Day: August 14, 2012

I spent some time on the CNN.com site and then some more on the international version of the same, and fox news, and even msnbc. I was curious to know what qualifies as news these days. News, in the modern vernacular is merely what information is trending, or being viewed or noticed, enough to be considered headline news. This ‘news’ varies greatly from site to site. One key distinction was between CNN, where the headline story was an opinion piece questioning whether Paul Ryan was for or against Ayn Rand, and the Fox piece that, surprisingly, fact checks Paul Ryan’s budget plan claims.

All sites saved space for images and talk of Miley Cyrus’ side boob, which speaks volumes of the effect that sex has on the media conversation. However, the real interesting part is what constitutes news for these sites. Internet, and to a lesser degree television, news has a direct link to the customer and the customer’s reading habits. News is then filed, even created, according to the needs of the audience.

That is a scary reality. That means that there is no impartial baseline determining relevance based on universal criteria. Heck, maybe there never was.

Some thoughts:
1. Dr. David Katz, editor-in-chief of the journal Childhood Obesity is uncomfortable with the Nike commercial I mentioned yesterday. He doesn’t like how uncomfortable the kid looked and how far from great he is. Well, that is the damn point. Greatness demands sacrifice, and that kid inspires greatness.

I am genuinely looking forward to the semester if for no other reason to discuss the polarization of the American commercial. I say polarization because what I perceive to be as a greater divide between the way commercials are scripted these days. On one end of the spectrum we’ve gone off the deep end with the oversexualization and even the dumbing down of women. It didn’t start with Axe commercials, but they remain the greatest example (save for a handful of beer commercials that are simply nuts).

Axe actually plays both sides here. They recently released a new ad, which doesn’t show skinny ultra-attractive women. Instead in focuses on a man who turned a girl he liked into a  pedestal piece. He talks about how putting her upon high made him feel powerless and how he changed his behaviors, so he would never feel like that again. This is the other side of the media message. This idea of change comes from within is echoed by the Nike commercial that shows a fat kid striving to be healthy. These commercials are a small yet powerful counterweight to what we normally see, and what we normally see is getting more drastic.