Second Blog

For my second blog, I would like to discuss direct/indirect costs in the media using James Potter’s Media Literacy and Media and Advertising by Anup Shah. I want to contrast the idea of the costs the consumer pays for a media product against the idea that the media is selling the consumer as a product.


Anup Shah’s article Media and Advertising is a compilation of various authors that critique the way in which products are being presented to a given audience via advertising. The different authors present many different ideas about advertising such as advertisements disguised as news or as entertainment, product placement in the movies, or even political influence. The part of the article that speaks to me, however, is the section that talks about the consumer as the product.

In this section, Shah quotes Noam Chomsky as saying “[T]he New York Times [is] a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. … You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations.” This idea is interesting to me because according to our book (pg. 98), “The media of books, films, and recordings are supported almost entirely by direct costs to the consumer. With broadcast television and radio, there is no direct cost for exposure to a program, but there is a high cost for purchasing the means to receive a program.”

If we break these two quotes down, we can see that we are paying the media companies to sell us to corporations! To see the grand scope of this revelation of mine, you have to see that the media essentially does not see the viewing audience as living, breathing people; we are property. We are media slaves, and we pay to be so! I think this is why we enjoyed video sites like Hulu and YouTube when they first came out. You know, before the advertisers found out about them and there were no commercials. I think they gained so much popularity back then because we knew in some way, even if it was only subconsciously, that we were free.