The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that new rules will allow corporations who donate to national parks and forests a more visible presence there. The CSM poses this as a trade-off between advertising and funding. It ignores the deliberate actions of a conservative government that reduces governmental funding to programs like the national park service in order to set up a trade-off that ought not exist.
2 thoughts on “Advertising In National Parks”
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So.
Am I the only one to perceive an irritating contradiction between the dislike of the idea of increased advertising penetration into public commons OOH, when contrasted with the insertion of an egregiously oversimplifying partisan politicization of the matter into the link’s teaser, OTOH?
Jeremy — doing so was an example of precisely the kind of stupid, juvenile, presumptively annoying needless and pointless injection of political bias into news coverage that is helping to marginalize the modern monosource media.
Clue Department: you are not positively promoting your general belief structure when you insult your readers’ intelligences in such a fashion.
Rather, in fact, the opposite. Because in no small part, many of us prefer to use the internet for news coverage in order to avoid a diet of what you just did. Not because we are partisan conservatives, but because, as informed, intelligent, rational people, we are sick and tired of the counterproductively over-simplified presentation of issues for the purpose of partisan political high-school clique socialization.
Capische?
So my advice to you is to leave such stuff out. Because to us swing-voting centrists — the ones you really need to attract, persuade, and activate — it only makes you look like yet another incompetent monosource media blowhard.
I’m going to assume you’re objecting to my characterization of the current government’s spending policies, not the title. If I’m wrong, please correct me.
You may be familiar with the term “starving the beast.” Wikipedia defines it: it’s a conservative political strategy most closely tied to Grover Norquist that advocates cutting revenue as a means to force cuts in spending on programs conservatives disagree with.
Does the federal budget reduce funding to National Parks? Yes. NPR has the story (scroll down to the environmental section for details).
“Starve the beast” is an acknowledged political strategy. According to the OMB discretionary tax cuts are a major cause of budget deficits. Budget deficits are used to justify reduced spending for National Parks, and reduced spending for National Parks are used to justify the need for increased recognition of corporate sponsors in parks.
So the point I was trying to make is that the decision the CSM implies we should make, more ads or more funding, obscures the real issue, and that the CSM is falling prey to a deliberate political strategy. The real choice is more taxes or less funding.
I don’t think that’s a, “…presentation of issues for the purpose of partisan political high-school clique socialization.” Perhaps I oversimplified and assumed readers would understand what I was referring to, but it certainly wasn’t without factual basis.
A couple more points: this site is not, “the commons” unless you’re going to argue that, say, the Republican Party’s website is the commons and that they should be expected not to pollute it with “partisan” opinions. This site is also not journalism — it’s really just a directory for articles that I and a few associates find interesting, plus some really cool science fiction. Finally, this site is not a political party. I don’t need to attract, persuade or activate anybody, and I have no aspiration to do so.
I presume you’re reading the site because you find the other articles interesting. I sincerely hope you’ll continue to do so. But, and please believe I mean no offense, I’m not going to avoid posting articles I think are interesting and commenting on them as I see things just to please you. If you’re so sensitive that the relatively infrequent political articles on this site drive you and readers like you away, then I guess I have to accept that as the cost of being true to my beliefs.