Advertising, ad campaigns, ad agencies, and the people that make it happen

I find it somewhat amusing to read that some U.S. Army generals are having a problem with all-too-graphic scenes on "24" -- those fictional torture scenes that are seemingly giving new recruits the wrong ideas. Fox makes the usual inane claim that the show is there to "entertain." The generals warn that U.S. Army cadets might believe those "24" scenes are close enough to being real, so the cadets have a hard time differentiating between the inhumane methods on "24" and more subtle interrogation methods. - guess they mean waterboarding! - Yet no one seems to be addressing the real problem the rest of the world has with US television’s coverage of what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Namely, if you watched it for the next ten years, you’d never see any dead or injured people. You see blown up cars and buildings, but no dead bodies. The networks claim that the images are too graphic. But apparently, Jack Bauer sticking knives in people and shooting off their kneecaps is entertainment. If you want to see what’s really happening in Iraq, you have to watch European TV news, or go to their web sites. Am I the only who finds a disconnect here?

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