They are the ones who are ignored, and consequently it's their fate. The urban crisis is never presented to us on television except as a situation of menace and fear, to be addressed by building more jails, giving longer and harsher sentences, and supporting the medieval barbarism called executions-the U.S. being the only civilized country that even has such a thing. So much of that is driven by the marketing imperative and by that feature of the marketing imperative that is most profitable, which is violence. Exposure to violence tends to cultivate that kind of insecurity and the approval of so-called strong measures, even repression. But it's more than just commercials, it's programming.
Commercials are the least of it.
In fact, commercials actually present a more diversified cast than the programs, because they're trying to sell to a large number of people, depending on the product and the sponsor. No, the marketing imperative shapes the world that is presented on television, and that shaping begins with infancy. A child today, for the first time in human history, is born into a home in which, as you mentioned earlier, it is no longer the parent who tells the stories, or the school, or the church, or the community. And in many cases around the world, it's not even programming from the native country, but essentially a handful of global conglomerates that basically have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell. That is the great human transformation of the past hundred years.