Last Blog! News in The Daily Show

The Daily Show is a satirical news show and markets itself thus. Obviously, as a brand cobranded with the Comedy Central network, it knows its place in the media world, and does not pretend to be a serious news source. However, the Daily Show does have a niche in the news media culture that contributes to the serious news community because it so effectively uses sarcasm and wit to point out different angles in the news. Comedy is a technique that appeals greatly to me as a consumer, and if someone can make a rational point using comedy, I am often more likely to listen to that point than if that person presented the point with a straight laced approach.
      Recently, I have heard many comparisons between the union protests in Wisconsin and the protests in Egypt. While they both fall under the category of "political protests," the Wisconsin and Egypt situations could not be more different in scope or in practice. Here is a clip from the Daily Show a couple of nights ago critiquing this comparison:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-february-22-2011/wisconsin-budget-protests
This is pretty hilarious and quite clever. John Oliver (the "Daily Show correspondent" covering the story) uses sarcasm to force the protestors creating the link between Egypt and Wisconsin to deflate their own comparison. Now, I would have seen rationally that these two events are not nearly as linked as they are made out to be if an anchor on national television had pointed out the divide. However, watching someone unveil the irony in the way that Oliver was able to do was, to me, significantly more effective than the previous method. I feel that often, the Daily Show makes a mockery of the images and comparisons produced by the mainstream media. However, they do not receive the same flak for challenging that media status quo because they are billed as a comedy show. Thus they are at liberty to point out the ridiculousness  of any language suggested to the mainstream media or to politicians by consultants like Frank Luntz without worrying about their image being tarnished. In a comedic news show, the whole point IS to challenge the status quo. In this particular example, John Oliver points out the ridiculousness of the comparisons between the Wisconsin situation and the Egypt situation. Through the eyes of all those who watch the Daily Show, this destroys the credibility of media outlets using this comparison. In this sense, the Daily Show serves an important purpose in elucidating manipulative or false language in the media. And while the show markets itself comedically, it often has something powerful to say about the hard hitting stories important to the mainstream media.

New York Times Depiction of Lybia

The Arab world is in turmoil. Over the past few weeks, the media has made something of a bonanza of the increasing belligerence in Tunisia, Lybia, Bahrain, Yemen, and Egypt. As these crises have developed, the American media has promoted different images and themes to portray the events in different countries. While the success of uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia successfully overthrew dictatorial regimes, similar efforts in Lybia and Bahrain have not yet produced the same triumph. In fact, Lybian protestors have been brutally quelled by the Qaddafi and his hired mercenaries. From what I have seen, the American media has been quite up front in portraying the despair of this movement, despair that contrasts sharply with the celebrations in Egypt and Tunisia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/world/africa/27libya.html?ref=world

This is an article I read in the New York Times today. While the article itself is interesting, I thought the picture was of special note in seeing the New York Times's presentation of the situation in Lybia. This man is solitary. He is separated from the group behind him, struggling alone in his quest to find food (his age makes me think that he is probably trying to provide for a family). Secondly, he is carrying food, a life necessity, and given the title of the article which references "Long Bread Lines," he most likely invested serious effort to obtain the food he carries. The people crowd behind him probably waits in the same line he did to get their bread. The sweat on his furrowed brow glistens in the sunlight, and he looks defeated, his eyes downcast, his eyebrows angled down in seriousness, and his mouth drooping slightly trying to gain air. Rubble litters the ground around him, and physical obstacles in the form of makeshift barricades obstruct his path back to home. He carries the loaves of bread he holds as if they were an infant, as if losing his grasp would result in death or serious injury. If I trust the headline, this might be the only food this man will receive on this day or maybe even for a few days. One word comes to mind when I see this picture: struggle. The effort in Lybia is a struggle, both physically and mentally. Even men like this, with enough time to shape impeccably trimmed mustaches, have difficulty finding the means to provide for themselves and their families. This is far from the jubilant portrayal of the Egyptian gallantry during the fall of Mubarak. If this photo accurately describes Lybia, protestors against Qaddafi are in trouble. 

