Dr. David Robbins:

To come back to Deputy Smith on the embedded nature of advertising in the media, I am not a behavioural scientist; I am a media and communications researcher. In my experience, having worked in the media for about 25 years, there was a convention of a Chinese wall between the editorial function and the advertising function. The editorial function would book an ad for, say, a car or an airline. The journalist would produce the paper in which that ad appeared without taking any account of who paid for it or where it would sit. It seems almost naive to believe that that could work but, in my experience, it did work. The journalist had a very strong sense of his or her independence from the commercial side of the house. The commercial operation of the newspaper was almost like a different world from the journalism side.

Having said that, a colleague of mine did an interesting piece of research on RTÉ's coverage of one of the IPCC reports where she coded not only the coverage itself but also the ads that appeared in between in the news bulletins. We got one set of messages about climate from the coverage of the IPCC report, but all the advertising in between was of very carbon-intensive activities.

All the advertising in between was about very carbon-intensive activities. That throws up a wider debate about how we fund the media, public service media in particular, and whether we should require it to depend on advertising at all. It is an interesting question. People consumer advertisements as well as media and they are often getting two contradictory messages.