A new report urges the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to support laws that restrict junk-food advertising to kids online. Is this a solution or scapegoating?

Business Week reports on action taken by Children Now to restrict junk-food advertising to kids online.

Having successfully lobbied the government to place limits on junk food ads on TV, they now target marketing to kids via the Web. “While there are some rules for TV, there are no rules when you move online,” says Patti Miller, vice-president of children’s advocacy group Children Now and a member of the Federal Communications Commission’s Task Force on Media & Childhood Obesity. “We don’t want to reduce junk food advertising to kids [on TV] and then find that it has just moved to another platform.”

The worry is that food companies are bombarding kids with ads for non-nutritious foods, fueling the obesity epidemic that, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, has increased the proportion of overweight kids under age 12 fivefold in the last generation and left almost 19% of kids between 6 and 11 overweight.

One of the key criticisms is that the ads are “viral”, which is to say kids distribute them in an expnential way via social networks and email (if kids even use email these days). So it’s not just the ads but also the medium. The criticism is partly that it doesn’t cost marketers as much to reach as many kids as it did through television and other traditional media. It’s like pirated CDs. It was OK to make mix tapes and essentially pirate music until file-transfer technologies made it so easy that record labels had to do something about it. And look how that’s turned out.

We can restrict access in schools and other publicly funded places. We can promote healthy eating habits in classrooms and cafeterias. We can ban cigarette advertising in television altogether because it’s bad for everybody. Tobacco companies can take their own prudent approach to avoid lawsuits and backlash, which they have. But trying to draw lines between age groups, website audiences, and what constitutes junk food or not is a fool’s errand. It also ignores who is ultimately responsible for what children eat and how they use the Internet. Unless they have jobs, who’s buying the food? Who’s paying the allowances? And who’s computer is it, anyway?

The Business Week article does a good job of presenting this opposing view:

Some consumers and marketers say families, rather than the government, should be responsible for monitoring kids’ exposure to advertising (BusinessWeek.com, 5/17/07). “Listen up, fellow parents: when we point a collective finger, three more are pointing right back at us,” wrote J. Kristin Ament, a writer for online marketing blog Unbound Edition, in a 2007 response to an earlier report by Chester and Montgomery. “When will we stop playing the victim and start taking personal responsibility for our kids’ health and eating habits.”

There are many other avenues besides laws to exert pressure on companies to tone down their messaging and targeting of children, especially young children. We grew up with the same Flintsones cereal commercials and all sorts of affable cartoon associations with less-than-healthy foods. We ate some of it, and our parents restricted access to most of it. But they also encouraged us to play outside and be active. To us, this seems like a misguided effort and more unnecessary sheltering. We have plenty of helicopter parents (we’re among them). Do we really need a helicopter government?

What do you think?