Media Complicit In ‘Shopapocalypse’ As Consumers Go Wild

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Media Complicit In ‘Shopapocalyse’ As Consumers Go Wild
By Danny Schechter.



BOSTON, MA November 24 2007: You could almost run that old Lone Ranger theme - the famous William Tell Overture - as the soundtrack to the local news stories I watched here in Boston on Thanksgiving day featuring perky local news “correspondents” stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers racing into malls for “midnight madness” sales. It was, in the words of Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, a “shopapocalypse.” His crusade against out of control consumption is pictured in the new film “What Would Jesus Buy?,” opening at some theaters in LA and San Francisco.

This highly relevant film was not on TV, of course, because our media is deeply complicit in promoting/encouraging mindless consumerism through newspapers, commercials and on newscasts. This is a well-practiced formula mirroring TV’s promotion of the war in Iraq, as the line between selling and telling disappears. Media outlets are amply rewarded with endless ad revenues hyping all the discounted goodies you can get with the Boston Globe packing no less than 43 advertising/sales supplements (down from 47 a year ago) into a paper that had wall to wall Macy ads, including some offering $10 coupons to bribe you into the stores. Marketing is what the media does best.

Bill Bowles writes about this on his CNI Blog:

“The problem is that many of us have been force-fed with a diet of nothing but passive, uncritical consumptionism, indeed, we are addicted to the stuff; breaking such powerful habits is what this is all about; it’s about getting people to think critically again about what’s going on and why and what, if anything, we can do about it.”

Bowles also ties this cultural affliction, sometimes known as affluenza, back to our dependence on a media system that won’t really allow other voices to be heard.

“It would be an understatement to say that the world has changed almost beyond recognition in the past two decades, we appear to have re-entered the age of the dinosaur, gigantic creatures stomping across the planet, ‘guided’ by pea-sized brains. So … we have increasing concentrations of powerful media—media that is actually an entire raft of processes critical to the survival of capitalism—either in the hands of vast corporations or the state (which in any case is now openly in bed with the big corporations)…”

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Continued here:
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/11/23/media-complicit-in-shopapocalyse-as-consumers-go-wild/

[Cha]

1. On m$$$m tv..

there's mass advertisement of drugs, shopping, and eating junk.

[demigoddess]

2. i've been on both sides of the street and I can tell you that when you are

living hand to mouth as so many of the middle class etc live these days, you are more likely to shop or want to shop than when you are comfortable in the money department. You feel like you may never be able to buy something new ever again as long as you live so you may as well get it now. And I am willing to bet that many family men who cannot afford health care and other things for their families will spring for a big tv or some other thing that they think will make them happy at xmas.