Category Archives: Media

A Dreamy Presidential Debate

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By Bill Shein
June 15, 2011

Like dozens of Americans, on Monday night I set aside any number of worthwhile pursuits to watch the first “debate” among seven candidates seeking the Republican nomination for president. It was hosted by CNN, a “news” network that successfully merged the seriousness of the presidency with a Times Square-esque debate stage modeled after a television game show. Let’s say it together: “Classy!”

Watching the candidates amidst red, white, and blue graphics projected onto 4.2 million flat-screen televisions, I quickly felt overwhelming fatigue. The moving camera shots, the awkward perma-smile of Mitt Romney, the habit of Rep. Michele Bachmann to look up at a TV monitor rather than into the camera – it created a powerful anesthetic that I’ve already patented for use during long surgeries.

Soon I was in that half-awake, half-dreaming state the entire nation experienced during the height of the 1990s dot-com boom and the 2000s housing bubble. (And don’t forget the run-up to the Iraq War, too!) The candidates’ predictable blather and the preposterous game-show format began to merge with my dreams, and, more or less, here’s what happened next:

CNN HOST JOHN KING: And we’re back, which means it’s time to ask another incredibly important question. Is it about climate change? Permanent war? Wealth inequality? Nope. Congressman Ron Paul, answer me this: Blackberry or iPhone?

(A cartoon bubble appears over PAUL’s head. It reads, “I have no idea what he’s talking about. ‘Blackberry’ is that tasty little fruit I sometimes mix into my morning oatmeal, along with prunes. An ‘Eye Phone’ sounds like a futuristic contact lens. But I really have no idea. I will, therefore, guess.”)

PAUL: Blackberry?

(The debate continues, with the candidates rambling on and on, ignoring KING’s efforts to keep answers to 30 seconds.)

KING: Will anyone observe the 30-second limit? Even once?

CANDIDATES (together): No!

KING: Okay, just checking. Former Sen. Rick Santorum, throughout this debate you’ve worn a pained expression. Why? Did you undergo dental surgery moments before we began?

SANTORUM: Actually, yes. Four root canals. Without anesthesia. (He motions off-stage.) Right there, back stage.

KING: Whoa. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, do you believe states should choose whether to allow same-sex marriage?

BACHMANN: Yes. That’s for states to decide.

KING: But you support a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, yes?

BACHMANN: Yes, I do.

KING: So, um, that wouldn’t really leave it up to the states, would it? You’re not being consistent, Congresswoman.

BACHMANN: John, as I often tell my 439 foster children, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a long time ago.

KING (exasperated): Yeah, but, well, anyway. Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, when you say that a president needs to “identify the problem” and “get the right people together” to address the issues, what exactly do you mean? Can you be more specific?

CAIN: My point is that we simply need to identify the problem, get the right people together, and then address the issues. And that’s what I’ll do as president! But I won’t appoint Muslims. Just FYI.

KING (after a beat): Um, okay.

(To great applause, the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud appears on stage.)

FREUD: Can each of you please share your feelings about the Weiner?

JAY LENO (appearing suddenly): Hey, stop stealing my gags, Freud!

KING: Mr. Freud, Mr. Leno, please. I’ll have to ask you to leave the stage. We must address important questions! To that point: Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, which do you prefer: “American Idol” or “Dancing with the Stars”?

GINGRICH (removing a jeweler’s loupe from his eye): John, have you ever considered a small diamond stud earring? I think it would look terrific. I’ll buy you one and charge it to my account.

LENO (chuckling): Hey, that’s pretty good. Newt, after you don’t win the presidency, you should write for my show!

(Suddenly, BILL SHEIN appears on stage at an eighth lectern. He is wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt, an enormous cowboy hat, and large, fuzzy, après-ski boots.)

KING: Bill Shein, if elected president, you’ve promised to create millions of manufacturing jobs in just six weeks. How?

SHEIN (modeling his outfit): Hawaiian shirts, my man. We’ve got to get back to doing things that no other country can do. First on that list? The creation of hideously ugly clothing.

