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 The rest of the time is spent with long over emotional interviews about stories that are outdated and irrelevant.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.

Radio

In eighth grade I had to a project that was to write to a congressperson about an issue so I wrote about Clear Channel’s consolidation of radio stations throughout the country and how this was ruining radio I felt. The stations had too many commercials, not enough variety, and played the same songs over and over. Well in the five years since nothing has happened and Clear Channel still is the radio juggernaut that it was then. What has changed are a couple of things. I stopped listening to the radio stations I listened to then so I no longer cared what Clear Channel did. Also when I did listen to the radio in my car I had a new option, The Current. The Current is an alternative station owned by Minnesota Public Radio. In other words there are no commercials, there is tons of variety, and rarely are songs played twice. While as great as this option has been I have found that it is not a million times better than regular radio like I thought it would be. There are problems that I didn’t think would exist with this station. I barely ever know songs that are played and it almost seems that the DJs play songs that are alternative, very alternative just for the sake of being alternative. So while I used to be as opposed to homogenized radio as one could be I have now come to the realization that it isn’t the end of the world and while the radio market could probably use a little more regulation than it currently has it isn’t the end of our country if things stay the same.

Artist Integrety

I don’t think illegal downloading is as a big of a problem as it is made out to be for the top selling artists. Mostly when people download they are downloading one song and not an entire album. This brings me to what I think is a big problem then with these artists. Their music is terrible. They have one catchy song but all the rest is just terrible and annoying to listen to. Soulja boy is a good example of this. He has Crank That for a big hit but all the rest of his songs sound exactly the same and are terribly annoying. This one is one of the most annoying things I have ever heard. I think people are more likely to buy the whole alhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifbum if all the songs are actually good. When an artist is relying on one or two hits to sell fifteen songs they don’t even necessarily deserve to be making lots of money. Artists like that don’t even have very strong fan bases anyways. An artist like Radiohead has a very strong and loyal fan base that is wiling to pay eighty dollars for an album and doesn’t rely on just hits to sell their albums. To me music should be an art and not just about making money. I’m not saying I don’t like those catchy songs and one hit wonders but I am saying that those artists shouldn’t complain if they make one good song and ten terrible ones and it doesn’t sell.

Movies

It seems every decade has a genre of movies that are not very good but many of them are produced in hopes of commercial success. In the 80’s and 90’s there were the action movies that are always rerun on TV that don’t have very good plots but always end up with one guy blowing up a lot of stuff and killing a lot of people. In this current decade though we have come upon the comic book movie, endless sequels and remakes. A few of these have been successful and pretty good. Spiderman was the first big one to hit it off and that movie was a good one. The rest of the movies that were spawned because of this though the same cannot be said for. Catwoman was awarded with a Razzie as worst movie of the year. This is a good example of the blockbuster syndrome in the movie industry. One movie makes it big and then many in the same genre but not nearly of the same quality are thrown out and most of them end up failing because they are bad. It would be nice to see more original movies out too. So many of the remakes that are constantly being put out are no good either. When trying to remake a movie that is already a classic is not already hard enough they are usually put out quick in the hops of making money so they are not very good either. Well last year The Departed was a really good movie and I hope for another one like it this year and it seems like there are some good ones but I haven’t been able to see any yet. Oh well I will soon enough.