While the media environment is evolving rapidly, television continues to be the dominant medium used by the American public. TV advertising is therefore still a core component of most major public service campaigns, on topics such as childhood obesity, drunk driving, or cancer prevention. To help inform the work of non-profits seeking to communicate with the public, the Kaiser Family Foundation is releasing a new, updated study that examines the extent and nature of public service advertising (PSA) on both broadcast and cable television.

The report – Shouting To Be Heard (2): Public Service Advertising in a Changing Television World – found that broadcast and cable stations in the study donated an average of 17 seconds an hour to PSAs – totaling one-half of one percent of all TV airtime. The most frequent time period for PSAs to air was between midnight and 6 a.m., accounting for 46% of donated PSAs across all stations in the study; looking only at broadcast stations, 60% of donated PSAs ran overnight. The time period with the fewest donated PSAs was during prime time (8-11 p.m.), with 13% of all donated PSAs.

The most common issue among donated PSAs was health (26% of all donated PSAs), followed by fundraising (23%), family and social concerns (12%), community organizations or events (8%), and volunteerism (6%).

Shouting to be Heard: Public Service Advertising in a Changing Television World

As we enter 2008, what we call the long-term fiscal challenge is not in the distant future. Already the first members of the baby boom generation have filed for early Social Security retirement benefits—and will be eligible for Medicare in only 3 years. Simulations by GAO, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and others all show that despite a 3-year decline in the budget deficit, we still face large and growing structural deficits driven primarily by rising health care costs and known demographic trends. Under any plausible scenario, the federal budget is on an imprudent and unsustainable path.

Rapidly rising health care costs are not simply a federal budget problem; they are our nation’s number one fiscal challenge. Growth in health-related spending is the primary driver of the fiscal challenges facing the state and local governments. Unsustainable growth in health care spending is a systemwide challenge that also threatens to erode the ability of employers to provide coverage to their workers and undercut our ability to compete in a global marketplace. Addressing the unsustainability of health care costs is a societal challenge that calls for us as a nation to fundamentally rethink how we define, deliver, and finance health care in both the public and the private sectors.
The passage of time has only worsened the situation: the size of the challenge has grown and the time to address it has shrunk. The longer we wait the more painful and difficult the choices will become, and the greater the risk of a very serious economic disruption.

It is understandable that the Congress and the administration are focused on the need for a short-term fiscal stimulus. However, our long-term challenge increases the importance of careful design of any stimulus package—it should be timely, targeted, and temporary. At the same time, creating a capable and credible commission to make recommendations to the next Congress and the next president for action on our longer-range and looming fiscal imbalance is called for.

See also Saving Our Future Requires Tough Choices Today.

Action Is Needed to Avoid the Possibility of a Serious Economic Disruption in the Future

Commercially, the 17th century was an age of silver, tobacco and slaves, and Brook shows how the three interconnect to form an intricate economic network. This new international economy is revealed in every aspect of life, not only in the account books of the VOC and the histories of the Jesuit missionaries in China and Latin America, but also in the items depicted in paintings by a Delft artist who died young. All our experience is global. As Brook writes in his final chapter, "If we can see that the history of any one place links us to all places, and ultimately to the history of the entire world, then there is no part of the past -- no holocaust and no achievement -- that is not our collective heritage." Vermeer's Hat shows how this is true of the 17th century and by so doing provides not only valuable historical insight but also enthralling intellectual entertainment.

Painting the World

Bundled against the cold, the businessman made his way down the steps. Coming toward him in blue mittens was a middle-aged woman.

"Do you know that we're going to take a stroll this weekend?" she whispered, using the latest euphemism for the unofficial protests that have unnerved authorities in Shanghai over the past month.

He nodded.

Behind her, protest banners streamed from the windows of high-rise apartment blocks, signs of middle-class discontent over a planned extension of the city's magnetic levitation, or maglev, train through residential neighborhoods.

The couple checked to make sure no plainclothes police were nearby and discussed where security forces had been posted in recent days. "Did you take any photos?" the man asked. Yes, she said, promising to send them to him so he could post the evidence online.

Shanghai's Middle Class Launches Quiet, Meticulous Revolt

The technology of the Twenty-first Century – the “new media” – has made it possible for virtually anyone to have immediate access to an audience of millions around the world and to be somewhat anonymous. This technology has enabled and empowered the rise of a new enemy. This enemy is not constrained by the borders of a nation or the International Laws of War. The new media allows them to decentralize their command and control and disperse their elements around the globe. They stay loosely connected by an ideology, send cryptic messages across websites and via e-mail and recruit new members using the same new media technologies.

