Documentary from a few years ago. It says kids are manipulated by advertising for toys, fast food, etc. The advertisers can the “nab” these kids for a lifetime. Bwahahaha!
I don’t really see how it’s a problem since a little parenting would go a long ways towards either not having kids watch TV all day long or telling them to be quiet when they throw a fit in Toys R Us. Walter Block had a really good chapter in Defending the Undefendable on advertising I thought. When I was a kid and I watched Cartoon Network and Nick all afternoon, I thought that the ads were annoying actually. Unfortunately this documentary is part and parcel with the San Francisco-model of banning Happy Meals. I for one really enjoyed Happy Meals and would like to thank McDonald’s for providing that form of entertainment to my childhood. “F*&% off” to pinheads in the government and busy bodies in the citizenry who would take that away from other kids.
It’s hard to believe that people see a threat of ‘brainwashing’ from adverts on TV, but they don’t see a threat in the nature of the public education system.
We’re expected to believe that after one has attends mandatory government schooling for hours every day for our most impressionable years, we come out fair and objectively-minded citizens capable of responsibly and equitably exercising political control over the institution that raised us?
But a thirty-second ad on television that a kid sees at the same age will instantly brainwash him into being a corporate slave willing to destitute himself and his family for cheap crap made in China?
I often wonder: is parenting such a neglected art nowadays? Children haven’t got any money: they need to ask their parents. Are parents so weak-willed they cannot even say no when their children ask them to buy something that’s obviously junk? Have parents given up education to the State in such a way they need legislators to fill in for them in every little thing? My mother had a very simple approach to the problem. She didn’t buy any toy for us. Once in a while she gave me and my brother money, dropped us off to the largest toy store in the area and went to the nearby bar to have a coffee. We could buy anything we wanted as long as it was in the budget. We learned to spend wisely: if we bought the flashy junk we wouldn’t have any money left for anything else. We soon learned the flashy junk lost its novelty very quickly and the next trip to the toy store was so far away. We needed to buy stuff that could keep us entertained for as long as possible. We needed buy stuff which lasted more than a few weeks without breaking. Is that so hard? Thinking about it now it probably is: leaving two children to wander the aisles of a toy store with money is probably a huge no-go in present society. You could even be charged with child neglect…
I for one believe that this documentary is engaging in psychological manipulation. If I am a weak-willed person and I’m easily misled by a neat presentation and dramatic music used to signify something ominous (them playing haunting music while showing film of innocent kids) instead of the brute facts, then they are selling me something apart from the informational aspect of the documentary. If they want to avoid manipulating me psychologically, they should present the font and statistics in a white slate in Times New Romans font