Kulak, advertisements, and war crimes
Kulak Revolt of theMotte infamy had an interesting essay recently on media advertisements which is about 30% too conspiracy theorist for me, so I'd like a sanity check. I'll also be summarizing it down to a central bullet point, because it's very stylistic, which I dig but most people don't.
So, uh, why are there Raytheon ads on CNN? And that sounds kinda dumb but...I'm not gonna buy a hellfire missile. No one I know who watches CNN is going to watch buy a hellfire missile. Maybe, like, some generals or congressmen are going to buy a bunch of hellfire missiles but it seems really, really inefficient to spend millions of dollars on CNN ads instead of just funneling it into a super-PAC or something. So why the devil do I keep seeing Raytheon ads on CNN and MSNBC and FOX when I'm at the gym.
And Kulak's answer is the ads aren't there for anyone to view them, they're there so CNN and MSNBC and FOX won't run negative new stories on Raytheon. I mean, media in general is a brutal landscape and it's not like CNN is rolling in money, so what are the odds that CNN et al will run negative news stories on, say, some poor Pakistanis at a wedding getting hit with a drone missile when their quarterly revenue numbers depend on Raytheon spending? So Kulak's thesis is that a wide variety of media advertisements, especially pharma advertisements, are there primarily or partially just to prevent bad press.
The basic thesis bugs me because I'm an absolute sucker for this kind of stuff and it feels very, very plausible and...there's absolutely no evidence. So, uh, opinions would be appreciated.
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Originally posted:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hidden-open-thread-2535/comment/11046145