Down With Ads!

If we could turn television into a commericial-free zone, we would do without loud and flashy ads that:-

1) Equate possession of expensive products with excitement and fulfilment.
2) Often present sleek new cars as thinly veiled vehicles of exciting thrills.
3) Portray the power to buy as the power to determine one's destiny.
4) Supply young people with an endless array of role models who are fixated on buying, owning and displaying fashionable possessions.
5) Glorify business executives for using the latest computer technologies to show how savvy they are.
6) Correlate the most up-to-date purchases with passionate intensity, charisma and personal depth.
7) Pioneer in the realms of illogic by insisting that people can become uniquely themselves by buying what many others are buying.
8) Convey to viewers that they are only really alive when they are shopping or showing off what they've bought.
9) Perpetuate the notion that people should be preoccupied with what to purchase and how to satiate themselves whilst giving short shrift to deeper values.
10) Treat the appearance of a woman's body as the most important aspect of who she is.
11) Bolster the prevailing media images of gender roles by showing men and women acting in stereotypical ways.
12) Extol as wonderful, in armed forces recruitment ads, the training of earnest young people to operate weaponry to kill other human beings.
13) Desecrate some of the finest rock-and-roll songs of the 1960's and 70's by using them as soundtracks to sell everything from cars to running shoes.
14) Encourage people to spend beyond their means, even if the result is intractable credit-card debt.
15) Reinforce the idea that everyone has, or should have, a price ... by featuring a range of athletes and creative artists who enthusiastically urge us to spend money on commodities that are clearly of minimal importance.
16) Mock people who don't fit in with the crowd because of how they look or what they own.
17) Freeze the frames of television viewing with constant messages that we should keep wanting to buy, buy, buy ... without bothering to ask why.

Television without commercials? It sounds like a dream come true. But such a turn of events would hardly clear the air. After all, the programs would still remain, and they too deserve close scrutiny; many of the same values proclaimed by commercials are implicit on TV shows that fill our homes.