The Most Obnoxious Trends in American Advertising and News

One clue about how a society is going and what direction it's taking is advertising. People and companies spend fortunes in advertising every year, every month, every week. Just a cursory look at what's being advertised will tell you something about the society we are living in and its values. Another indicator is to see what the mainstream media is paying attention to. That is even scarier and more obnoxious to me than the advertising indicators. In a sense, they both tell us what is important to citizens and what the public is buying in terms of both physical items and social and political concerns.

Look at the news. It used to be that the news was really news--something that was going to affect our lives politically and socially. Every time a news story gets "hot" it is sucking the life from stories that are important in less sexy, less "tabloid" issues. The impending collapse of social security and Medicare, the horrendous income tax mess, any real discussion about how to deal with the Middle East--all these are blithely shoved aside by a constant and repulsive explosion of parroting broadcasts about Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears and the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I find this not only repulsive and obnoxious, but, frankly, very scary. More and more important issues are ignored while tabloid issues take front and center. More and more we see the same phrases bandied about by newscasters who cry "tragic" with regard to Anna Nicole Smith and "hot item" with regard to Paris Hilton. And these stories go on for weeks, taking up entire news cycles that ignore more important issues. The frightening thing about this is that evidently people are watching this junk, and this is really scary to me because it means they're not demanding that news broadcasters get back to reporting about matters of some importance. In a sense, the news itself has become one big advertising medium because tabloid issues sell papers and media.