Page 34 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Advert s ng and Persuas on | 1

reasons, and because of the high cost of airtime, campaign reformers advocate
that corporate media outlets should provide “free time” for political candidates
to better serve the public interest and to disentangle the candidates from the
special interests, which are often the ultimate funding sources for expensive ad
campaigns.

swEaTshoPs anD ThE EnvironmEnT
It is frequently asserted that we live in a postindustrial society with an econ-
omy driven by information systems and symbolic culture. Advertising is cer-
tainly part of that symbolic culture, but commercial messages are, most of the
time, selling goods, the products of industrial production, even though such
commodities are often produced in other, less developed countries. Americans
for the most part are not exposed to the factory conditions and the exploita-
tion of workers who toil under extreme conditions in underpaid jobs. Nike has
long been criticized for refusing to pay a fair wage in countries such as Indone-
sia, Vietnam, Mexico, and China, even though its advertising campaigns feature
powerfully humanistic visions of individual liberation. Writers such as Naomi
Klein have documented the exploitation of cheap labor markets by American
companies and popular brand labels. It can be said that advertising creates a
symbolic world that surrounds everything from trainers to sports gear, from dolls
to toys, in a fantasy of consumer culture, which removes products from the un-
pleasant realities of their production. Left uninformed about corporate global
practices, the consumer is more susceptible to commercial persuasions. Public
interest advocates, human rights organizations, and labor groups such as the
Workers Rights Consortium have pressed for external monitoring of factory
conditions in countries around the world, and these proposals, together with
environmental concerns, have been brought to bear on international trade orga-
nizations and the major economic summits of the developed world.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism seemed to
hold the promise of well-being and economic security to a Western world eager
to achieve a standard of living unparalleled in human history. Indeed, early ad-
vertisers were often visionary utopians who advocated for personal growth and
spiritual attainment. By the twenty-first century, the promise of industrial pro-
duction heaves under the weight of an environmental crisis, including air and
water pollution, toxic by-products, and the destruction of human environments
as well animal habitats. The unanticipated and unwanted side effects of indus-
trial production are now widely understood, such as the extravagant depletion
of global resources, and global warming, the consequence of greenhouse gases
discharged into the atmosphere due to an unsustainable level of energy use.
Thus far, with only a few exceptions, advertising has not been able to come to
terms with the need for conservation and more ecologically sound, environ-
mentally friendly corporate practices. Instead, ads have used the beauty of the
natural world in images of nature as just one more “selling hook.” The extraor-
dinary imagery of pristine landscapes used to sell SUVs illustrates this point.
These vehicles have become, for critics, the symbol of conspicuous consumption