From Gray Panther to National Nanny: The Kidvid Crusade and the Eclipse of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 1977-1980

Abstract

This article chronicles the FTC's proposal to significantly limit children's advertising in 1977, a controversial episode for advertisers and corporate America alike that has come to be known as the "kidvid crusade." As a comprehensive political economic analysis, this article relies on dozens of trade press articles, archival sources, government documents, and oral histories. In 1978, the U.S. Congress launched a retaliatory attack on the FTC; failing to renew the FTC's funding, it shut down the agency for the first and only time in U.S. history. The kidvid crusade is a lens through which to understand the broader political and economic shift toward neoliberalism in the coming years and, indeed, portended the rise of deregulation and new forms of corporate public relations in the political sphere.