ABC and WZZM 13 give McDonalds a free pass on their ongoing campaign to target children

Yesterday on the ABC show Good Morning America, there was a perfect example of the inherent flaw in commercial media – the inability to seriously challenge corporate interests.

Good Morning America reporter George Stephanopoulos presented a story about the McDonalds Corporation’s decision to revise their Happy Meal package to include fruit. This decision by the fast food giant to provide the same kinds of food “stuff “ – chicken nuggets and fries – clearly demonstrates that they are primarily interested in public perception over real nutrition.

Good Morning America then blew a perfect opportunity to actually confront what any reasonable person would see as a complete scam from McDonalds. The show invited the President of the McDonalds Corporation to the show and did not hold them accountable for decades of targeting children with unhealthy food.

In watching the video you hear George Stephanopoulos refer to “some critics” who would rather see the Happy Meal discontinued, but the ABC commentator did not identify any of these “critics” nor provide them with equal airtime to challenge the McDonalds Corporation.

What viewers hear instead are vague commitments from McDonalds about providing nutritional information in every Happy Meal box. At one point Stephanopoulos even admits that he can hear his children telling him to take them to McDonalds so they can have some fun.

It’s bad enough that a major TV network gives a free pass to a company that is complicit in obesity, ecological destruction, worker exploitation and deceiving children (as documented in the film McLibel), the ABC Network provided a national forum for McDonalds to continue to lie to the American public.

To make matters worse, Michelle Obama then released a statement saying:

“McDonald’s is making continued progress today by providing more fruit and reducing the calories in its Happy Meals. I’ve always said that everyone has a role to play in making America healthier, and these are positive steps toward the goal of solving the problem of childhood obesity.”

At the local level, ABC affiliate station WZZM 13 not only plugged the Good Morning America story about McDonald’s claim to care about children, they also missed a big opportunity to take the fast food giant to task for decades of targeting children with unhealthy foods.

Channel 13 invited 2 local moms to come and “debate” the McDonalds Happy Meal issue in their TV studio. However, the 7 minute segment basically consisted of one mom saying she never takes her kids to fast food restaurants and the other saying she does is every once in a while. In other words, McDonalds got a free pass on WZZM 13, since their decades long practice of targeting children with unhealthy foods was pretty much ignored.

WZZM 13 could have provided viewers with valuable information from the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood or encouraged parents to read an excellent toolkit for how to fight fast food marketing produced by the Berkeley Media Studies Group. The local ABC affiliate could also have invite a public health official or someone from the local group Stop Targeting Our Kids (STOK) so that viewers would have a greater opportunity to understand how McDonalds deceives children. The fact that WZZM 13 did not hold the McDonalds Corporation accountable is no surprise considering McDonalds is a regular advertiser on the local ABC station.