“This notion that ‘These media companies are just giving us what the public wants!’  No.  They’re giving us what the media companies want; they’re giving us what the advertisers want.  And they’re packaging it in such a way as to make it sound like it is our fault; it’s not.”

–Jennifer Pozner

Giving people “what they want” is the worst excuse for providing bad content.

• We consume only what is provided.
• It is not what people want, but simply what they consume.
• We don’t only consume what we want, but what we despise.
• Often what is consumed is not even close to what we want–it is simply less like what we don’t want.
• I recently purchased a conditioner that was 92% biodegradable.  I actually don’t want 92%.  I want 100%.  But 92% is better than zero.  So I bought it.  Now the retailer believes I like 92%.  I think 92% is actually bad because it isn’t 100%; it isn’t good enough.  But if the only thing that matters is cash, then I must love it.

The truth is that we have abdicated responsibility for our culture.  Now, I’m no puritan.  I actually kind of like a little bit of scandal and a little bit of sexy in my diet.  But we act as if there are only two options:

1. Free speech means we can put anything on the airwaves we want regardless of what it does to us.
2. Me must be moralists that remove “objectionable” content from the airwaves because it is “indecent” to children.

I just don’t think its all or nothing.  I don’t think we have to pretend like free speech means we get to be jerks all of the time.  I also don’t think that we should only care about sex.  Remember the Super Bowl “Wardrobe Malfunction”?  I wasn’t scandalized by a bare breast–it was the simulated rape that got my goat.

Back to my point.

There is another option: we make the producers give better content.  I don’t think the world collapses when we do it.  All it takes is to reorient the conversation.  Jennifer Pozner does just that in the clip above.  She makes it simple:

They produce something, subject us to it, then blame us for buying it.

We allow this to be the case.  We allow all of the responsibility to be on us to avoid it.  We expect them to take no responsibility for producing it.

But…

• They produced the ad campaign or
• They spilled the oil or
• They blasted the tops off of our mountains and allowed the runoff into our streams.

We didn’t do it.  Just because we may benefit from someone else’s destructive action, why are we punished while they are ignored?