A Media Presentation and Space Geekery

We had an intersting public speaker at school today.  And for once it was more intersting than just "getting out of a class" interseting, because they were talking about the media influece. 

The presenter was from the "New Mexico Media Literacy Project", and he chatted about various types of advertsing for an hour and a half.  Evedently, the project was started by an guy who worked in televsion news and though the quality of the news had gone down in the 50 years he worked in broadcasting.

So we went though a few ads step by step to see how they mislead to make their products seem better or than people need thier products or to build brand loyalty.   And how both political ads that they showed us lied, or at least extreme exagerations. Adn how marketing ads cant' lie, but can commit exgagerations, and poltical ads can out and out lie.

My favorite lines out of the whole show was that that the teen girl magizines front covers were anti-therpy, and that the little girl was being used to get millions of dollars   from each person who has a Visa card.  And that 5 companies (Disney, Viacom, Universal, AOL Time Warner, and Rudolph Murdock News Corperation) control all of youth culture, and 80% of adult culture in the US. 

And since I'm all media today, here's a story from the <i>NY Times</i>. I was going to copy  from AOL news, but though that the <i>NY Times</i> article was better. 

( Space Capsule Crashes in Utah )

So right now NASA isn't have the greatest of luck with it's probes lately.  The ones that just stay in orbit are fine, it's just that the probes and rovers that have been going smoosh on Mars and now on Earth.