The Local Business

In this course we have discussed advertising by enormous corporations that have a high stake in the media Americans consume on a daily basis. However, I want to focus this post on commercials on a more local, insulated level. Ultimately commercials all have the same goal: to cause consumers to buy their products. In all scales of advertising, companies want to create brand loyalty for their consumers. In the 21st century, advertising giants tend to pursue this by promoting a lifestyle or a set of emotions rather than a product. As a result of huge advertising budgets and extensive market reach, these companies have the ability to target particular subsets of the population and create ads that will jive mesh with the lifestyle that demographic idealizes. Thus, these ads do not necessarily have to be as informative as they need to be clever or carefully planned. What, then, about local companies, whose markets reach a small, geographically predetermined section of the population? Because of their limited advertising budget and their limited audience, these companies often focus more on down to earth, informative presentations of their businesses. The small size of the companies also means they are more concerned about spreading information about their companies, rather than spreading feelings like already established corporate giants try to do. However, this informational style utilized out of necessity by many small businesses also promotes a way of life: simple, homey, old-fashioned, small-town American. 

     One of my favorite youtube channels is the Rhett and Link channel. Rhett and Link are two comedians from North Carolina who began on youtube by making commercials for local businesses recommended to them by people across the country. While Rhett and Link intentionally make the commercials ridiculous, the youtube community has greeted them with almost unanimous praise. Here are a couple of their commercials: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3v4nC3iuMo&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3HnFfS9iSI&feature=relmfu

These commercials were clearly very low budget. They are all shot on facility at the stores. They are all rather quirky and unorthodox. Yet they all have more than 100,000 views on youtube, and the Red House commercial has over 2.5 millions views. All of these stores are now internet celebrities and have benefited greatly from the publicity (here is an article talking about the sudden celebrity status of the Red House after the commercial was released: http://www.furnituretoday.com/article/529177-Red_House_Furniture_goes_viral.php). Personally, I find all of them really entertaining, and they all make me want to go to those stores. Why are they so successful as local commercials? First and foremost, Rhett and Link give all these businesses identities. The Red House is the place where people of all races get along. The Discount Seafood Warehouse is where you can find clean, fresh, cheap seafood variety. Bobby Denning furniture is where you can say goodbye to high prices. These commercials are also funny. They do a really effective job at keeping the watcher entertained, and however much their intention is to poke fun at the traditional local commercial and to poke fun at the businesses themselves, these commercials generate immense amounts of (good) publicity for the target businesses. And while they fall into the more "informative" category versus the more "thematic"category often used by bigger businesses, they still manage to produce a brand identity. If I were a local businesses, I would pray Rhett and Link chose me for my next local commercial. 

Albert Pujols: Super Brand

Come on. Really Albert? You are asking for thirty million dollars a year for ten years. Thirty million dollars every year. For a decade. Are you insane? Today, you reached your announced deadline for the negotiations with the Cardinals, your team, surrounding your contract extension, and of course, they did not agree to your ludicrous demands. Do you know the talent they could acquire for your proposed three hundred MILLION dollar contract? Until now I have, with a few exceptions, accepted the ridiculous salaries in baseball. You, however have crossed the line. Do you really think you are a 300 million dollar baseball player?

The simple answer to the question above: no. No baseball player, even one who bats .330 with forty home runs and 120 RBI's per year like Albert, is worth paying thirty million dollars per year to hit the ball and run around the bases. Albert Pujols the player is not worth anywhere near what the Cardinals pay him. Albert Pujols the brand is. Specifically, his brand name is worth that money to the Cardinals baseball organization. Over the past ten years, Pujols has become the face of the St. Louis franchise. He has appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, has starred in many advertisements for his endorsers (Nike, ESPN, Wheaties, etc.) Here is one of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m5-M2YE3os. With this commercial, not only does Albert Pujols generate a huge amount of publicity for himself, he also promotes the team whose logo appears on his chest. To be honest, I watch the Cardinals because they have Albert Pujols. Sales of his jersey alone must generate literally millions of dollars a year for the Cardinals organization. I would say his presence alone causes more people worldwide to watch Cardinals baseball than any other part of the Cardinals team. As a baseball fan, I expect to see Albert in a Cardinals uniform. He would look totally out of place in a Cardinals uniform, and the Cardinals would look totally out of place without him in their uniform. This symbiosis means that, while any team would pay millions of dollars to have Pujols the player and the brand, the Cardinals have an extra incentive. He is a great player. I am by no means dissing the abilities of perhaps the greatest hitter since Ted Williams. However, the 300 million dollar contract he requests could easily pay for equal or greater talent. However, the Cardinals certainly cannot replace Pujols's identity as an icon and a brand, a brand that will  (in my opinion) soon guarantee that it is cobranded with the Cardinals for the next decade at a price of 300 million dollars. 

