I will have to try very hard to keep myself from cursing furiously as construct these sets of thoughts. For a long time I have thought there are fundamental problems with the way news is dispersed on television. Let us say we are watching the news. Specifically the national news: it often discusses SERIOUS events that might have a direct impact or that viewers might be seriously attached to mentally. You hear a serious story, ends with a note, the audience is thinking something serious and all the sudden your brain gets raped with an impaling barrage of nonsense about how important it is to buy soda, food, or whatever else. This might seem like an old tired rant, but let’s describe a similar situation that can occur all the more disturbing and mentally insulting.

I was reading an article about a deadly explosion at one of Burt Rutan’s (of SpaceShipOne fame) so-called “space pads” at the Mojave airfield in California. The article titled “Blast at desert spaceport kills 3″ and it seemed the death count had gone up since I last read about it. For me this story is important because Rutan has repeatedly mocked NASA for spending so much money compared to him. He seems to fail to realize he was able to use decades of information and technology developed and paid for by NASA and other government means, including all the billions of dollars spent over the decades. Safety is one thing NASA has been criticized; yet for all it has achieved you might say the death toll is quite low. To me it seems a new stretch of freeway will cause more fatal accidents than has occurred in the history of NASA. Will Burt continue to brag about his shoestring budget now that 3 of his comrades have died while his operation has achieved very little in practical terms since 2004?

Lets examine what I will find in this CNN article. It is flanked on the right by a jumpy flash advertisement urging the reader to purchase a Nintendo Wii game immediately under the guise it will “train your brain”. So big deal I can try to ignore what is an ad to the side because it is not part of the content. You will see there is a tempting link to “watch the aftermath of the explosion” which I thought would be a way to glean what type of explosion and what the area was being used for. Instead of seeing what I expected I saw a fucking ape grinning and giggling while carrying a surfboard and a blond beach bum character looking at the chimp with raised eyebrow. I was so disgusted, enraged, insulted, and betrayed. This is CNN, a trusted name in news. Why would it be in CNNs interest to barrage me with unrelated material the very first moment I lay eyes on their YouTube knockoff video streamlined video feed? When I view the cable channel I can at least wait and come back after the commercials are over, but not the case with this. I could wait for 20 minutes, click on the video link, and the totally unrelated and insulting advertisement would play. It might be less than 20 seconds long, sure, but how long is the video stream content? I don’t know because I did not get that far. I tried clicking back on my web browser to get back to the article but when the page navigated back, the video feed floated in the article’s way. I had to go back to my home page to rid my senses of the drivel.

This is a huge commercial to content ratio that video providers are trying to push on YouTube like services. It is the same thing with AdultSwim’s website. A 2 minute ad every 5 or so minutes of content (AdultSwim of course owned by the same company as CNN: TimeWarner) That is a far higher ratio of commercial time than would be on television. Also the viewer is forced to watch it or abandon (or seriously disrupt) their computer experience completely to try and avoid it. The owners of the material might think: great the viewer is FORCED to pay attention and the advertisers will love that. Advertisements are a disgusting and immoral means of funding our news and television (or equivalent entertainment and information). Look at the BBC website. No ads. Watch TV in England, no ads. Watch TV in Quatar: no ads. Is anyone out there stupid enough to use advertisements as a trusted way to get information? Yes! The typical average user has no choice but to: the advertisements are IN THE WAY of the content (what people WANT to watch). Text ads like google have been so successful because they allow a moral way to combine content of a creator with minimal interference on the user experience. It seems like a step back doesn’t it when advertisements had to conform to strict expected standards? Advertisers have long relied on deceiving people or forcing people into watching content. It’s ugly, its immoral, and we put up with it? There should definitely be regulation on how advertisements are handled by video content providers on the internet else the providers will just continue to deceive and trick users the same way CNN did to me (and will do to you too).

Posted by admin in Effyou