I often see things in media that make me think somebody had to have made that up. The proposition is simply unsupported by fact. I am well aware that large portions of what are presented as news is created by companies to promote one product or another. If the media companies own the movie and the news than promoting the movie becomes news. The new discovery in science that will lead to something and that something is a drug and so we drive up the speculation on this or that stock. The TV reason d’etre is to sell us crap we don’t need to fill up a hole we do not have so I expect that but at some point the news began trying to shape the political debate with the same style of fraud and that is scary.
It scares me because it is almost impossible to know as it is happening. I am thinking like Bill Mahr in that the crazies can drive out the reasoned. When you make everything a conspiracy the real ones get by while you sort out the nonsense. If you spend all your time trying to make people believe that the neoclowns blew up the buildings you miss them taking away the right of privacy and assembly in the aftermath. But I digest; Naomi Wolff has a great book Disaster Capitalism that makes the point much better than I.
I am asking a different question when the media spends so much time talking about nonsense how do we know when they just made the whole thing up. I have an example and I would love to get some help from the blogosphere on how to proceed.
The constant Dobbs anti immigrant harangue and the Republican effort to try to turn brown into the new gay to win elections got me to question this and the more I looked the more it sent my bullshit detector into the brown. A couple of days ago the media both mainstream TV and the internet were awash in stories about a new reality TV show that was going to get a citizen to date a bunch of noncitizens and see if they could spark a romance. I admit that what they call reality TV does not appeal tome for the most part but that is taste and it is a large nation in that respect. I don’t get off on humiliation but that is a huge fetish out there so I won’t go there. People like to watch people being berated by chefs with accents and CEOs with bad combovers I don’t get it but entertainment is the only thing I think the free market can effectively not destroy so I have revealed my bias lets move on.
On its face “Who wants to marry a citizen”, is no dumber than a shot at love with the myspace bi or the bachelor so you sort of accept the story at face value and go straight to the reaction they seem to be trying to evoke distaste for immigrants. I said above that I look at what are they selling with all news but especially entertainment so who is the audience for this show Is it likely to court the 18 to 34 cool money spending demo? I don’t think so and this is why. The people that watch these identify with the participants. They want to see self-degradation not other. If you think maybe you are expanding the brand again I don’t see that working as it is my experience that people that are given real shit in their lives to deal with seek out different styles of entertainment. I may be wrong on this one as having spent time in the south I am familiar with the spread the misery around mentality of the blues and country music. So now I have reason to wonder what kind of company pitches this and so I do what everyone tries first I Google the production company and see what happens. The only things I find are hits about this crappy TV show. For an alterative media the net is obsessed with the mainstream so many were sites reporting canned press release news. Then there were the issue blogs about what this would mean for western civilization. These are people like fox news that stirs up a nonexistent war on Christmas each year by taking an incident and distorting the facts to create a news story about something completely different. This is the type of story they live for and they had indeed gone batshit for the story and generated a huge volume of stories. Eventually I found a link to a record company that was in fact an internet radio station with very little else they did have a story about a free internet pope tribute song and a benefit concert they were involved with promoting. The company also has a relationship to Mandalay entertainment the Las Vegas casino group but I will come back to that. I am not a TV industry worker so I don’t know maybe companies that have no history pop up and sell shows, everyone starts from somewhere and the fact that I see this as total crap doesn’t prove they were not genuinely try to make this into a program. It just raises some questions that no one in any of the stories being written about it was asking. Then I found a link to a short promo for the show and after watching it I am convinced that this is a propaganda piece created for the sole purpose of giving media a story to reinforce their anti immigration agenda. It is of course possible that these people are just really bad at making media those of you that have seen my youtube channel know that I have a lot of nerve mentioning quality but I am a malcontent not a professional in media of any type and this was overwhelmingly bad. It had that fake feel of the bad infomercial.
Now what to do? This is a question I need the web help with. If they are just bad at what they do and not malicious then they will loose their investment when the idea flames out and the market will speak. But if they are just generating propaganda how do you get that message out and how does one individual find the proof? I will be revisiting this when I find out a bit more. This is a link that you can view the video I refer to. www.hookacitizen.com look closely at the disclaimers.
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