Advertising regulation and childhood obesity

Children’s media – both the media produced specifically for children and the much wider category of media they engage with in practice – periodically occasion a particularly fraught struggle between the market-oriented policies of competition and deregulation on the one hand, and the cultural or citizen-oriented policies designed to meet children’s needs and interests and to protect them from harm, on the other. In this struggle, policies for competition and deregulation are positioned as generic – they apply, ideally, to all media markets and within this, children tend to figure as a special case, grounds for making an exception, if they figure at all. Policies for cultural and citizen needs, however, are specific to the constituency at issue – children, in this case, but in other contexts older people, minority ethnic groups, rural populations, and so forth. Although guided by general principles (of universal service, fairness of redress, right to privacy, value for money, etc.), these policies cannot themselves be applied in a manner that is uniform across the population. Managing the balance, struggle even, between the generic principles of the market and the specific needs of particular constituencies of citizens is difficult, and for a largely economic regulator such as Ofcom, it can seem easiest to prioritise the former, so that meeting the needs of the market becomes ‘the rule’ over the latter, where meeting the needs of children becomes ‘the exception’.