Originally Posted by basil
Regarding media political positioning, you're all wrong. Every one of you. Mass media, or rather, the separate companies that make up the industry develop a product. That product is you. You and every single one of your media-consuming fellow citizens are sold as a package (an audience) to companies such as Xerox, BP, Kashi, Netscape (just watched a string of ads on CNN), and many others. The larger the package, the bigger the return. So, the task of competing media companies, at the behest of management and stockholders, is to develop increasingly larger packages so they can pimp you, your family and your neighbors to the highest bidders. And then you buy the product (read: pay to get fucked) with dollars used to provide whatever swill best serves to keep us coming back to the same bat station. Make no mistake - the only thing correlating with programming is what flips your switch, measured with popularity polls, surveys, and measured by marketing teams and trend analysts. No matter what you like - Bush, the US in the UN, building a fence along the Rio Grande, whatever, groovy, just say so and the media feeds it back to you so you can be right and so you can be sold.