Media : Just Say ‘No!’ to TV Addiction, Activists Urge : Canadian foundation buys air time to tell people to unplug their sets and stop conspicuous consumption.

Political songster Gil Scott-Heron got it right in 1974: The revolution will not be televised. Not, at least, on the ABC and NBC affiliates in Los Angeles. Nor will it appear on any of the network affiliates in Boston, or, most likely, in any other major American media market.

But the revolution has made its television debut in such Canadian crossroads as Thunder Bay, Ontario, 100 Mile House, British Columbia and Red Deer, Alberta.

We’re talking about Kalle Lasn’s media revolution, an environmentally oriented uprising against rampant consumerism and the print and television commercials that abet it up and down North America.

Lasn, director of the Vancouver-based Media Foundation--also known as Adbusters--is trying not to rein in broadcasters and advertisers but to produce professional advertisements of his own, then raise money for TV time or magazine space to get them before the public.

The twist is that Adbusters urges against conspicuous consumption--and urges viewers to unplug the TV set as well.

So far, the approach is working better in Canada than in the United States. But it has already won respect on both sides of the border from a variety of public interest groups concerned about the content of TV broadcasts.

“I think their work is urgent,” says Olof Sundin, who runs an addictions program at Bellevue Community College near Seattle. Sundin thinks many North Americans are addicted to TV, and he sees parallels between chemical addiction and compulsive shopping. He has mounted a campaign to get one of the Adbusters spots on Seattle television.

Which is just what Lasn had hoped people would do when he launched the Media Foundation three years ago. He envisions a time when environmental, political and religious groups will walk into their local TV stations, pull out their checkbooks and buy time to get onto the air ideas about something besides the purported joys of buying and owning.

“The commercial media can be seen, in a way, as our biggest environmental problem,” he suggests. “Every 12 minutes, it’s saying, ‘Buy! Buy! Buy!’ ” Lasn goes so far as to call TV addiction the continent’s No. 1 mental-health problem.

Indeed, statistics now show that the average American is bombarded with 3,000 ads a day, when everything from TV commercials to billboards is counted. By age 20, the typical American has seen 800,000 ads on television alone, at a clip of 800 per week. And thanks to the global proliferation of cable offerings and satellite dishes, American ad-meisters are now free to taunt the world’s hundreds of millions of poor with impossible, perhaps dangerous longings.

But in the very face of our commercial logorrhea, Lasn sees reason for hope: The consumer culture, he reasons, has become so pervasive, so grating and so out of touch with common-sense economic and environmental realities that growing numbers of North Americans are getting fed up and ready to join the resistance.

“We feel there’s going to be a media movement in the 1990s,” says Lasn, whose Fall/Winter 1991 issue of Adbusters Quarterly is illustrated with etchings of the Boston Tea Party.

Lasn, an emigre Estonian, used to work in the advertising business himself, as a young professional in Japan in the 1960s. But he became interested in filmmaking and moved to Canada, where the government patronizes the domestic film industry.

Lasn and his Japanese wife settled in Vancouver, which happens to be the home of a potent environmental movement. It was here that Lasn came to his belief--accorded ample ground at the recent Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro--that unnecessary consumption and the resulting pressure on the world’s resources is the central burden of our age.

Lasn is far from the first person to connect the commercial culture with social and environmental decay, of course. Many media critics, parent-teacher associations and public-interest groups before him have stood up before the omnipresence and offensiveness of advertising and junk TV.

There have been petitions filed with the Federal Communications Commission to keep cartoon shills out of kids’ shows; legislation linking improved children’s programming to broadcasters’ license renewals; a law banning children’s commercials outright in the Canadian province of Quebec; preacher-driven boycotts; dire academic laments and woe-is-us books on the perils of too much television.

But media watchdog groups in the United States say they know of no one else using the Adbusters’ approach.

Adbusters has so far produced about a dozen anti-consumption spots. One is a clay animation, starring a happy, smiling pig emerging from a map of North America. In the background, a narrator reminds viewers that North Americans constitute 5% of the world’s population but consume a third of its resources. “Nothing is destroying this planet faster than the way we North Americans live,” intones the voice-over. At the end of the spot, the pig burps resoundingly, contentedly.

Lasn had no illusions about getting commercial television stations to run such self-defeating messages as free public-service spots. He did think, however, that if he had enough money to buy cheap, late-night air time, stations would sell it to him.

After all, even if television executives hated his message, Lasn knew that the airwaves are considered a public resource under law--and that those lucky enough to have a license to work the airwaves for profit have traditionally been obliged to present at least the semblance of a free marketplace of ideas.

“Television is the most powerful medium of our time, and if they won’t take your money for your 30-second slot, then you’re excluded,” he says. “That skews the democratic process.”