KING: And after Hawaiian shirts?

SHEIN (smiling): The return of the fanny pack, brother. It’s going to be huge! While China is wasting time making solar panels and wind turbines, we’ll be cranking out Fanny Pack 2.0 by the millions!

(Cheering audience members rush the stage, lift SHEIN onto their shoulders, and carry him back stage. They pass LENO and FREUD in a loving embrace, an unoccupied dental chair, and a BACHMANN staffer holding a sign that says, “DON’T FORGET TO LOOK INTO THE CAMERA!”)

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Bill Shein believes television coverage of public affairs has reached absurd new heights.

SUPPORT THIS WORK: Help fund distribution of Bill’s upcoming book about democracy reform by making a $2-to-$12 donation here. Thanks to “crowd-funding,” the e-book verison will be available for free. Thanks for your support!

Those Dastardly Deductions

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By Bill Shein
June 11, 2010 

Here’s some boilerplate language from the IRS that Americans and their elected representatives need to discuss: “To be deductible, a business expense must be both ordinary and necessary. An ordinary expense is one that is common and accepted in your trade or business. A necessary expense is one that is helpful and appropriate for your trade or business. An expense does not have to be indispensable to be considered necessary.”

As anyone in business knows, this means that virtually every penny spent on advertising, marketing, and public relations is fully deductible. Every TV commercial. All the newspaper and radio and Web ads. The salaries of marketing staff. And all the money spent on public relations to repair your damaged brand after, say, history’s most massive oil spill – including a $50 million “apology” ad campaign.

This is as true for a local clothing shop running small ads in a weekly paper to The Gap spending $100 million to promote the latest back-to-school fashions. Taxpayers provide a subsidy to both businesses by allowing them to fully deduct these expenses from their total revenue, reducing their tax bill.

Incredibly, the tax code also allows companies to write off any punitive damages a court of law orders them to pay. This was true for the $500 million Exxon paid after the Valdez disaster, and will be true for any fines BP will pay for the Gulf spill. The logic is plain: It is considered an “ordinary and necessary” cost of doing business to violate the law and despoil the environment. That’s equal parts bizarre and insane.

It’s long past time for us to reconsider what’s deductible, fully or partially, as a business expense, and everything should be on the table. In particular, we must reconsider whether enormous global corporations and wealthy chain stores should be permitted to deduct 100 percent of the billions they spend to promote their brands and products – often undermining the survival of small, local businesses.

This huge tax break for business, which is an incentive to create ever-larger enterprises, has also led to a society so steeped in marketing messages, so blanketed by advertising, and so overwhelmed with commercial speech that our view of ourselves and the world has been distorted. By design, today’s sophisticated marketing messages mold our tastes and desires. They target our core notions of self, body image, social status, and happiness. Ubiquitous commercial messaging stokes our insecurities and creates phony “needs” that can be “satisfied” with a purchase.

While a society drowning in these ads is bad enough, the amount of tax revenue lost to this effort is enormous. Yet even in the midst of today’s fiscal challenges, there is no discussion of this issue. Why? In part because what’s left of American print and electronic journalism is largely funded by commercial advertising – a dangerous model for an industry charged with holding “the powers that be” accountable.

Do taxes on the increased profits that result from massive amounts of advertising equal or exceed the revenue lost from the advertising deduction? It’s impossible to know, but it seems unlikely. Indeed, the largest corporations – the ones who can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on saturation marketing – also spend handsomely on tax advice to avoid paying taxes. And the cost of that tax advice is fully deductible, too.

As part of a broader strategy to take back our society from the far-reaching and damaging tentacles of large commercial interests, we need a new model for what’s considered “ordinary and reasonable” in business. Because it shouldn’t be ordinary – and, in fact, it’s entirely unreasonable – to subsidize the commercialization of every corner of our society just to help big companies “move product.”