Doritos: Chips that Provide Life

I like laughing. Laughing is relaxing, enjoyable, and usually done with other people. Because of laughing's good effects on people, humor is an incredibly successful marketing technique when used correctly. A funny commercial, although still nothing more than a commercial, is much more watchable than a standard humorless one. Somehow, however, only a few companies manage to effectively use humor in their advertisements. In the super bowl, I thought Doritos, the Darth Vader commercial, and beer commercials were the funniest ads of the program. My personal favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSTEFK-LoVo. I laughed pretty hard at this the first time I saw it. To be honest, it made me want to buy Doritos. It WORKED. Doritos uses its humor really cleverly here. First of all, the whole premise of the commercial is that the friend watching his buddy's house for him is too lazy to stop eating Doritos and get off the couch to do the tiny number of menial tasks his friend asks him to carry out while he is away. This appeals to the (masculine) desire to bum around and do nothing on the couch, and then get caught in a tight spot right before the friend (or, in other terms, the wife) gets home. The commercial uses builds and releases of comedic tension. Just as you think that Doritos has saved the day with the fish and the flowers, the klutzy friend knocks over grandpa's ashes, which spill all over the floor. Of course, again, Doritos swoops in and ameliorates this sticky wicket. The cut to the grandpa on the couch without showing the friend sprinkling the Doritos on the ashes adds more to the comic suspense the commercial creates. 

     Why is this commercial so effective? What does the Doritos brand have to say about itself in this commercial? Well first and foremost, it sells itself to young men. The commercial features two young men as the main protagonists. It appeals to the laziness of young men. It also uses conspicuous consumption to its advantage (did you notice how nice and put together the apartment or house looks for a 20 some year old guy?). Doritos brands itself as a fixer. If you have a problem, just relax and have some Doritos and your problems will all go away. Not only that, you might even discover that the Doritos fix something else (grandpa) that you were not expecting. Doritos also markets itself as a product associated with leisure and couch-potato behavior. What could be better than popping a squat on your couch with a back full of cheesy Doritos, and letting the Doritos take care of your problems? On top of all this, the commercial makes Doritos feel hip and cool because it effectively appeals to our humor. If you eat Doritos, you will be a young guy who sits on his couch and doesn't have problems that Doritos can't solve. Who knows, maybe even they will even raise you from the dead like grandpa. 

