Corporate donations to PBS rose sevenfold in six years partly for image purposes

Evidence

The business community also sought ways to improve its own public image. As described by one chemical industry strategy document prepared in 1979, industry needed to engage in a multimillion dollar advertising campaign to counter “growing evidence that the public image of the chemical industry is unfavorable, and this has a negative results on sales and profits.” One apparent industry effort was to increase grants to entities such as the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Even absent formal advertising, PBS nonetheless provided those corporate sponsors with prominent favorable images simply by directly associating their names with popular PBS shows. Corporate donations to PBS increased from 3.3 million in 1973 to 22.6 million in 1979. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 443

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to cultural-studies/materialist media critiques in the reading corpus about how ideology is funded and produced. — connects to: Anti-Muslim propaganda won mainstream legitimacy on PBS as early as 1994

Broader Connections

• Anti-Muslim propaganda won mainstream legitimacy on PBS as early as 1994 #complicates (0.70)