• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, November 12, 2010

Forbes.com has positioned its desperate marriage of church and state, its pay-for-play editorial content, AdVoice, as "a new approach to integrating editorial content, user content and marketers' content -- allowing more organic presentation of advertiser content than ever before."

Gary McCormick, CEO of the Public Relations Society of America, whose members should be doing cartwheels of joy over this development, argues that "AdVoice has elicited howls of concern and derision (rightly so) throughout the publishing community about ethical implications that arise when paid advertiser content is placed within an online format that looks, feels and reads eerily similar to a publication's editorial content (which) consumers have come to know as free of bias and advertisers' self-motivated interests."

I'd like to say Forbes is the only one "inviting advertisers to be part of the conversation" -- but it is not. Lots of Web sites have similar programs hoping that readers will stumble into sponsored content enough times to sell more of it. The primary defense for such inexcusable breaches of the traditional separation of editorial (church) from advertising (state) is that such content is somehow "marked" to help readers discern that the content is paid for by someone with a defined agenda. 

But as the years go by, not just on the Internet, but also with magazine and TV "product placement," the ability to discern what is sponsored and what is not is getting fuzzier. And that is a tragedy, because it derives from the economic weakness of media businesses that consumers used to be able to trust for their objectivity (to the extent that human beings are ever objective about anything.). Add to this the political agendas barely hidden beneath most TV news and public affairs programming, and you have a nation rapidly sliding toward an inability to separate the wheat from the chaff.

But oddly, in this new age of "everybody gets a voice," thanks largely to the Internet, there seems to be little outrage. I mean, when there was a time that The New York Times might actually fold the tent, nobody jumped up to launch a foundation to help support all the news that is fit to print. Personally, I think Zuckerberg's $100 million "please-don't-think-I'm-as-big-a-dickhead-as-that-movie-makes-me-out" donation would do the nation more good in the hands of the fourth estate than it will in the hands of inept Newark school district bureaucrats.

But the urgency of all this might just be lost on most until it is too late. I used to teach a course on magazine publishing at an NYU summer institute -- and when I first posed the separation of church and state to the students, they all seemed to think it was pretty damned important. That is, until I started giving them real-life examples of magazines holding hands with advertisers doing things like profiling the CEOs of fashion houses who were big ad spenders or using advertiser products in edit shoots. 'Well," they said, "That's OK for fashion and home magazines." Then I gave examples for nearly every kind of magazine and interestingly, they only finally drew a line in the sand with news magazines, excusing all others including business and political news.

And this was in an era when kids actually consumed traditional media. Now they get nearly all of their "news" online, much of it urban myth, reading nothing more than 100 words. Consequently they have no perspective on current events. To them everything is indeed new under the sun.

The debate should be much more profound than merely whether Web sites can sucker audiences into reading ads disguised as content.  As Benjamin Franklin once said: "A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."