Each issue of media trade journals such as Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review details how commercial pressures affect news coverage. When Time magazine ran a special health section in 1985, all references to the hazards of cigarettes were deleted from information provided by the American Academy of Family Physicians. That issue of Time carried seven full-page tobacco ads. The report documented that GE's jet engine division had been accepting defective engine bolts from a major supplier. News Tribune re-assigned its environmental reporter to a general news beat at the same time it celebrated the renovation of a shopping mall by creating a regular column entitled Gone Shopping .
Local media are especially sensitive to major advertisers such as realtors and car dealers.
This is a kind of media self-censorship inconceivable to the framers of the First Amendment, whose aim was to protect the media from government censorship. In a consumer democracy, citizens are so teased and goaded into the relentless pursuit of goods and services that they have little time for civic affairs and community problem-solving. Similarly, an advertiser-driven popular culture emphasizes stories of individual conflict and gratification, and rarely tells stories of citizens joining together to challenge the status quo. By incessantly focusing attention on the self, advertising culture discourages awareness of the world outside the self. This passivity is further reinforced by a bureaucratic culture that discourages citizen activism.