When Everything is a Commercial.....

In Frontline’s “The MTV Machine,” a critic claims, “Everything on MTV is a commercial. That’s all MTV is. Sometimes it is an explicit advertisement paid for by a company to sell a product; sometimes it’s going to be a video for a music company, there to sell music; sometimes it’s going to be the set that’s filled with trendy clothes and stuff, there to sell a look that will include products on that set; sometimes it will be a show about an upcoming movie, paid for by the studio, though you don’t know it, to hype a movie that’s coming out from Hollywood, but everything is an infomercial. There is no noncommercial part of MTV.” This critic essentially argues that MTV’s programming content does not represent, as they claim, what kids want to see, but instead tells them what to see, buy, wear, and even how to act, making MTV the titular “merchants of cool.” The assertion is that the media machine of MTV generates, as the excerpt from the Ewen article states, not just advertising but propaganda which manipulates youth into purchasing decisions and conforming their opinions and behavior as well (Soules).

I agree that this assertion has truth in it, but it’s only true to an extent. MTV and other music channels do bombard their viewers with a highly slick, commercial format. There is no arguing the critic’s point that MTV programming is like a long infomercial. Every aspect of it is, indeed, intended to sell something, whatever that something may be. However, it all comes down to the individual. We may receive signs and symbols and urges and promises from a commercial, as we have studied, which can sway our decision-making process as consumers. But at a certain point, a person must be willing to be manipulated, particularly in the case of MTV. MTV’s programming is narrow in focus, very precisely positioned on a certain “type” of teenager, tween, and young adult. Their recognition and continued creation of this type means that the type hangs on their every programming turn, every word that their veejays and guest star event announcers utter. But a large segment of the population in that same age group does not allow MTV to sway their decision-making process, or creation of identity (myself included). While the 24-hour-a-day airing of a channel that deliberately has, as the critic says, “no noncommercial part,” seems sleazy and insidious, it is not as all-pervasive or far-reaching as the critic makes it seem.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ica0S13BTh4
In this opening clip from the 2001 film Josie and the Pussycats, a typical segment of MTV programming is parodied. A boy band emerges on the runway of their private jet and gives a performance to hordes of screaming fans. Each member of the band has an expertly crafted image designed to sell a look to several different types of consumer/fans. When they return to their jet, it is literally filled with the products they hawk for their record label as MTV stars. Their handler, Wyatt, is shown to be a domineering music advertising executive. The clip is humorous, but it also foreshadows that, through the music of the bands they promote, MTV allows a shadowy cabal to hide subliminal advertisements in the music kids are listening to. The film is an entertaining example of the opinion of the critic in the Frontline video taken to the extreme. While it is a funny satirical parody of the way modern music and videos influence young people, there is a grain of truth in it, the same grain that is true in the critic’s original complaint: MTV is one long commercial. The difference is only in what the target of the ads can do about it.

Works Cited

Soules, Marshall. “Excerpts from PR! A Social History of Spin, by Stuart Ewen.” 2007. Malaspina University-College Media Studies Department. 7 March 2009.

“The MTV Machine.” Chapter Three, “The Merchants of Cool.” Frontline. 27 February 2001. 7 March 2009.