Huffington Post posted a promotional video called A “24″ Christmas: Jack Bauer Tortures Santa Claus.

In it, Santa Claus has been apprehended by the CIA, and Jack Bauer is sent in to torture and interrogate him. Of course, almost everyone is going to click on the video to see if Jack Bauer really does torture Santa Claus.

And, of course, Jack Bauer does not end up torturing Santa Claus. Torturing Santa Claus would make Jack Bauer and “24″ look really bad. And torturing Santa Claus would take away from a central message of “24″, which is that good people are rarely tortured by “the good guys”, instead it is almost always only truly evil criminals who are ever tortured by “the good guys”.

Anyway, I was truly disgusted by this video, and by Huffington Post’s willingness to promote this video, so here is the comment that I attempted to post:

The morally bankrupt Keifer Sutherland makes over 10 million dollars a year promoting torture.

I assume that Huffington Post is against torture, and is against the promotion of torture. So why post a video that promotes the horrible show “24″?

A couple of things about this video:

1. This video takes a lighthearted view of torture. I’m sure victims of torture must find this video hilarious.

2. In this video, Keifer Sutherland (playing Jack Bauer) doesn’t actually torture Santa Claus. The message being that only bad people get the torture treatment.

This is a truly disgusting… and just gives cover to those who feel that as long as they personally don’t support torture, that it is ok to support a show that very effectively promotes torture.

“If torture isn’t evil, then there is no such thing as evil”

Note, Huffington Post is well within their rights to moderate comments, and they should moderate comments to keep out spam and offensive comments. Their comment moderator decided that my comment (posted early on December 19th) was too offensive to allow.

What don’t understand, is why a site like “Huffington Post” which has come out strongly against torture, is so willing to promote and defend pro-torture propaganda such as “24″.

For more on how TV promotes torture see:

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/torture.html

Originally uploaded by yes, spaz.

Lately my anti-TV blogroll has increased substantially.

For some fun reading on TV, anti-TV and Instead of TV check out these new blogs:

Ellen Currey-Wilson – Confessions of a TV-Addicted Mom Trying to Raise a TV-Free Kid

I’m missing all of my shows

Plato’s Cave – The Effects of Television on Humanity, Culture, Society, & the Human Body

Television vs Children – TV is not child friendly and parents deserve to be informed

TV Free Living – Get Out and Live

TV Stinks – finding life away from the television

And, of course, don’t forget these great websites:

Bowling Alone

Instead of TV

Screen Time – Center for Screen-time Awareness

Screen Time – Forum

Trash Your TV – Your Complete Guide to a TV-Free Lifestyle

Turn-off Your TV – Kill Your Television

Unplug Your Kids – Living a TV-free life … with a few crafts and books thrown in!

White Dot – the international campaign against television

White Dot – Forum

Regarding screens in public places, there is a whole website devoted to the subject.

Check out: Media by Choice

For me “screens in public places” was not such a big issue, perhaps because where I live, blaring screens everywhere is not such a problem. But reading the excellent Media by Choice gave me a new perspective. I especially liked the description of the Ray Bradbury story in the Welcome page.

I’ve added a few new pages to tvSmarter.com, hope you’ll check them out.

Playing versus TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/playing.html

Young Children (babies & toddlers) and TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/young.html

My Democracy page had gotten too unwieldy, so I divvied it up into:

Democracy & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/democracy.html

Civil Society & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/civil.html

Propaganda, the News & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/propaganda.html

Covert Propaganda & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/propaganda2.html

Torture & TV

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/torture.html

Please let me know if I should change and/or add anything or any other suggestion.

Jon Hanson has written an excellent takedown of the “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty”.

Here are a few excerpts:

Several weeks ago, as part of its much lauded “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty,” Unilever released “Onslaught,” a video (above) examining disturbing images of women in beauty-industry advertising. The video ends with this admonition to parents: “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”

But is talking “to your daughter before the beauty industry does” an effective solution?

It seems peculiar, therefore, that Dove would offer a film demonstrating the ubiquitous attack of the beauty industry that ends with the suggestion to parents that they are the ones to make a difference by simply talking to their kids. If the industry is the problem, it strikes me as odd that the parents are supposed to be the solution.

Hanson, makes a very interesting point, about parallels with Philip Morris ad campaigns.

Telling parents to talk to their children is not unusual as a public relations Philip Morris Talk to your Kids; They’ll Listen strategy. For instance, Philip Morris, among other companies, has long been pushing that message in its “public service” ads, particularly since the industry began to face a real threat of tort liability in the 1990s. The message seems public-spirited, but most industry analysts believe that Philip Morris is delivering, not a public-service message to parents, but a responsibility-shifting message to the public: kids smoke because of uninvolved or irresponsible parents, not because of anything that Philip Morris has done.

This has been a long-time pet peeve of mine. Whatever the negative messages of TV (or the media in general), the solution that is inevitably trotted out, is that “parents should just talk to their kids”.

There is some evidence that parents talking to their kids about what they see on TV does have a small ameliorative effect. But there is no evidence that such talk eliminates the many negative effects of TV.

Plus, watching a lot of TV with your kids and then continuously lecturing them the negative effects of the media seems like a case of mixed signals. Kind of like serving burgers and doughnuts for dinner (night after night), while at the same time lecturing on the importance of healthy meals.

A simpler, and more effective solution is to just turn-off the TV. For some reason this solution is rarely mentioned.

See also:

“Desperate Housewives and other TV soap operas may help make adolescent girls desperate for a thinness few can healthily achieve, new Australian research suggests.”

http://www.lifeclinic.com/fullpage.aspx?prid=526142&type=1

“A report of the American Psychological Association (APA) released today found evidence that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is harmful to girls’ self-image and healthy development.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070220005051.htm

Study Finds TV Alters Fiji Girls’ View of Body

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/world/study-finds-tv-alters-fiji-girls-view-of-body.html?sec=health

Driving home, I happened to catch part of Michael Pollan’s interview on NPR. He was talking about an article he wrote for The New York Times called “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch”.

His article is about how TV cooking shows have become a big hit in the United States, but that this doesn’t seem to have lead to more cooking, instead Americans are cooking less than ever.

He also contrasts Julia Child’s original cooking show from the 1960’s with today’s much more frenetic shows that emphasize cooking as a spectator sport.

To the question of why people enjoy cooking shows so much, he answered that they provided a “vicarious experience of cooking”, but without the effort and mess.

I really enjoyed his article and interview, here is a quote that, that I think, very much hits the target:

“The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit. It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.”