How Network TV Puts Lives at Risk : Ban on condom advertising is just not helpful

“I came on to let the people know what time it is,” said Magic Johnson on the Arsenio Hall Show last Friday. “Please put your thinking caps on,” he said and, with a gesture below his belt, “put your cap on down there too.”

Shocking? Indeed, and doubly so: first, the shock of a man gesturing, on television, toward his penis; second, the shock of a man alluding to his incurable illness and the fatal mistake that caused it. The first shock will pass. Let’s hope the second doesn’t.

And let’s hope that network television, which, last Thursday, was overwhelmingly eager to broadcast Johnson’s confession of his mistake, will stop blocking efforts to protect others from making the same mistake. The three leading networks say that they intend to continue their ban on condom advertisements for national broadcast. Fox said Monday it will accept condom commercials.

The Big Three’s position is that since many viewers op pose contraception on moral or religious grounds, local affiliates should be free to make their own decision about condom advertising. But the effect of this ban on the national buy has been the elimination of condom advertising from prime time in all but a handful of local stations.

THE ABSURD COP-OUT: Popular opposition to condom advertising is less than the networks claim it is. Last spring, the Roper Organization, a national opinion-research firm based in New York, revealed that 67% of Americans age 18 and older support TV broadcast of contraceptive commercials. This was up from 46% in 1984. Since Magic Johnson’s announcement, the percentage is almost certainly higher still.

The religion-based rationale for the ban is equally questionable. Those whose religion prohibits contraception make no exception for female contraception. But, with obscene inconsistency, the networks accept advertising for off-the-counter (and sometimes, behind-the-counter) female contraceptives. What we are dealing with here is not respect for religion but a double-standard.

NEED FOR CANDOR: This is why Magic Johnson’s gesture was decidedly the necessary gesture. There is, to be sure, more to protection against AIDS than the condom. Condom-protected sexual relations with casual partners, especially with frequently changing casual partners, will remain perilous in a way that relations with a spouse or with a known partner are not. As the condom does not prevent conception in every case, so it cannot prevent infection in every case either. “Abstain, abstain, abstain,” Bill Cosby counseled in an extemporaneous speech after the lighting of the Christmas tree at Marshall Field’s in Chicago.

Good counsel, but we believe that “abstain or die” is unrealistic counsel. It is time for television, which has gone halfway in contraceptive advertising and, alas, more than halfway in programming that presents sex without danger, to outgrow its dangerous condom taboo. To do otherwise is to put lives needlessly at risk and to waste the unique opportunity that Magic Johnson’s candor has created.