Responding to this challenge requires changes in our approach to warfare. The one thing we can change now does not require resources – just a change in attitudes and the organizational culture in our Army. Recent experiences in Iraq illustrate how important it is to address cultural change and also how very difficult it is to change culture: After MNF-I broke through the bureaucratic red-tape and was able to start posting on YouTube, MNF-I videos from Iraq were among the top ten videos viewed on YouTube for weeks after their posting. These videos included gun tape videos showing the awesome power the US military can bring to bear. Using YouTube – part of the new media – proved to be an extremely effective tool in countering an adaptive enemy. Here are some areas that our Army will need to address if we are going to change our culture with respect to this critical area.

Changing the Organizational Culture

NYT reviews "This Republic of Suffering", by Drew Gilpin Faust, one of the books also discussed in a recent Gopnik piece, In the Mourning Store.

Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since. Two percent of the United States population died in uniform — 620,000 men, North and South, roughly the same number as those lost in all of America’s other wars from the Revolution through Korea combined. The equivalent toll today would be six million.

The praise is effusive:

"Moving ... illuminating ... penetrating ... lucid ... insightful ... powerful ... poignant ... profound ... brilliant ... harrowing ... wise ... informed ... troubling ... a masterpiece of research, realism, and originality."

Read the first chapter.

Death’s Army

It should be clear that Battle of the Bods is innovatively vile. Further, it is virally vile. To watch it is to play along and to start sizing up the women like a frat boy during orientation week. Worse, it is boringly vile. About half of the program finds the female contestants yapping about whose knees are better than whose. Ultimately, upon being ranked fifth by the boys, the most obnoxious of the girls teared up and stomped backstage. Her comrades went to comfort her and cheer her up, with one mentioning the $300 they'd each won. "Three hundred dollars?" came the retort. "That's not a Louis Vuitton purse. That's not even half of a Louis Vuitton purse!" Poor dear. Doesn't she know there's a sale on at Coach?

The spiritual darkness of The Power of Ten, The Moment of Truth, and Battle of the Bods

Gopnik on Nicarla Brunicholas:

Those who loved the dignity and the sporadic secrecy and the sudden intimacies of traditional French civilization are bound to long for the days when President Mitterrand would go on long walks alone to old bookstores, and then make love to his mistress on the way home to his wife, patting his love children on the head while making sonorous pronouncements about life and destiny. The ballad of President Bling-Bling and Carla Bruni is a reminder of a deep and permanent truth, which the French once knew better than anyone: there are worse things in this world than a little organized hypocrisy.

Love And Politics

I believe McLuhan is on a comeback but in a way more sustainable than first time around. Few writers on emerging technologies get far without quoting him or using his percepts and terminology. Communications as an academic discipline is only a generation old and shows no sign of going away. McLuhan was a co-founder of that discipline, if not its godfather. I think this time he is here to stay.

Much has been written about McLuhan, but nothing I know has yet captured the essence of the man. Could it be because he has no essence, no single point of view, but a galaxy of ever-changing perspectives expressed in aphorisms, catchphrases and elliptical prose that stops on a ledge, leaving the reader to leap or not? Although I have followed his writings and reputation ever since that first glimpse of him in the back garden on Wells Hill Avenue, I feel as if I am still only peeking through the hedge at the domain of a man with some far-fetched ideas, yes, but also with a host of insights that are seminal for the times.

In the Garden with the Guru

Banda, a blip on India’s vast geographic radar, is one of the country’s poorest and most regressive districts. Located in the heart of the populous northern state of Uttar Pradesh, this 3,061 sq km region infested by dacoits, or bandits, invariably makes headlines for all the wrong reasons – drought, starvation, domestic violence, land-grabbing, killings and a thoroughly corrupt administration.

However, lately, blighted Banda has been attracting attention for an entirely different reason. The area’s Pink Gang, about 200 self-styled female Robin Hoods, is taking on dowry deaths, wife beating and even cases of government apathy and corruption, often fighting violence with violence.

A rambunctious and fearless posse recognizable by their pink-colored saris, the Pink Gang is the nemesis of violent husbands and inept government officials. Having personally suffered abuse, members of the vigilante club thrash abusive men, wife beaters and rapists, confront and shame wrongdoers and storm local police stations to accost lackadaisical cops.

India’s Pink Posse