with a vested interest in increasing consumption into several millions of dollars of ongoing marketing every year.
- The link between a high consumption of junk food and obesity is stronger than for any other behaviours, such as playing sport, TV viewing, fruit and vegetable intake, water intake etc.
- All the modelled evidence of likely population impact on obesity points to bans on junk food ads being more effective than anything else.
It is astounding that ACMA has misinterpreted the science to justify putting such a high value on potential lost income from broadcasters and such a low value on children’s health.
I hope that the Federal Government will be asking some tough questions of ACMA. Without a crack down on junk food advertising to children, it is possible that the Government’s efforts in other areas to tackle obesity will be far less effective.
If we followed ACMA’s flawed approach to the science in its review, then we would all be sitting on our hands watching “business as usual” drive up obesity rates.
ACMA has asked for comments on the draft standards by October 17. It will be interesting to see if the Government demonstrates its professed commitment to health promotion and prevention.
All well and good, but it misses the point, which is that if you are watching TV in the first place, you’re a candidate for obesity in that you are sitting down and not exercising. Ads that show “what’s coming up” are equally bad, they encourage you to remain watching. Stop attacking symptoms and go after causes.
Go Boyd! ACMA’s so-called ‘economic analysis’ is laughably based on banning all food & drink advertising from free to air tv — as they claim it is not possible to talk only about junk food since there is no tool for separating the junk food from the good stuff. We have been waiting for this report for more than 12 months. They really needn’t have bothered.
One of the most obvious ways to stop this blatant abuse by the food industry, and it being allowed by ACMA, to push it’s junk food and dubious other commercial items during childrens free to air T.V. is simple.
The federal government must fund the ABC to open it’s dedicated digital kids channel, ABC 3. One thing is for sure…there will be no advertisements!
Its the classic pea-and-shell game of the advertising industry being bought by the innocent rubes at the regulator. On the one hand there is the demand for ironclad evidence that advertising increases junk-food consumption among the young. On the other, there is the fact that the industry exists on selling people the premise that this is a proven fact. If advertising is not actually a fraud perpetrated on the makers of bad food everywhere, then it logically follows that it has an adverse impact on children’s diets. Whether it is bad enough to cause all or some of the epidemic whale-ism observed in the young is pretty much beside the point – no-one actually claims junk food is a diet which should be promoted to the young.