Campaign Ads Create New Species of Zombie!

Campaign ads, we all are subjected to them, but do they really do anything for us? Campaign ads can make us dizzy when we watch too many of them, all that debating and hashing the other side just gets old. Just like this cartoon portrays, we all sit down to take a moment to look at what each candidate brings to the fight, but eventually we become overwhelmed. With campaign ads always tell us how bad the other candidate is, how do we know who is actually going to do anything? Candidates spend a decent amount of funding creating ads that specifically put the other candidate in a bad light, but why do they never fund causes? It's mind boggling to stop and think about all the ways campaigns could be made. Yet it still never fails that candidates focus on the bad and the ugly sides of each other. There may be an occasional ad that represents what they plan to do with your vote for them, but with all the negative ads floating around can you really believe them? It's enough to definitely make your head spin.

With so many promises being thrown at us, when is it time to just turn off the debates? Opposing sides throw a multitude of good and bad promises at us as voters and sometimes it gets hard to sort out who is doing what. Eventually we get so much information thrown at us that we just want it to stop. Once we reach this point though, it becomes even harder for us to decide who to vote for. In some cases when we reach this point we just decide not to vote, because both parties seem just as bad as the other. With so many promises candidates are throwing at us, it can be hard to determine who to go with, especially when candidates debate in harsh black and white conditions. Do we give in to lower pay so we can have lower taxes or do we settle for peace and high taxes? The decisions are hard and definitely make us weigh in a lot on what we think we could handle and what we have no toleration for.

With all these ads, debates, and promises, it's no wonder we are becoming political zombies. The overwhelming amount of choice over who is the lesser of the two evils that each side portrays can sometimes make us revert to our core political views. We end up just being a zombie to our political party and in turn voting for our party to win the election. With so much negativity floating around on the political fields it's a wonder that more of us have not already become zombies. Next time you sit down to watch political ads think about what they are not showing you. What the general purpose of the ad is besides the obvious defacing of the opposing side. You may be surprised by the techniques they use to deface each other and just how bad it makes them look.

Media's Menus.

Media, it's our lifeline to the outside world, the world that never seems to stop whirling about. Day after day we check our smartphones, Internet sites and of course sit in front of our televisions to be fed the latest news that is floating around Washington and the world. Media is our main means of mass communication, but does it always give us the whole picture? Though you may not think about it while watching your daily dose of news, those stations you watch do have a slight bias, some more than others. Media tends to literally spoon feed us information that we want to confirm and support our own political views. Of course this takes a little searching on our part to find media stations, websites, and other sources that support our views. Yet once we have found these comfort zones, we only shy away when we need to confirm to ourselves that our politics is the superior view. Yet we can't give all the blame to the media we surround ourselves with, we carry our own bias as well. Media is basically an enabler for us to get more of our view confirming information faster and more often. Like the cartoon above suggest media does spoon feed us but note that "we" the character in the cartoon, prepare ourselves for this almost every day ritual. Media can be viewed as a restaurant that we come to everyday and eat the exact same meal. There may be those days when we try something new from another restaurant and just don't like the meal at all, so the next day we again go back to that restaurant where they know us by heart.

Out of all the media we use to compile information from, television can be the most controversial. We can watch the same story on three different stations, all the while those three different stations give three almost completely different takes on that story. This is because television is based mainly on visual aids and visual aids are extremely easy to manipulate. When your argument is almost based solely on visuals it's very easy to cut out specific aspects that you would not necessarily want the public to see on your station. Television stations can easily manipulate footage they have captured and they replay us only what supports that stations overall view. Although we as viewers would argue that our stations have no bias, they are there, whether we want to admit it or not. Television may not be our number way of viewing news anymore but we cannot exclude those same stations websites. Media may be moving past watching news on television but we still watch news on the web. If we get used to watching a specific television station, it is more than likely that we use that stations website and maybe even follow them on Twitter or Facebook.

Just because the media has started to fall away from the use of television does not mean that the web is free from this media bias. Television stations post videos of their shows and other videos of topics that they covering. These videos are just as likely to be skewed as television. Media in all its forms has complete control of what they chose to show, just as we have control as to what sources we chose to trust and watch. Media has been skewing our views for years. Will we ever ask ourselves what we are not getting from our trusted stations? Or we will continue to put on our bib and sit in front our trust media sources and be spoon-fed the information we seek.