Super Bowl frenzy includes free 3/4-page ad for bratwurst company

Newspapers’ food pages make PR firms happy

Leigh Pomeroy
Mankato Free Press

In the run-up to the Super Bowl game, The Mankato Free Press, like nearly every mainstream medium in the country, is publishing articles designed to entice us into the frenzy that accompanies this overhyped and highly commercialized event.

In fact, the National Football League, a tightly held amalgam of wealthy business interests, relies upon the media to give it billions of dollars of free publicity each year. It’s a business model made in capitalist heaven.

Meanwhile, those companies that also stand to benefit from the free media feeding trough are also cleverly placing their messages.

Witness, for example, the 3/4-page article titled “Go BIG for the BIG GAME” (capitals included) in Saturday’s Free Press featuring four fat, calorie, salt and nitrate-laden sausage recipes, including “Touchdown Italian Sausage Chili,” “Reuben Brat Hoagie,” “PigTails (sic) & Fries” and “Spicy Sausage Queso.”

I’m no “food prude” — I love fat, salt and calories as much as the next guy. But what struck me about the article was how it was so contrary to the healthy food articles and recipes (thankfully) prevalent in The Free Press, and how this article was no less than a 3/4-page advertisement for a certain sausage company whose name was given in an Internet URL comprising the entirety of the article’s second paragraph.

Having just finished Wendell Potter’s eye-opening exposé of the public relations arm of the health insurance industry, “Deadly Spin,” I can visualize the high-fiving in the offices of the PR agency that wrote and planted this article each time it was published in hundreds of newspapers across the nation.

No doubt such celebrations make the frenzies and dances in the end zone after every Super Bowl touchdown look like an afternoon tea party.