{"id":2903,"date":"2009-11-18T18:19:20","date_gmt":"2009-11-19T01:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.candlelightstories.com\/?p=2903"},"modified":"2009-11-18T18:25:49","modified_gmt":"2009-11-19T01:25:49","slug":"huffington-post-presents-advertisers-commercial-as-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2009\/11\/18\/huffington-post-presents-advertisers-commercial-as-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Huffington Post Presents Advertiser&#8217;s Commercial as News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media\"><script src=\"http:\/\/www.vbs.tv\/vbs_player.js?width=480&amp;height=270&amp;ec=doeDgwMTq7c01-ODhYXV9VOoVRH7_tvp&amp;st=Palladium&amp;pl=undefined\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/div>\n<p>I go over to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/\"><em>The Huffington Post<\/em><\/a>, a site that defines the words &#8216;mess&#8217; and &#8216;indecipherable&#8217; better than any dictionary could, looking for some news, and I come across a story entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2009\/11\/18\/secret-oil-rigs-in-los-an_n_362153.html\"><em>Secret Oil Rigs in Los Angeles Uncovered<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 &#8216;Ho ho!&#8217; I thought.\u00a0 &#8216;Here&#8217;s something interesting and probably full of nasty secret pollution and damage to our health by oil companies!&#8217;\u00a0 And of course I went stumbling right into the fake news trap.\u00a0 Watch the &#8216;documentary&#8217; above.\u00a0 Notice how the young fellow doing the talking and walking is dressed kind of down with his jeans and boots.\u00a0 Notice how the camera has a tendency to swoop to his feet.\u00a0 To show the boots.\u00a0 A lot.\u00a0 The documentary, which purports to uncover the hidden oil rigs pumping crude from underneath Los Angeles, is presented on Huffington as being by <em>Palladium Boots<\/em>.\u00a0 Unless you click on the link, you don&#8217;t realize that <em>Palladium Boots<\/em> is not the name of a fantastic little production outfit making cool films, but rather a boot company selling&#8230; boots.<\/p>\n<p>So now we&#8217;ve got a major news and political opinion site putting up an article that looks like news about hidden oil wells in an urban center, but is really an advertisement.\u00a0 The implication is that we are going to see the documentary confront issues surrounding these wells.\u00a0 Issues like how many children would die if one of these things blew up next to their schoolyard.\u00a0 Or how many people each year will get cancer because of oil wells nextdoor.\u00a0 Instead we get a guy tramping around LA asking insipid non-questions and only hinting at darker possibilities.\u00a0 We get a smattering of LA history and a lot of amazement at how well-hidden the wells are.\u00a0 Frankly, if you&#8217;re in LA for more than 48 hours and don&#8217;t know about the wells, you are hopefully just passing through on your way to Orange County.\u00a0 The real problem here is that a film produced as a corporate advertisement cannot confront real issues because the producers don&#8217;t want to create any real disturbance.\u00a0 So they dodge all the important questions.\u00a0 You&#8217;d think, after watching this ad, that oil drilling in LA is something just dandy.\u00a0 Wonderful!\u00a0 They&#8217;re pumping oil from under junior&#8217;s school!\u00a0 Lovely!\u00a0 We&#8217;re all better off for it!<\/p>\n<p>But we&#8217;re just watching a boot commercial.\u00a0 That&#8217;s it.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not a cool citizen news report or hip internet filmmaking.\u00a0 It&#8217;s just a company hawking its crappy boots to nitwits who think they are learning something.\u00a0 A simple illustration of why this is so bad is to imagine your reaction if you found out that I had been paid by this boot company to write this very blog post.\u00a0 You would never trust me again.\u00a0 So what does that tell us about the Huffington Post site?<\/p>\n<p>A smarter idea for this fake-news documentary would be to film a barefoot reporter who walks into the oil company executive&#8217;s office and politely asks him if he&#8217;d like to sit his own children down next to an oil well for a few years to see if they drop dead of cancer.\u00a0 When thrown out of the oil company&#8217;s offices, the barefoot reporter would stagger down the street begging for a pair of shoes.\u00a0 He&#8217;d end up with a pair of pink stilettos that fit him perfectly.\u00a0 Just like Cinderella.<\/p>\n<p>That would be my fake-news commercial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I go over to The Huffington Post, a site that defines the words &#8216;mess&#8217; and &#8216;indecipherable&#8217; better than any dictionary could, looking for some news, and I come across a story entitled Secret Oil Rigs in Los Angeles Uncovered.\u00a0 &#8216;Ho ho!&#8217; I thought.\u00a0 &#8216;Here&#8217;s something interesting and probably full of nasty secret pollution and damage [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116,163],"tags":[788,789,786],"class_list":["post-2903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-comment","category-opinion","tag-advertising","tag-documentary","tag-huffington-post"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2903"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2911,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903\/revisions\/2911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}