A few weeks ago, I came across the following article, published by the Seattle Times's website. The article is about a famine in Somalia that is taking the lives of tens of thousands, while there is a "blockade of aid" by an Islamist militant group, preventing even more people from receiving food and attention.
The article continues with devastating statistics and a comparison to another, similar disaster in Somalia in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, after scrolling less than halfway down the page, I noticed a Keds ad: brightly colored, cute tennis shoes popping up at me as I read about Somalia's famine. Out of pure distraction and instinct, I moved my mouse to click on the advertisement and be taken to the Keds' website before realizing the implications of what I had just done.
I had decided that I would rather devote thirty seconds of my attention to a tennis shoe company than finish reading about famine claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings.
Something seemed disturbingly wrong about that. Moreover, something seemed disturbingly wrong about the fact that this advertisement ran in the same space as the famine article in the first place. It is scary to think that the media think we readers are that desensitized to issues that we will not care. It is even scarier to think that for a second there, the media was right.
I'd like to investigate further into the standards of certain web new sites regarding advertisements so embarrassingly juxtaposed like this one. With more and more news organizations relying on web advertising, though, I don't know if it always will be financially feasible to turn down such advertisements. It may be one of those things that we just have to accept within the dawn of the digital journalism age.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2016221871_somalia16.html
No comments:
Post a Comment