As we enter the third 24-hour period of relentless media coverage, the part where even the local TV stations have custom bumpers for the incident with distinctive theme music, let’s make sure we have some things clear.
TV news does not sell news to you.
TV news sells commercial time to corporations and your eyeballs are the poker chips in the card game.
Atrocities (and let’s keep our terminology straight: hurricanes and earthquakes are tragedies, this was an atrocity) are like a Double Bonus Round in the Eyeball Delivery Sweepstakes for FOXNews and CNN and MSNBC.
And all this attention is just incentivizing the next Eyeball Deliverer out there, patiently loading magazines (or mixing fertilizer, or dumping powder into pressure cookers, or studying a flight manual, or filling jerry cans…)
And, yes, ironically this post is just more attention being paid, and by complaining about the problem I make myself a part of it. It’s a hell of a thing.
Tamara Keel, “Terminology, again”, View From The Porch, 2016-06-14.
February 7, 2018
QotD: You are not the customer … you’re the product
Comments Off on QotD: You are not the customer … you’re the product
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
