Comm. prof discusses commercials, culture

Joseph Turow, professor of Communications in the Annenberg School, was picking up Chinese takeout in suburban Narberth one evening when the waiter read his name off his credit card, looked up, and said, "Joseph Turow. Media Industries."

Turow looked confused, so the waiter said it again. "Turow. Media Industries."

Media Industries: The Production of News and Entertainment is the third of Turow's eight books. The waiter had read it back home in Shanghai.

Apparently, it made an impact.

But even if his words can travel across the Pacific and back again, Turow still doesn't seem to think he's the type to be remembered.

"Why me?" he asked repeatedly when contacted for an interview.

The fact that he has been in his field since 1974, received grants from the Federal Communications Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others, and published over 50 articles doesn't keep him from worrying about his allegedly receding hairline.

To himself, he's just a guy who's been teaching the same class -- Mass Media and Society -- for thirty years.

But as Turow says himself, "Professors make a dent in people's lives and don't even know."

The child of Polish immigrants, Turow grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and was intended for a very different career. "I was supposed to be a lawyer. Everyone in my family thought I'd be a lawyer," he says. "My brother was going to be the doctor."

There was one little glitch with that plan -- Turow wasn't interested in law. Instead, he found himself drawn to the advertisements on television. "I thought, someone has to make those ads," he says. Why not him?

He came to Penn in the fall of 1967 with ambitions of becoming an advertising copywriter.

But it was the height of the Vietnam war, and things, as he says, were "radicalized."

When a favorite English teacher saw his copy of Advertising Age -- a magazine for advertisers -- she responded with only a disappointed, "How could you do this?"

"It was an anti-commercial era," Turow says.

Between that professor's disapproval and another class he ended up in almost accidentally, Turow was sliding away from practicing advertising and moving toward studying it.

Turow took Anthony Garvan's American Civilization class only because no other class meeting the history requirement fit his schedule. In it, Turow was introduced to the connection between things people made -- art, buildings, ads -- and the way they lived, their values and culture.

So he thought to himself, "Gee, wouldn't it be interesting to study advertising this way?"

Now, after thirty years of studying ads, he believes "American society is nothing if not commercialized."

Turow gives commercials enormous credit for their effect on popular culture. "Advertising is the central support system of a great percentage of American mass media," he says.

Because advertisements pay the bills for many magazines, newspapers and television stations, those media channels will strive to reach the demographics most beneficial for their advertisers.

There was no undergraduate Communications major when Turow was an undergraduate at Penn. Instead, he majored in English before obtaining a Ph.D. in Communications from the Annenberg School.

After teaching appointments at UCLA and Purdue University, Turow began to miss the East Coast, and a job search landed him back at Penn.

His office here is filled with icons of mass media -- Betty Boop perches on his nameplate outside the door, and a 1920s radio sits on the bookshelf next to a set of Tom Swift novels. Among these manifestations of his academic life's work, Turow is working on the first chapter of a ninth book.

"Writing is very difficult for me," he says, almost apologetically. "To me, it's like sculpting. I chip away and hopefully something decent shows up."

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