The next time you see a TV advertisement that aims to make you feel all warm and fuzzy about a multinational corporation, or uses the latest video effects to excite you about a new car or mobile phone, ask yourself: Is the tax revenue lost to this massively expensive, taxpayer-subsidized exercise in commercial speech better spent on something else? 

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To polish his “personal brand,” Bill Shein once rented billboards that showed him rescuing a kitten from a tree. Since he’s not a business, the expense wasn’t deductible.

 

A Troubling Double Standard: Media Coverage of Natural Disasters and War

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By Bill Shein
January 19, 2010

The reasons for heartache after the massive earthquake that struck Haiti last week are too numerous to count. The horrific loss of life, the unimaginable pain and suffering, the distress of fellow human beings is beyond comprehension.

The television news channels presented a steady stream of tragic images and awful video: Enormous piles of dead bodies. Limbs protruding from between the cement floors of collapsed buildings. Babies covered in death shrouds of torn cardboard and tattered cloth. Men and women wailing in agony.

On its Web site, Fox News featured a photo slideshow marked “WARNING: Graphic” with 106 photos of death, destruction, and despair. CNN.com featured a similar slideshow, as did the New York Times and many other print and broadcast news outlets. Anchors and reporters, sometimes overcome with emotion, warned that “some of these images may be disturbing” and that “viewer discretion is advised.”

The images from Haiti inspired an outpouring of financial support and the rapid mobilization of relief aid. They led many to volunteer. They may, perhaps, fuel a long-overdue discussion of the awful history of exploitation and occupation of Haiti by the Great Powers, and how the difficult road ahead must not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Yet the dramatic reporting out of Haiti also raises vital questions about what we see – and don’t see – on American television news. Because while there is no shortage of graphic footage from the scene of natural disasters, we see very few images or video of similar human suffering from man-made war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the reporting from those places, there is no looping video showing the carnage, the dead bodies, the grievously injured soldiers, the orphaned children, the hungry refugees. There is no daily coverage of wounded civilians in hospital beds. There are no interviews with Afghan families in which they are asked detailed questions about the death of loved ones.

There is, of course, plenty of war coverage. But it is quite different from what is broadcast from Haiti. The early days of the Iraq invasion featured dramatic footage of the so-called “shock and awe” campaign. From a distance, we saw enormous explosions. We were shown detailed, 3-D animated schematics of the weaponry used. The Pentagon provided daily video clips showing successful missile strikes on “targets.” But we saw few, if any, people.

It was largely left to foreign media to show graphic video of civilian injuries, of hospitals filled with the injured and dying, of morgues overflowing. In the U.S., this was widely considered “propaganda” that should not be aired. Ever.

This is a disturbing double standard: Human misery and death from natural disasters like Haiti is shown endlessly, almost pornographically. But the bloodshed caused by U.S.-led war remains hidden from view. Why? The answer, of course, is that it is easier to make war when the horror is not widely seen.

Imagine if we saw endlessly looped video of hospitals in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at U.S. military bases filled with the injured, dead, and dying. What if CNN’s celebrity anchors raced to the site of a missile strike, climbed atop the rubble of a house, and held out a microphone to capture the screams of civilians trapped inside? Or if the networks were on hand every day to interview wounded U.S. soldiers waiting for medical treatment in the desert heat? Surely the human drama would be as compelling as what we’ve seen in Haiti, and the information quite useful to citizens of a democracy.

In the stunning 2001 documentary, “War Photographer,” longtime photojournalist James Nachtwey lamented that advertisers don’t want bloody images of war to appear alongside their marketing messages. Yet for the past week, cheery advertisements for all kinds of products filled the commercial breaks during Haiti coverage. Why the difference?

During their coverage, the networks have consistently and appropriately promoted ways to support the Haiti relief effort. Phone numbers, Web sites, and instructions for making donations via text message crawl across the screen. And there’s been a massive response.

What might happen if we saw 24/7 coverage of the truth of war? And the bottom of our screens included the phone numbers and email addresses of those in Washington who make war policy? How would we respond? And what long-overdue discussion might we have?

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Bill Shein likes how Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”