"Washington Post Promotes Dickensian Marketing Experiment on Poor Children."

[SusanCalvin]

FAIR is right, this is disgusting.

http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58&id=dcd7c5a376&e=66f9c91e8b

The Washington Post offers readers a chance to watch impoverished children taunted with a cruel choice.

In America, as a rule, we shame the poor, ignore the poor, blame the poor for being poor, mock the poor and do little to nothing to protect the poor. Increasingly, however, a new trend has emerged: using the poor as props in shoddy “inspirational” viral content. One such effort was recently featured in the Washington Post (12/18/15), and is as bad as such things get:

These Low-Income Kids Were Given a Gift for Their Parents and for Themselves. But They Could Only Keep One.

[Dustlawyer]

1. It's like the two rich old men betting a dollar on whether Dan Ackroid, one of their successful

stock brokers would come out on top over Eddie Murphy, a homeless man when their positions were reversed.

Now I know how it felt as Rome burned.

[SusanCalvin]

2. Oh, bingo!

[PADemD]

3. Contacts

To make matters even more cynical, the effort—while in conjunction with the “marketing specialist” at the Atlanta Boys and Girls club—was designed to promote a schlocky, third-rate corporate network called UP TV. A media channel “dedicated to uplifting programming,” it’s owned by $1 billion private equity group, InterMedia Partners. Their senior vice president of marketing, Wendy McCoy, was “amazed” that the poors can be selfless:

UPTV

http://uptv.com/contact/

InterMedia Partners, LP

http://www.intermediaadvisors.com/about-us/

http://www.intermediaadvisors.com/contact-us/

Leo Hindery, Jr. is an American businessman, author, political activist and philanthropist. Hindery is Managing Partner of InterMedia Partners, a New York-based media industry private equity fund

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Hindery#Politics

[Recursion]

4. It's awful, especially because there's a better way to do basically the same thing

As this Ikea Spain ad shows. Same "uplift porn"; much less cruel to the kids.

[Ed Suspicious]

5. We are hunger games.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

6. "Poverty isn’t a marketing gimmick, it’s a scourge, a cancer and a national shame."

The rich consider it to be a motivator.

[Liberal_in_LA]

7. Awful