Being critical, the way I am, I started thinking about these claims. Are they true? What reason do they have to lie? I still don't know... But this got me thinking about something else. Has the pervasiveness of hyperbolic advertising ruined our ability to believe any claim made over broadcast media?
Think about this for a moment. How many ads do you see that make claims that are either blatantly false or barely tied to the truth? ("Fair and Balanced", "New Cars Starting at a low...", etc...)
Advertising is a mind game, and advertisers (myself included when I'm engaging in advertising activities) employ, and maybe even rely on, tricks of the mind to get you to perform a certain action, be it watch their new TV show, or stop into their car dealership looking for the great deal you saw advertised. However, we, as critical consumers, should know the way this goes...
There's only ONE of that specific car, but it's missing something (like air conditioning and all other amenities), and you'd really rather prefer the much more expensive one, or that TV show isn't really all that great. And it's these disappointments that I think we've come to expect when it comes to responding to advertising.
So now, it's not a hard jump of the imagination to think that because of this, we become accustomed to lies in advertising. Because so much of broadcast media is advertising if some fashion, I think that we've started just expecting all information given out over broadcast media to be false to some extent.
However, if this were truly the case, would people really believe the things the hear and see on television? Somehow, the legions of fans of various cable channels and personality driven entertainment seem to point to this as not being the case, so perhaps, I have it all backwards.
Perhaps, most people actually DO swallow the things on the radio and TV at face value without being critical of it.
I don't know which is worse, quite honestly.
Of course, there's one last option. People may be able to properly discern truth from falsehoods in most cases. Hopefully, this IS the case, but because I've observed that people tend to apply the same behavior patterns once they've developed them in similar circumstances, I can't help but think that there is some spillover effect from either disbelief in advertising claims, or their belief in advertising claims because they believe the other things presented through similar circumstances.
What are your thoughts?