Case Study: Why We Forgive

Mark Wahlberg has become one of the most celebrated actors of the 20th and 21st centuries. Whether starring alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed or Will Ferrell in The Other Guys, Wahlberg has proved that he has the appeal and the versatility to play many different roles on set. He is in every sense a celebrity icon. Like many celebrities of his stature, Wahlberg has a devoted following. In my own group of friends, he is universally liked and respected. Yet violence and anger stain Wahlberg's past. As a teenager growing up in Dorcester, Wahlberg beat a middle aged Vietnamese man unconscious in an unprovoked outburst of racial hatred, permanently blinding the man in one eye. During Wahlberg's teenage and young adult years, the Boston police reportedly arrested him between 20 and 25 times for crimes that ranged from cocaine possession to assault to attempted murder. Wahlberg frequently ridiculed racial minority groups, and reportedly used racist language during many of his assaults. In his early 20's, however, Wahlberg abruptly changed his lifestyle, relinquishing his violent past and focussing his energy on his acting and producing career. He has since established himself as one of the most successful and prolific actors in America.
     While Mark Wahlberg has accomplished a great deal in his acting career, I wonder why I and the rest of society choose to forgive him for his past grievances. After all, his transgressions in youth match or even transcend those of Joseph Rakes, the supposedly soft-spoken subject of Stanley Forman's pulitzer prize winning photograph, do they not? Why, then, does Joseph Rakes still live under the shadow of his youthful anger, and Wahlburg has been able to transcend his violent and racist behavior? The answer lies in two of the concepts we have discussed this term: branding and worthiness. Mark Wahlburg is an important man. He endorses products (Calvin Klein, for example). He stars in movies, and produces ENORMOUS revenues for movie companies. The media (by means of the advertising filter) has every incentive to market Mark Wahlburg as a person worth emulating, as a good image of Wahlburg benefits the goals of advertisers who use him as a marketing tool. The movie industry also wants to keep Wahlburg's image in a good light for financial reasons because they need to promote his brand for their brands. As for the people who already know about Wahlburg's past, we tend to overlook many of his wrongdoings because we like his movie characters and his close-up shots at the Academy Awards, in which he appears elegantly dressed and smiling. We assume that, because he is a person respected by the movie industry and the mainstream media, he deserves our respect as well. Also, we find it easy to ignore Wahlberg's past because of his efforts to change his old ways (the fairy tale story of converting from the dark side and thus gaining the ability to ignore past evils is such an American, Starwars image, ingrained into our heads from such a young age that it is immensely difficult to question). In contrast, Joseph Rakes, who grew up in the same racially charged time period as Wahlberg, cannot overcome the demons of his past because he does not provide the people in power with an incentive to vindicate him. To twist Chomsky's definition of "unworthy victim," Rakes is a victim unworthy of absolution because his absolution provides no benefit to the one responsible for his acquittal. Rakes has one claim to fame: his portrait in Forman's photograph, and that he has been branded with that identity. Wahlberg can escape this image because others have had a desire to brand him differently.

Save the Planet

I think George Carlin is an existential genius of comedy. While I try not to adopt his cynical, jaded perspective on the world, I often find myself agreeing with his message. This is a video of one of Carlin's unmistakable diatribes regarding climate change and "saving the planet:"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw
Of course Carlin's argument is riddled with logical fallacies. People do not actually worry every minute of the day about the earth's air quality. Pollution does cause significant suffering for animal species other than homo sapiens. Yet Carlin brings up a number of points that do legitimately force me to examine the stigma around pollution and climate change. Ultimately, what DOES it matter if the climate changes? As Carlin points out, nature has no planned course. Nature does not have disdain for plastic, or any other pollutant. What if our purpose on this planet WAS to invent plastic? For two billion years, earth had no mechanism for breaking down wood. Ultimately, however, nature found a way for wood to decompose. Who is to say that in a few million years, plastic-eating bacteria will not evolve and support more life on earth than wood does now?
         Amid his twisted logic, I completely agree that the whole "save-the-planet" movement is based not around regard for the planet itself, but for the people living on the planet at this moment. We have evolved to be a self-centered species. After all, does the natural process of evolution not denote that in order for a species to survive they must be willing and able to work in their own self-interest? Let me give an example. Suppose you consider yourself an environmentally aware individual. You are faced with two options: you continue having access to your car or you have your car taken away for so called "environmental reasons." Of course, you would choose to keep your car. While this might seem like an absurd example, it illustrates how fundamentally dependent we are on industry that cannot help but pollute the planet. Even hybrid cars rely on batteries powered by electricity, the majority of which, at its origin, is generated by coal or oil based power plants. With our increasing expectation of standard of living increases (as well as the effects of such economic forces as the Jevons paradox, which I outlined in a blog a few weeks ago), I feel completely hopeless in this campaign to lower carbon emissions. I will do it for economic reasons (i.e. lower my payments or those of PA), but I find it hard to convince myself that turning off my computer speakers when I leave my room will make any difference to the state of the environment. And as Carlin points out, who gives a shit? The planet will recover. Even if our carbon emissions raise the temperature of the atmosphere, life will adjust. It might take thousands or millions of years, during which time humanity dies out. But Carlin points out rightly that we are by no means the worst disaster earth has witnessed in 4.5 billion years. I know this post has little to do with a specific news story in the news this week, but I feel it addresses a prevailing attitude in modern society that I, like Carlin, believe is arrogant and misleading. I would greatly prefer "Preserve the Planet" or "Save the Human Way of Life."