Paul,'s Reviews > Fit Bodies Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think and What to Do About It

The more I think about this the madder I get. I hate the fact that I have been tricked (as well as the fact that I was too naive to see it for myself).

Has anybody ever wondered why television is free? We all know that nothing is free, right? And we know that the actors/actresses in these shows are paid large sums of money, don't we? Easy answer, then, advertisers pay for TV. So what? Now, let's think about that for a second. If advertisers pay for TV, then advertisers must determine what goes on TV, at least indirectly, right? Again, so what? Well, it puts some ... interesting ...constraints on television shows. First, in order to get as much advertising as possible, shows must be divided into short segments that are not logically dependent on one another (so we can have a commercial break without disrupting the flow) [A.D.D. anyone?]. Second, advertising never sells products based on facts but on image and emotion because facts take too long. In order to prevent TV schizophrenia, TV shows must to some extent remove any intellectual content. (If you don't believe me, take a history book and at the end of every paragraph put a little one or two sentence advertising slogan "ford ... like a rock" or "the army ... be all you can be", and see what happens. It's pretty weird actually)

Now let's give a little history lesson. Advertising started to pick up steam in America at the beginning of the 20th century because for the first time in HISTORY a nation was able to produce more goods than it could consume. So, the ultimate goal of corporations since that time has been to make us WANT things that we don't want. You see advertising, by its very nature, is amoral. Its only goal is the production of desire for a product. Thus the final result is that everything that happens on TV is an attempt to make us want stuff we don't have, to make us unhappy with ourselves, with the way we look, the relationship we're in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear ... in other words to foster discontent. Again, so what? So what if advertising owns TV? Well, there are two major effects that I see. One is that TV shows MUST do whatever they can do to get people to watch them and they must market to the lowest common denominator. That being said, it should come as no surprise to anyone that sex and violence become more prevalent on TV, that is what people WATCH, and TV shows must have an audience. Second, and perhaps more important, is the trivialization of life and the relativization of truth.

"There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political burden so costly ... that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, 'Now ... this.'" Even our news programs have no interest in objective truth, they must be solely interested in getting viewers so that they can sell razor blades. I fear that we, as Christians, have become a large market, and an easily manipulated one at that. Companies put in us the desire for whatever they wish to sell us and we work our hands to the bone to get the things that they tell us we want, for ourselves and for our friends and families. We never really stop to think, "Why?"

That's enough, I guess. So turn off the computer and watch "The Office", it's a pretty good show .... and I'll see you at wal-mart afterward. :)