If someone had asked me if I believed that satirical news reporting is a mainstream form of culture jamming, i would have to say yes. I feel like shows such as The Rick Mercer Report or The Daily Show are the modern versions of media which criticizes media in a parody-like fashion.
What the show The Rick Mercer Report does is comment on stories in a style that is similar to the news. In the textbook for this course, it says: "Culture jamming is understood as a mode of resistance to the norms and conventions of mass culture that exposes and opposes the media's underlying power structures and ideological messages" (213, O'Shaughnessy). I see satirical news shows such as this one as current versions of culture jamming techniques. The show brings notice to the problems with the actual news that people would not regularly think about by parodying it and exposing the problems.
At one point in the textbook, the author states that "In 2000, Sprite created a television advertisement that told the viewer that they didn't need sports stars like Grant Hill to tell them to buy a soft drink because it was cool"(225, O'Shaughnessy). What the Sprite ad does, is it explicitly displays to the consumer that they are being manipulated by the media. The ad brings about awareness in the watcher that they had most likely already know about if they knew anything about the media. Similarly, on the show The Rick Mercer Report, the host Rick Mercer does a rant about Rob Ford. He ranted about how Rob Ford is a huge mess, yet he is still the mayor of Toronto. We are all aware of the scandalous actions of Rob Ford, however, as long as he is creating the most amount of pros for us as citizens out of the candidates, we will not acknowledge his bad behaviour.
No comments:
Post a Comment