From Where I Sit REALITY, HEROISM, AND CHARADE
	MARCH 2005

by Richard Koscher, Publisher

The new TV season is off and running in high gear. As always, broadcast channels are providing a mixed bag of productions, ranging from laudatory to execrable (e.g., from “Lost” to “The Swan”), and from beastly to heavenly (e.g. “Fear Factor” to “Joan of Arcadia”).

I’ve become a compulsive viewer of the gripping show, “24.” During the broadcast I sit like an excited child in front of the TV. For 60 minutes Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is the big hero in the counter terrorism world the show portrays. My phone is turned off and I put all distractions aside. I can’t talk to anybody or pay attention to anything but the show during that wonderful hour. It grabs my attention, holds me enthralled, and doesn’t release me until the end credits. If you haven’t seen “24” yet, I recommend that you rent the DVDs for the first three seasons and get down to work.

The thing I like best about the show is the obvious appreciation the producer displays for his fans. For example, in one episode a telephone displayed a number other than the faux 555- exchange commonly used in shows and movies. Instead, the display showed the actual cell phone number for the show itself. Fans were free to get the number off the display and actually call the show with a chance, at least, of talking to actors actually involved in the show. A great idea! The clock is ticking, so start watching it if you haven’t been doing so!

The “24” show provides a welcome counterpoint to the wave of reality shows currently flooding the broadcast channels. I’m a loyal fan of “The Apprentice.” (Donald, in case you read this, I haven’t applied yet but as soon as you start your own “Trump Magazine,” I’ll get on the show and show you how to do this!) Most reality TV, however, seems to be aiming for an audience several levels below least common denominator. “The Biggest Loser,” for example was itself a big loser, in my opinion. How much food did the show waste in forcing contestants to build food pyramids using only their mouths?

At the same time that most of these reality shows were disgusting us in this fashion, news channels, only a single click away on our TV remotes, carried haunting pictures of thousands of hungry children left destitute by the tsunami disaster. Those news articles carried accounts of the real heroes in our culture. “Doctors Without Borders,” for example, mobilized their people in a couple of days to get on scene with medical services so desperately needed by those poor people. Good Samaritans all over the U.S. dropped everything, maxed out their credit cards, left their lives behind, and flew into the disaster region to do anything they could to relieve the suffering of the people. Articles about those people constitute the best of reality TV; those people are the real heroes. Sorry, Jack Bauer, you’re not even close!

For the most part TV turns on fiction — whether the straight-forward fiction of “24”-type shows, news programs that find some spin to put on news that fictionalizes it — distorting it both from the right and the left, or the other kind of fiction embodied in such advertising phrases as “I’m lovin’ it.” (After “Super Size Me,” nobody really should love McDonald’s anymore) Who believes that an online mortgage company really does refinance homes for nothing? These home financing TV ads are paid for by companies that often provide overpriced loans, burdened by bogus fees, and aggressively marketed to people who can least afford them under the fiction that they save people money.

Not everybody is foolish enough to be taken in by such falseness. Everybody knows you can’t really drive a Nissan to the end of the world. There’s an underlying lack of honesty that taints the entire TV advertising media. For example, 43 percent of people in a recent survey conducted by Media Choices identify magazines as the medium they "trust and believe," as opposed to only 32 percent for TV. The figure plummets dramatically for Cable TV and the Internet. Even more significantly, the same survey shows that 44 percent of respondents say they often purchase a product or service as a direct result of the advertising in magazines as opposed to only 34 percent who chose TV ads.

So next time you are in the position to take out an advertisement for your product or service, think about how trustworthy you might come across on TV, which will cost you an awful amount of money. If you want to reach people in East County with your advertising message, call us at 925-634-7927. We’ll give you a great suggestion about this!