Government Media Control
Ya gotta wonder how greedy or stupid are the folks at NBC to announce that they are going to carry liquor ads. Not that having booze commercials would be the worst thing in the world, relatively speaking, if it were only for the high-end hooch. You know, the stuff the classy folks drink and never get drunk. Yeah, right; here’s to ‘em. In the real world, however, ya gotta think that the swill vendors wouldn’t be buying time unless the commercials were generating considerable sales to the masses. In other words, NBC is enabling the booze hawks to sell their product to people who don’t need the encouragement. Inevitably, as a result of the commercials, people who are induced to buy the intoxicants are going to beat their wives and children, get into traffic accidents, and kill people. How much money is that worth to the television executives? Apparently more than enough. But surely they didn’t think they would get away with it? Was their thinking so shallow that they thought a flock of Congress-geeks wouldn’t rise to the occasion of political advantage and move to close the FCC loophole through with the once-proud peacock slithered?
It’s not like broadcasting is otherwise covered in glory. The gross abdication by the FCC during the Reagan years has enabled media conglomerates blind to all but the bottom line to gobble up the public airwaves and stuff ‘em into the toilet. A Redding radio station runs gravelly-voiced promos that insist, "If you're not cranking it, you must be yanking it. Wipe my shiny metal ass." Um, no thank you, and those who think that’s just fine — Hey, free speech, man — ought to be dispatched to Tora Bora in their shorts.
In the Los Angeles market, searching for music, Linda found a station which played commercials for at least five minutes. One spot offered "sedation dentistry" which one might infer means that they knock you out, probably until your credit charge has cleared. What’s next? They keep you comatose until you’re mouth is fully healed and you don’t remember having ever had money? Another station advertised not just the facts...(pregnant pause)...but the feelings. Gimme a break.
Now you think that with all the people in Los Angeles, and a gazillion radio stations coming out of their, um, transmitters, that there would be at least a handful of programmed to appeal to grown-ups with some discretionary income. And it’s not like we’re really picky. Classical would be fine, though not that weird twelve-tone crap for the deaf. We also like oldies. I mean, we were desperate enough, we might have listened to adult contemporary. And I’m sure those stations out there somewhere, but Linda punched and punched and mostly all we heard were Spanish, rap, and techno-trash, probably all owned by a small handful of companies.
Call me a throwback, but I believe in government intervention, when it is informed, and when market forces control circumstances to the detriment of the public. In the area of media-slash-communications, the government has fallen down badly on the job. Their decisions have written a virtual blank check for the corporate powers to put on what they want with little or no oversight. The result has been the opiation of great masses of double-digit IQers who consume without producing, who think with their viscera, and are malleable to manipulators who sell them lies couched in action and painted with glitter. It is not a good situation.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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