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.

Offensive Play

How different are dogfighting and football?

by Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker
October 19, 2009

One evening in August, Kyle Turley was at a bar in Nashville with his wife and some friends. It was one of the countless little places in the city that play live music. He’d ordered a beer, but was just sipping it, because he was driving home. He had eaten an hour and a half earlier. Suddenly, he felt a sensation of heat. He was light-headed, and began to sweat. He had been having episodes like that with increasing frequency during the past year—headaches, nausea. One month, he had vertigo every day, bouts in which he felt as if he were stuck to a wall. But this was worse. He asked his wife if he could sit on her stool for a moment. The warmup band was still playing, and he remembers saying, “I’m just going to take a nap right here until the next band comes on.” Then he was lying on the floor, and someone was standing over him. “The guy was freaking out,” Turley recalled. “He was saying, ‘Damn, man, I couldn’t find a pulse,’ and my wife said, ‘No, no. You were breathing.’ I’m, like, ‘What? What?’ ”

They picked him up. “We went out in the parking lot, and I just lost it,” Turley went on. “I started puking everywhere. I couldn’t stop. I got in the car, still puking. My wife, she was really scared, because I had never passed out like that before, and I started becoming really paranoid. I went into a panic. We get to the emergency room. I started to lose control. My limbs were shaking, and I couldn’t speak. I was conscious, but I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say.”

Turley is six feet five. He is thirty-four years old, with a square jaw and blue eyes. For nine years, before he retired, in 2007, he was an offensive lineman in the National Football League. He knew all the stories about former football players. Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head. There were men with aching knees and backs and hands, from all those years of playing football. But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.

(Continued here.)