Remember that advertisers know exactly what they’re doing. They purposely try to manipulate your thinking, they place their ads carefully; a lot of the time, ads are just a more subtle form of propaganda. And it’s not just the ones on television or in magazines that I’m talking about. The news, if not biased itself, can be tainted by advertisements. The other day in class we were trying to look up a video on a news site of a story about an event in Iraq, and a commercial came on for some investor or something, but what was so funny was that there were nostalgic scenes from the guy on the commercial’s “past in the army” or whatever - of course, it’s a fabricated character, but it’s still funny that as we’re trying to look up a news story on the massacre of Iraqi civilians and (indirectly) the mental breakdowns caused by war, this image of this smiling guy in an old army uniform appears, like, “Golly gee, isn’t it great to be serving my country?” And our teacher was also saying how during the big oil spill, when she was trying to look up news reports online, the commercials that interrupted the story were all of like, BP saying “Oh look we’re doing such a good job of helping clean up the oil spill lol” as if they could somehow save their reputation by making a few videos of them cleaning up after themselves, like, “Hey, maybe if we show how we’re helping out, they’ll forget what we did in the first place!” hahaha no.