Angering the Mouse: Did a Pioneering Children's Advocacy Group Pay the Price for Taking on Disney?
Maureen Turner
Valley Advocate
March 18, 2010
Since its founding in 2000, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has taken on some formidable foes, with impressive results.The Boston-based nonprofit, which works to counter the ill effects of consumer culture on kids, has pressured Scholastic Books to stop selling the heavily sexualized Bratz doll products in the catalogs it distributes in schools. It's organized parents against BusRadio, a closed-circuit commercial radio station created for school buses. (The company ultimately went out of business.) It's fought against all kinds of sneaky marketing efforts targeting kids, from report card envelopes that contained Happy Meal ads to Cover Girl product placements in novels written for girls.
Then, in 2007, CCFC took on the bigfoot of kids' marketers: Disney. Specifically, the organization went after the Disney-owned Baby Einstein company, which for years had marketed its videos for babies for their supposed educational value, despite the lack of any scientific evidence—and despite a recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under the age of two should watch no television.
CCFC took its complaint against Baby Einstein and a similar company, Brainy Baby, to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that the educational claims amounted to false and deceptive advertising. In response, Baby Einstein dropped the word "educational" from its marketing materials. Last year, the company also
