A media watch group’s take on meianstream advertising. FAIR works with activists and journalists and tries to “advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints.”
The routine horror of the news on Channel One also indirectly bolsters the commercials, which proffer their young viewers a fantastic antidote to all those tragic woes and bloody dangers. Skeletal and nearly bald, a real teenager with leukemia suffers through the agonies of chemotherapy-just after a fictitious teenaged girl (full-bodied, and with all her hair) finds happiness by using Clearasil. Buildings explode and people mourn in Bosnia (with its “brutal and complex story of ethnic hatreds and violent nationalism”)-and then we see the Buffalo Bills, locked up and deprived of lunch by their demanding coach, chomp with furtive relish on their Snickers bars (“Hungry? Why wait?”). And so on.