His plan was to buy low-priced “fringe” time, first in Vancouver, then in Toronto, Canada’s biggest media market. From there, he hoped to air his message in Boston--a city with a revolutionary history and famous universities--then in all-comers Los Angeles. Finally, he would penetrate the belly of the advertising beast: Madison Avenue, New York.

Along the way, he hoped, viewers in each region would fall into his crusade, noticing the ads and raising the money to broadcast them in other towns.

To an extent, that has happened in Canada. But Lasn struck out in the Cradle of Liberty itself: All three network affiliates in Boston rejected the Adbusters ads. And in Los Angeles, KABC and KNBC have likewise refused to sell time. (KCBS hasn’t given Lasn a yes or no yet.)

“We try not to promote competitors,” explained William Emerson of KNBC’s broadcasting standards department. “If you say, ‘Do not watch television,’ you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot, aren’t you?” At KABC, broadcasting standards director Georgia Seid said: “We would not, of course, air a commercial that told people not to watch television. That’s just standard policy.” She added that the network rejects all advocacy commercials.

That was much the response Lasn got from the main Canadian network, the CBC, the first time he approached it. In 1989, the forest-products industry, one of the most powerful engines of the Canadian economy, produced a spot called “Forests Forever.” The ad showcased the view that Canada’s lumber companies were managing the nation’s timberlands so responsibly that there would be forests forever.

The ads vexed Lasn, who responded with “Mystical Forests,” a counter-advertisement featuring statistics from the University of British Columbia suggesting that loggers--with the blessing of their government regulators--were cutting trees too eagerly for successful regrowth.

Off went Lasn to the CBC, ready to buy a 30-second slot for the ad. But CBC advertising standards people turned him away, arguing that it was network policy to refuse all paid “issue advertising” in order to keep the rich from controlling the Canadian political agenda.

Lasn thought the policy had precisely the opposite outcome in his case: By deeming his save-the-trees spot to be “issue advertising,” the CBC was silencing a struggling environmentalist--even as it aired the wholly self-serving claims of the well-financed forestry interests.

Why, he asked, was it an “issue” to say the forests were being cut too fast but not an “issue” to say they were being cut at an acceptable rate? It was a question the CBC was unable to answer.

While Lasn sparred with the CBC, he and some fellow environmentalists started a small, photocopied newsletter to tell other anti-logging groups in the region about their efforts.

“It started to grow,” Lasn recalls. “People started coming in with their own stories, about how 10 years ago they couldn’t get a (labor) union ad on TV. It was like a groundswell of frustrated media suppression.”

The CBC finally pulled the “Forests Forever” ad in the interest of consistency. And Lasn and his colleagues decided to expand their newsletter into a magazine that would deconstruct the consumer culture and its connections with environmental degradation. Adbusters Quarterly was born.

The CBC, meanwhile, went on to scrap its ban on “issue advertising”--network officials found themselves increasingly uncomfortable about silencing paid political messages. The issue that ultimately decided things was that of Canadian national unity: Quebec is scheduled to hold a referendum this fall on whether to secede, and the CBC--whose very mandate calls on it to promote Canadian unity--didn’t like turning away pleas to keep the country together paid for by Canadian federalists.

The CBC’s policy revision has been a breakthrough for Adbusters. The network’s ad-standards people now screen the group’s commercials one by one, instead of rejecting them all outright. Some have made it onto the air, including a spot showing a dazed-looking, twitchy man staring at a TV screen above the subtitle, “You are what you watch.”

“Only the CBC would do this,” says the CBC’s manager of advertising standards, Roger Kennedy, with a stage groan. (The network is a hybrid, owned by the government but financed by paid commercials.) “I think most broadcasters think it’s self-defeating, accepting ads that say watching television is a destructive process. But there is merit in the message. There is such a thing as a saturation point for healthy television viewing.”

So, burping pigs and TV zombies have been cropping up in towns from New Brunswick to British Columbia, paid for here and there by journalism professors, church groups, environmentalists, a bookstore owner and some high school students in Red Deer who felt the video culture was cheating them out of a solid education.

At Banff National Park, staff video producer James Martin uses the Adbusters ads to break up the nature documentaries he makes; the documentaries are then shown on cable television in the resort’s many hotels.

Lasn says the only complaints have been from Canadian animal-rights activists offended by the burping-pig spot.

He says he’s puzzled that his message is more readily accepted in Canada than in the United States, since his stoutest cadres are Americans and more than half of Adbusters Quarterly’s circulation is south of the border. (The magazine has a press run of 21,000.)

“Maybe there’s less money riding on it here in Canada,” Lasn speculates. “I think it also has something to do with our social system in Canada. We’re less champions of free enterprise. In the United States, anti-consumption is something nobody wants to hear.”