Think how much deception and grief we would have been saved, if the press had always done that. So, having allocated 5 percent of this column to the full part of the glass, I can spend the rest pointing to the 95 percent of Campaign 2000 that is empty. Things started going terribly wrong when TV became our main information source and politics was put in the hands of marketers. Ads do not employ the human faculty of critical thinking. Quite the contrary, they are designed to shut it down.
Ads are emotional appeals.
They reach into our psyches and press hot buttons. If at first they don't succeed, they do it again and again and again, until they pound into our defenseless cerebral matter impressions of reality that are purest fiction. Thus we are convinced that sports utility vehicles are safe, that junk food tastes good, that we can save money by going out and buying stuff, or that conservatives can be compassionate. Ads, soundbites, thought-stoppers. Over and over.