“Freedom of the press,” said A. J. Liebling, “is guaranteed only to those who own one.” But to enjoy that freedom, it is not necessary to buy an entire newspaper. You can buy one page at a time. Nor is it necessary to buy an entire television network. You can buy one minute at a time.
The way you do this is familiar to all of us. It’s called advertising. Advertising is a powerful medium of dissent. It can be used, jujitsu-like, to turn Big Media’s bigness against itself. The same vast enterprise that carries corporate dogma to its huge audience carries with it your message of uncompromised truth.
That message must be a stinging rebuke to the muddled journalism that surrounds it. If it is, it will have a life far beyond its brief paid existence. It will be torn from newspapers and hung on cubicle walls, held aloft and read to the U.S. Senate, replayed on the evening news. It will garner tens of thousands of dollars of contributions from kindred spirits. All of these things have happened to advertising created by Avenging Angels.
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Avenging Angels makes ads only for progressive causes and progressive candidacies. We search for the most lucid, provocative, passionate statement of your mission. Once we find it, we locate the most efficient media to place it. It’s our goal that it be impossible to ignore.
Is it expensive? Compared to doing nothing, Yes. But the notion that advertising requires extravagent repetition to work is simply not true. Lyndon Johnson’s Daisy commercial was one 60-second message, aired just once, on one night; it effectively ended Barry Goldwater’s campaign for President. Sane’s “Dr. Spock is worried” was one page, in one newspaper, on one morning; it energized the movement to ban nuclear weapons tests. Mind-numbing repetition is required only if the message is mind-numbing in the first place.
We have an unshakeable faith in the judgment of the American people. Cynics decry a nation of TV-besotted numskulls, H. L. Mencken’s booboisie, but it is boobs on the sending end, not the receiving end, that are the real problem. The American people armed with the facts will usually come to the right conclusion. In late summer of 2008 an astounding 84% of the public regularly told pollsters that the country was going to hell – “Headed in the wrong direction” was the literal indictment – and they were right. After Obama’s election, during our all-too-short “Winter of Hope,” that number bottomed out, but now it is climbing again. And again, the people are right.
“A lie,” said Winston Churchill, “gets halfway around the world before the truth has got its pants on.” He was making a case for “truth squads” or “rapid response units” – a valuable idea by either name. We cannot let lies put down roots. “Only full-throated pursuit of truth can rival big lies,” Jonathan Schell recently wrote in The Nation. “There is a power in the real that is going untapped.” Avenging Angels was created to help the progressive movement tap into that power. To see how we have succeeded over the past nine years, please visit the section of our website titled “OUR BEST WORK.”
