On the laughable hypocrisy of 'The Office' (via General Electric) telling you what’s best for your health and the environment

April 20, 2010 @ 10:38 pm

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

What Your TV Is Telling You to Do: NBC Universal’s Shows Are Sending Viewers Signals to Recycle, Exercise and Eat Right. Why?

That’s a question I asked myself a few months ago when I was watching one of my favorite shows, “The Office.” I remember getting a funny feeling watching a scene in which office manager Michael Scott asks the employees for ideas on how they might be better citizens via volunteerism. Then a few weeks later, Dwight harangues fellow employees to recycle as a recycling-obsessed mascot called “Recyclops.” As someone who’s watched “The Office” since the first episode, I also noticed that there sure seem to be a lot of episodes in which people get wasted and it’s depicted as a good time had by all (…except once, when white-trash Meredith, the office alcoholic, lights her own hair on fire at a party. Even so, Meredith’s punchlines revolve more around her twisted sexual misadventures more than they do alcohol-related bummers like loss of a job, DUIs or psoriasis of the liver.)

All this stuff has definitely been setting off my “tyranny”/nanny-state alarm. For the benefit of those who read the WSJ for the “business” angle, the article presents this new network marketing tactic as “behavior placement” designed to helpfully influence viewer purchasing decisions by making fictional characters and their behaviors more aligned with the products being advertised more blatantly in the commercials (…Ummm, OK. Good spin, NBC… as in ‘my head is spinning’ from that BS.) WSJ-reading suits will walk away from the article satisfied because this practice is not framed as an issue around individual liberties, government or corporate greed and hypocrisy—it’s just another way NBC is helping advertisers soften up the sheeple before they’re programmed to buy in the slaughterhouses of the fast food restaurants, car dealerships and big box retail stores. “I’m glad I’m in the know about this new way the network and its sponsors are making money from all those suckers,” the suit might assure himself before ordering another round of shots for his clients at the strip club. But anyone who’s sober can see that there’s likely more to it than that.

Dwight from ‘The Office’, or Big Brother?

It’s especially ironic these messages are coming from NBC executives—all employees of General Electric, one of the worst offenders ever in terms of lack of corporate responsibility. GE basically bought NBC as a forum in which to sell their wares, and now, let’s face it, push its propagandist positioning of itself as a “green” company while prescribing best practices for our health and the planet—all while distracting us from the mass-scale damage it actually does to both.

From GE’s Wikipedia entry, ‘Environmental Record’:

GE has a history of large-scale air and water pollution. Based on year 2000 data,[27] researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute listed the corporation as the fourth-largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States, with more than 4.4 million pounds per year (2,000 Tonnes) of toxic chemicals released into the air.[28] GE has also been implicated in the creation of toxic waste. According to EPA documents, only the United States Government, Honeywell, and Chevron Corporation are responsible for producing more Superfund toxic waste sites.[29]

And under ‘Media Deception’:

GE was the focus of a 1991 short subject Academy Award winning documentary, “Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons, and Our Environment“[45] that juxtaposed “GE’s rosy ‘We Bring Good Things To Life’ commercials with the true stories of workers and neighbors whose lives have been devastated by the company’s involvement in building and testing nuclear bombs.“[46]

Is this who you want telling you what to eat responsibly, volunteer and recycle? A giant, polluting conglomerate that does far more environmental damage than good? It should be obvious to anyone that a two-minute cold opener of Dwight asking people to recycle does not make up for all the havoc GE has wreaked on human lives, the environment and human health.

Of course I’m as guilty as anyone for enjoying a few TV shows, currently “The Office,” “Entourage,” “Mad Men.” But for the most part, it’s mostly garbage, with the big network shows certainly being more saturated with state-sponsored talking points about good works and torture being “necessary” when Jack Bauer says so (“24” on Fox) than I see on the paid shows. I don’t know about you, but I get a bit nauseas upon learning that my TV shows contain deliberate, subliminal agendas promoting certain behaviors and attitudes—especially when it’s coming from corporations that actively manufacture products and produce them in a way that actively destroys you, animals and the environment. All of this is done on a mass scale in tandem with token, public-facing “green” initiative posturing that’s nothing but self-serving PR. Remember the Pentagon pundit scandal involving paying civilian and military personnel to positively frame the Iraq war on the TV news shows? Remember the Bush administration spending millions of your tax dollars planting fake news stories to promote its policies? Anyone already notice “behavior placement” on Fox? In these instances, lines are not only being blurred, but crossed.

Upon being subjected to this kind of thing, free-thinking American people everywhere have to ask themselves: Is this really a free country or communist state-run TV? These messages seem to be coming from the nanny state, not advertisers, the vast majority of which want to sell things to you that you not only don’t need, but that are bad for your health, the environment and definitely animals (…for those that care about that last category at all. Even if you care only about the first two, all three are inexorably related. For more information on the relationships between food, health and the environment, may I recommend “The Kind Diet” and “The World Peace Diet” by Alicia Silverstone and Will Tuttle, respectively).

Yesterday it was about getting a library card, the war on drugs, and filling out your census forms. Today, we’re being told to:

Recycle.

Volunteer.

Eat well.

The older and just as hypocritical state-sponsored, under-the-radar PSAs were bad enough, but these new points are enough to make me miss the old days. Can you imagine characters from “Seinfeld” acting in socially responsible ways? Like Jerry volunteering—an activity which, to my amusement, he usually disparaged along with reading? Or George picking at a salad at the diner? They barely cared about being socially acceptable.

Of course recycling, volunteering and eating well are all good things. They are good for others. As a vegan, I’m as happy as anyone seeing ads for soy-based, vegan products hitting the mainstream in the form of TV commercials. But let’s face it, the number of companies that can truly label themselves as being socially responsible are in the vast minority. Most others advertise the same gas-guzzling cars, fat/sugar/starch-laden animal-based fast foods, and booze that destroy your health and the environment every day. So when they infiltrate the airwaves with “behavior placement” meant to keep us all buying and consuming more crap and viewing our corporate mommies and daddies as good citizens, I’ll mind my own counsel, thank you very much—by turning off the TV.

The worst offense of all this state and corporate-sponsored social agenda pushing isn’t that it’s intrusive, annoying and tyrannical. No, the “Office” scenes featuring Recyclops and Michael Scott telling his staff to volunteer more were most offensive because they weren’t funny.