Archive for the 'Eyeballs and Eardrums (The Media)' Category
Sunday, May 30th, 2010
Paid Addlers
Somewhere, Alexander Cockburn remarks that the unspoken role of mainstream journalists and pundits is to render plainly intelligible facts into nonsense.
A prime example is this absolute twaddle from Frank Rich in today’s edition of The New York Times:
Of all the president’s stated goals, none may be more sweeping than his desire to prove that government is not always a hapless and intrusive bureaucratic assault on taxpayers’ patience and pocketbooks, but a potential force for good.
OMFG. It seems Rich may actually believe this preposterous double-talk! (“Sweeping”? Seriously, wtf does that word mean in this sentence? Perhaps a Freudian slip showing Rich knows, at some level, that the claim under consideration is indeed a sweeping — a sweeping under the rug, into an ashcan, “off the table”…)
Let’s take the item that most Obama dupes would raise as proof of Rich’s typeset lobotomy: “health care.” If Rich’s story were true, would Obama have strangled single-payer medical insurance in favor of the corporate players and the Mercedes-driving, race-horse breeding doctors? Of course not.
This president has no goals, other than to hold office and babysit the status quo on behalf of the overclass, before which he is an abject and eager lackey. Adolph Reed had that fact nailed down and reported in 1996:
Rich’s tall tale is powerful evidence that our system works in the sense Cockburn diagnoses. So is that fact that Reed’s repeatedly proven point remains buried in miles of mainstream and blog-meistering dogshit.
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
A Vaster Wasteland
In 1961, FCC Chair Newton Minnow delivered his famous speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. In it, Minnow dared to say this to the assembled mind-fuckers:
When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
Over the years, Minnow has noted that the reality he slammed in 1961 has only gotten progressively worse.
Of course it has. Commercial TV cannot be good. The controlling interests of its sponsors bar controversy, complexity, seriousness, and sharpness, in favor of studiously applied triviality, titillation, flattery, stereotyping, thoughtlessness, flippancy, and, most of all, strategic dishonesty.
And television — all television — is an inherently addictive substance, as its sponsors know all too well. And, given the immense funding behind it (TV in the USA is a wholly subordinate arm of corporate capitalist marketing), how could it do anything but gain more victims and deepen its hold over existing ones? To wit:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.
The amount of time spent with media increased by an hour and seventeen minutes a day over the past five years, from 6:21 in 2004 to 7:38 today. And because of media multitasking, the total amount of media content consumed during that period has increased from 8:33 in 2004 to 10:45 today.
And what new cultural wonders are the corporate broadcasters adding to their upcoming fall line-ups, in between the shows about doctors, cops, cops-who-are-doctors, and doctors-who-are-cops? One highly anticipated example is (and I shit you not) “‘No Ordinary Family,’ a look at a family that discovers each member has super powers.”
Now there’s something relevant and mature and high-quality for this flailing, incoherent, frustrated empire! Just what the doctor-cop-superhero-American-Idol ordered!
And behind it all, as always, is the social engineering logic of big business marketing. From a report in the latest Advertising Age:
Thursday night remains one of the most important nights of the week for advertisers, particularly movie studios looking to goose box-office results for films that open Fridays or retailers who want to draw attention to a weekend sale.
Such are the core cultural dynamics of “the land of the free,” friends.
Friday, April 2nd, 2010
Voice of the Sponsor
The gulf between the public/on-air claims and the behind-the-scenes realities of corporate marketing is scandalously immense. If journalism still had a pulse, there would be frequent exposes of this all-important chasm. Alas, the capitalists own the media, so there is only silence.
Consider the example of one Thomas Morgan, the CEO of MediaD.tv, who is busy coaching big businesses about how “Internet TV has the potential to be the most powerful ad-supported medium ever created, if we learn to leverage the strengths of both television and the internet.”
Here is how scumbags like Morgan talk to their customers about the core of what their Orwellian careers are all about:
Finally, the gap between TV and online is not as great as people think. Let’s compare a 1000 people watching a full prime show on TV, and a 1000 people watching the same show online. If roughly 40% of them are outside A18-49 then the C3 model will discard 400 people to start. The remaining 600 view 22 commercials at say a $30 CPM so about $.66 per viewer X 600 viewers = $3.96 of revenue. Compare this to online: 1000 people view 6 commercials at say a $40CPM, so $.24 per viewer X 1000 viewers = $2.40 of revenue. Hence the parity gap. However, if we upped the ad load to 12, and dropped the CPM to $35 on average for all viewers, online would generate $4.20 of revenue per 1000 viewers, exceeding the $3.96 of TV. Parity achieved and exceeded!
Such is the nature of the planning of citizens’ most common life experiences in our glorious “democracy.”
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Amen, Manuel!
Manuel Garcia, Jr. has published an excellent essay on the logic of corporate capitalist political marketing. Read it here.
Garcia’s overall thesis is this:
The social programming language of capitalist authoritarianism seeks to activate personal greed, intellectual insecurity and visceral racism as motivators of guided popular political reaction. The Pavlovian logic to this scheme of social manipulation is that all human beings are possessive, gullible and fearful.
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
Our Pablum-buro: One Way Corporate Marketers Censor Media
Could any information or drama the Fortune 500 defines as “family friendly” possibly address our real needs at this point in human history?
Probably not, but that doesn’t mean they won’t force their between-ads filler on us.
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Some Good News
Turns out people aren’t as gullible as I recently reported.
This just in from Advertising Age:
CORRECTION: Both the original headline and the body of this story about Honda’s “Social Experiment” incorrectly stated that the automaker tallied 2 million fans on Facebook. Honda now has more than 250,000 fans (the one-day takeover Oct. 19 more than doubled the number of 63,083 and since then has grown.) The 2 million figure represented how many “connections” — or how many friends its fans collectively have — a very soft metric of social-media success. We were way off and we apologize for the errors.
Me, too.
