Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kibitzer 
Now here's an unreasonable suggestion: Why don't people just watch the damn show before voicing their learned comments about its content?
That's far too important a question to be left to languish rhetorically. Here's a an attempt at an answer…
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kibitzer
Why don't people just watch the damn show before voicing their learned comments about its content?
Because the alleged content plays a barely-audible second fiddle to the nature of the show itself. Forgive the cliché, but the medium really is the message, and the medium exists to manipulate the flow of wealth. Any other results are merely side effects.
"Nightline" is an advertising vehicle created by ABC, which is owned by Disney, which is substantially dominated by the Jobs estate, which is indistinguishable from Apple itself, all of which are corporate abstractions the sole, amoral purpose of which is to turn anything and everything into money. Consequently, every word, image, thought, feeling, notion, and impulse Nightline conveys is first, foremost, and always an ad. The many-armed, multidinously-fingered, and infinitely-manicured corporate media goddess can no more analyze nail salons than a mirror can examine itself. This severely limits what we can and should expect of the "content." (Forgive the precious quotes - it's fatal to for a moment forget that the purported content of such efforts is nothing of the sort.)
All corporate-sponsored communication is advertising, and advertising is by definition anything presented to you that the presenter might profit. All advertising is manipulation, and to approach corporate manipulation without first asking who is doing what to whom and why is as irresponsible as it is naive. Such naiveté guarantees being rendered effectively unconscious before the first seductive notes of the mood music are even heard.
To consume media without examining the nature of the source is to listen to a schizophrenic without considering the nature of schizophrenia. To ever face a television without first asking what it is, why it exists, and how it is you've come to be looking at it is to become one of the zombies or vampires the screen is currently so fond of showing us. It's no more inappropriate to dismiss out of hand the notion that Nightline can tell you the truth than it is to decline to allow a lumberjack to style your hair with a chain saw.
Most of what Nightline can and can't tell us about working conditions in Apple's Chinese factories or anything else is determined first and foremost by what Nightline itself
is. What it actually says is trivial by comparison, and to listen to it unprepared can only result in being misinformed.
