Group to File Complaint With FCC Over McDonald’s ‘Wish’

The TV advocacy group Action for Children’s Television plans to lodge a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission against CBS for last Friday’s airing of “Ronald McDonald’s Family Theater: The Wish That Changed Christmas,” which was hosted by the clown character and was fully sponsored by McDonald’s restaurants.

Peggy Charren, the group’s founder, also criticized CBS for airing an interview with the clown on “CBS This Morning” Friday.

“To get children watching corporate logos performing is an outrageous misuse of the system, because it so confuses commercial and editorial speech that you cannot separate them,” Charren said. “(With advertising) you have to know who is talking to you. Otherwise, you can’t judge.”

Friday night’s broadcast of “Ronald McDonald’s Family Theater” was said by CBS to be the first in an occasional series of programs featuring the clown introducing animated children’s stories by pretending to read them from a book emblazoned with McDonald’s golden arches symbol. The series is intended to promote reading, McDonald’s said.

Charren said Friday that she will ask the FCC to investigate whether the program violated two of the agency’s rules about children’s programming: one that forbids the host of a program from selling products and another that prohibits broadcasters from airing commercials for a product during a show in which that product plays a part.

“We will focus on the fact that, historically, the commission has said it is very important to have children separate commercials from editorial content,” Charren said.

CBS and McDonald’s said that they worked carefully to avoid such violations when producing the program. While Ronald McDonald did host the program, he did not mention hamburgers or McDonald’s restaurants. And the McDonald’s commercials aired during the program did not feature Ronald McDonald.

Charren also upbraided CBS for featuring the clown in a four-minute segment during its morning news program Friday, accusing the network of compromising its news values in favor of commercialism.

Patrick Tague, senior broadcast producer of “CBS This Morning,” said that the program was lobbied by representatives of both CBS and McDonald’s to conduct the interview. Executives on the show decided to do it, he said, because part of Ronald McDonald’s role in the new series is to encourage children to read.

“There were a number of qualms about doing the segment,” Tague said. “Qualm No. 1 is asking your talent to interview a person who is in character. The second qualm was (being unsure) to what extent McDonald’s is involved in this for other than altruistic reasons. But our thought was that, because the subject matter of encouraging children to read was so important, we’d give it a shot.”