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You’ve seen the ads. They have the secret to make you rich, beautiful and happy. You might have even received a few of them at your publication. Very often they come accompanied by a request from the advertiser that you run them for a few issues and bill them – typically at some P.O. box in a distant state (a risk, of course, that is important to keep in mind).
Can you run them? Should you run them?
The answer to the first question is generally “yes.” While you – as the “publisher” of the student newspaper or yearbook – are liable for the content of the ads you run, you are generally not responsible for the promises the ads make or your readers’ responses to them. In other words, you are responsible, for example, for ads that contain libel, that invade someone’s legal right to privacy, that infringe someone’s copyright or that are legally obscene. (Although hopefully you have included an indemnification clause in your rate card or advertising contract that will allow you to recover losses resulting from such unlawful content from the advertiser.) You are not responsible, however, for investigating or verifying the “puffed up” claims by advertisers for their products or services. Nor are you liable to your readers if they respond to an ad and – lo and behold – they get something less than they thought they were promised. Assuming they run as text-only, none of the above ads, for instance, are libelous or obscene. None invade anyone’s legal right to privacy and none contain the copyrighted work of others. You can legally and safely publish them if you choose. (You can also usually safely reject them – particularly if only students make the decision to do so – but that’s the subject for another column).
You are under no legal obligation to investigate or verify the claims made in the ads. You don’t, for example, have to contact the advertiser to ask for hard evidence backing up his claim that people have actually earned $3,000 a month working from home. You don’t have to assign one of your reporters to use the miracle weight loss formula to see if he drops 10 pounds in a week. Courts understand that requiring such action on the part of the media – at least under our current system – would impose an unbearable and unfair burden. (After all, how much would you charge for a one-inch, text-only ad?) Rather, courts have shifted the burden for verifying such ads primarily to the buyer and liability, where it exists, primarily on the advertiser.
Still, even though “buyer beware” is the watchword and student media can safely publish most lawful – even if somewhat suspect – ads, the tougher question is “should you?”
To answer that question, you and your staff don’t need a lawyer. You need a mirror. Deciding what ads to publish or not publish should reflect the editorial policy and philosophy of the publication itself. Some publications view themselves as something of a public bulletin board, a full-blown marketplace of ideas where anyone and everyone – including flavor-of-the-month diet gurus – should have an opportunity to have their message heard (assuming no laws are broken in the process). Others establish themselves as a more limited forum where the publication’s message and design are carefully fine-tuned and outside submissions, including ads, are selectively published depending on how they mesh with that editorial vision.
Neither position is right or wrong and most student media tend to fall somewhere in the middle, which can sometimes make deciding where to draw the lines for advertising a tough call.
Unfortunately, I have no magic advertising acceptance formulas to share. And no matter what decisions you make, chances are good you’ll eventually be criticized. The good news, though, is that you probably can’t be successfully sued – and worries about the law will seldom, if ever, need to complicate the mix.