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Columbia Records ads in the underground press[edit]
The claim that the FBI (or the CIA, or the White House, depending on the source) visited CBS and convinced CBS executives to stop running Columbia Records ads in the underground press has never been substantiated, and Frank Stanton, the president of CBS at the time, has denied that this ever happened. There are two sources for this claim: (a) a brief item in a column in RAT that gave no source for the story; and an FBI memo released under the FOIA from an FBI field office suggesting that the FBI might want to consider talking to CBS. A number of informed sources have suggested that in fact the drop-off in ad revenue from record companies was due to the fact that Rolling Stone and its imitators (Creem, etc.) were sucking up all the available ad dollars.
65.88.88.200 (talk) 01:57, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The assertion, unlike your denial of the assertion, is properly sourced. The Sentinel was a right-wing ex-Hearst paper and not hospitable to the claims of the underground. --Orange Mike | Talk 20:06, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
See what Abe Peck has to say about this in Uncovering the Sixties (no page cite, but it has an index). He talked to Frank Stanton, Clive Davis and Jim Fouratt (who ran the "hippie desk" at Columbia Records for about a year), and came up with nothing concrete. Not to say it didn't happen, but after the infamous and unforgettable "The Man Can't Bust Our Music" ad campaign was anyone surprised that Columbia gave up on advertising in the underground press?
The underground press was an absolutely terrible advertising medium for national advertisers: papers didn't have stable addresses, phone numbers, and contact names; didn't have business and advertising desks; didn't stick to a regular publishing schedule; didn't know how to bill, didn't have fixed ad rates, didn't always remember to run the ad after they were paid in advance; often went out of business suddenly owing people money; didn't have audited circulation numbers; etc., etc. If you wanted to buy ad space in the underground press the best way to go about it was to show up in person the night before they went to press, with camera ready copy in one hand and a wad of cash in the other. Cash preferred, because many papers didn't even have a bank account to deposit checks in. The two big exceptions were of course the LA Free Press and the Berkeley Barb, which were actually run in a more or less businesslike manner, but the rest of the underground press just presented record companies with a lot of hassle. So: maybe the FBI did talk to some of the advertisers. It's certainly documented that they visited a number of printers. But the big record companies would probably have dropped their advertising in the UG press anyway. The Underground Press Syndicate was in the beginning supposed to provide a central clearing house for national advertisers to make ad placements in papers across the country with one-stop shopping through the UPS, easing the hassles, but after the first couple of months this fizzled out before it ever really got going. Too bad. 65.88.88.200 (talk) 23:24, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
