l feel like I’m whistling into the wind with this, but here goes anyway. The cover of the August issue of a free magazine (of the sort that is given away in pediatricians’ offices) called Babytalk looked like this:
Babytalk then issued a press release claiming that there had been a massive negative reaction to the photo because it showed a breast. Now, while I do not doubt AT ALL that breastfeeding women encounter hostility, please do not fail to notice the way that”Babytalk”has (in my view cynically) used a very real and important issue to raise its own profile. It is basically a bound group of advertisements and product descriptions pretending to be a magazine, but this story has given it credibility and visibility and probably a large list of new subscribers.
There is also a discomfiting underlying tone of “Women are such hypocritical prudes!” to this whole manufactured controversy, portions of which seem frankly incredible. A CNN article, dated July 27, 2006, here notes: “Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies.” Note also that the CNN article reports: “Kane said that since the August issue came out last week, the magazine has received more than 700 letters — more than for any article in years.”
So we are supposed to believe that mothers of babies were so upset by the cover of a free magazine that they actually wrote 700 letters to the editor IN LESS THAN A WEEK? And this, in turn, lead to a methodologically sound survey touted as “a poll of more than 4,000 readers” on this issue? Also in a few days during July, immediately after the August issue came out? Anyone catch the name of the research firm that conducted the survey so quickly?
But wait! This Yahoo News article, dated August 4th, reports that Babytalk has received 5,000 letters! Five thousand new mothers were outraged by the cover of a free magazine enough to write letters of complaint, 4,300 of which arrived between July 27 and August 4! Amazing! By way of comparison, in all of 2005 the FCC received 233,000 complaints against all of the radio and television station programming within its rather substantial national jurisdiction. And an FCC complaint can be filed online, which is a lot less labor intensive than writing a letter. [NB: Babytalk solicits online reader input about this cover via e-mail here. This does not constitute a “poll” with any indicia of statistical or scientific validity.] Note also that up until Michael Powell began an indecency entrepreneuership campaign, the FCC typically received only a few hundred complaints each year.
Out of this whole episode, Babytalk magazine got a lot of positive free press from mainstream media outlets like CNN and Yahoo News, and from numerous blogs, see e.g. this, this, this, this, and this. Remember that the magazine itself was the source of the information on the negative reactions it had received, and it alerted the media itself, and provided all the”data”and quotation sources. To her credit, Echidne noted, “I actually think that this is a made-up story, at least partly.” Everyone else seems willing to believe the worst about a group of Babytalk-reading new mothers without a proffer of any reliable evidence whatsoever.
Again, this is an important issue,”Babytalk”seems to be on the correct side, and the resistance breastfeeding women encounter is a very real problem. But don’t lose sight of the fact that”Babytalk”is a commercial publication that has its own agenda as well, which it didn’t hesitate to use a naked breast to further.
–Ann Bartow
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