The Race for Extreme
“Catastrophic Blizzard”
It was two weeks ago when media announced horrible winter weather with huge loads of snow. What then came was rather normal winter incidents, because there were road problems in some regions, some towns in North Germany were isolated for a few hours, and in my region everything was totally normal, or even more harmless than normal.
However, the reports about it were hyped like hell, even in the so called “reliable news”. A reporter was standing somewhere in the snow and talked about plow men who removed the snow to a village were a young woman was getting a baby or an older one needed medical help. As if this had not been there every year! We’re seeing snow every year, we’re seeing cut off villages very often and—guess what—sometimes there’s even no electricity for some hours!
I can just repeat myself and say that it seems Germany is waiting for an apocalypse. Probably, it’s not the people who are waiting for this, but rather the media, because they always need to increase their viewer levels. This is easiest achieved by reporting about horrible incidents, unbelievable events and maybe also an upcoming apocalypse (without making the mistake to name it directly, because otherwise you would be called a Nostradamus and become noncredible).
TV superlatives
First Germany, then the world
You can also see this will for ever more important news in an advertisment for a TV movie. A German TV station is advertising a movie called Gonger 2 as “world premiere”. Now guess where that movie comes from: It is a German production for exclusively this TV station and it was never released in any other country. Therefore, the correct description would be just “premiere” or “Germany premiere”.
Moreover, they started calling their evening movies “blockbusters”. Of course, now this is not enough anymore, so they came up with the term “superblockbuser” for the same type of movies. I am already wondering if they do not even recognize that there are not any “blockbusters” anymore, so there cannot be a even higher level. Probably, the producers of the advertisment know it, but since the usual audience will not sense they do not care.
Oh my god, he will die!
Watching other TV series it is always the last chance if something finally gets done. There is only one last chance to rescue a specific person. Some series started with a nice concept, e.g. helping companies or restaurants to become better, but then they also surrendered to the lovely sound of emotion. They soon started to show only people who were deadly sick, who lost a son or suffer from some other stroke of fate.
It is just disgusting to use the sorrow of people for one’s own income, to increase the ratings. Moreover, it deadens tactfulness and makes viewers become dumb which is then reused by the media to avoid the need of new series. Instead the same sentences are repeated over and over, even only one or two days later.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
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