Public Relations

Cigarette companies have one of the strangest public relations jobs. The product that these companies sell will eventually kill the users if used right. Yet they have to also make themselves appear good by warning how smoking is bad. So they have to advertise for and against their products at the same time. The companies that provide products that are supposed to help people to quit smoking also have an odd job. If their products are used right their costumer base would disappear. Maybe if advertisers want to figure out how to be more effective they should look at cigarette companies because arguably they are very good at getting young people to smoke albeit they have a product that once you start using you have a physical need for it. I don’t think there is any other industry that actually is so conflicted in the fact that they have to tell people to not use their product. These companies also have ads that make their product appear to be many things. Sexy, high class, cool, fun and hip you name it and the cigarettes have an image to present to the public. Due to a lawsuit they also have to provide ads against themselves creating a public of image of nasty, disgusting and deadly. I would imagine the PR people for these companies must be very highly paid and good at what they do to be able to continually gain new costumers while trying to get old costumers to quit or never start in the first place.

Morning News

Only the nightly news can be taken seriously. NBC’s Today Show is a joke. When I was kid every day when I woke up and went downstairs for breakfast the today show was on. I watched it pretty much every day too until high school and then I started to realize how dumb it was. They spend about tow minutes out of every hour covering stories that are actually important. The rest of the time is spent with long over emotional interviews about stories that are outdated and irrelevant. A lot of time is wasted doing things that are supposed to be funny but really aren’t. The best part is where in the world is Matt Lauer and that only happens once a year and doesn’t have anything to do with news at all. This segment would be better if the travel channel picked it up and turned into a series of its own. This and other morning “news” shows are a good example of the news as entertainment problem. Rather than covering actual relevant events they try and cover human interest stories that were never terribly interesting to me or do things that may have some vague connection to a current event and try and make it entertaining. Even the nightly news isn’t all that great to watch. There will be four stories maybe on the national news then a bunch of human-interest stories. Basically I find the television news very hard to relate to and not terribly relevant to me.

Internet

The Internet has revolutionized college student’s lives. It has made it infinitely harder to stay focused, easier to do research and a lot easier to kill boredom. Addictinggames.com has given me hours of entertainment although at the expense of my grades I fear. Collegehumor.com is always there for me when I need a laugh. I don’t think today’s college students could imagine dorm life without the Internet for Facebook. Even the school relies on the web for class registration and many other needs. It is impossible for me to imagine what it would have been like to go to college without the Internet. I imagine a lot more secretaries and such would have been needed to get paperwork done. Having the Internet depending on how it is viewed has greatly improved colleges in many ways by improving the amount of research that can be done and for students allowing them to be more easily connected and give them entertainment. People who went to college years ago may argue that it isn’t good in ways that students don’t have the sense of community that there once was, that they can sit in their rooms and talk to friends and go on their computers for entertainment rather than going out and meeting new people. The ease with which classes can be registered for now and grades can be distributed must be a lot easier. In fact this assignment wouldn’t even be possible without the Internet showing how much more than anything that the Internet has added to the culture of America and the colleges.

Television

Today as I watched the Vikings game I felt an unusual surge of anger. It was unusual in that it was stronger than my normal anger that is constantly raging. This was caused by the stupidity of the football announcers during the game. Maybe it is just because football has such long periods of inactivity that the announcers end up saying stupid stuff or maybe it is just because they are dumb but I seriously couldn’t take it. They invent obscure records that aren’t that impressive to make the game more interesting. Like who cares if this guy has the most touchdowns at the Metrodome on the fourth of November. That isn’t really that impressive. And the programming is so controlled by advertising it is ridiculous to me. Any amount of time over thirty seconds is instantly zapped away to commercials not to mention the planned breaks and then to have to listen to two doofuses talk about how much they like that networks shows is enough to make me cry. I mean I really respected Bob Costas as an announcer until I saw him try to be funny. In the two minutes of programming that the network allowed some analysts between commercials they had one of those old electronic football games and Bob was going to do it and it didn’t work. So he started shaking it around, “There they go!” Then the forced laughter of the other guys made me sad. It was just so dumb. Watching the combination of announcers on Fox of Jimmy Johnson, Terry Bradshaw, and Howie Long I actually felt myself getting dumber. I wish the networks could figure out a system to show commercials only in between commercials and that the league could speed the games up so 1. We don’t have to deal with as many commercial breaks slowing the game down and 2. Not have to deal with the dumbass announcers for as long and have less non-game studio programming.