TV Time
It’s only been in the last week or two that I started watching TV here, and only in the evenings. Still a few oddities, though:
- Al Jazeera International (or Al Jazeera English? I’m not sure…) is a quality, balanced news network. It looks to be balanced not only in regional dispersion of coverage, but editorial slant as well. My sampling of it is admittedly very limited, but it looks to be the kind of quality programming CNN International was 10 years ago, or BBC International would be without it’s slight preference for covering Western Europe. It’s even got a presence on YouTube, which feels a lot less forced than CNN’s cheezy, trying-too-hard iReport…
- A lot of the channels we pick up here are from India. On one of them, one of the most frequently played commercials is for a woman’s skin product designed to “make your skin look whiter.” I encountered a few of these types of advertisements living in China, but they’re no less disturbing to me the second time aroung…
- Remember the old Foster’s commercials? You know, “How to speak Australian…” They’ve got those here, but they’re for Foster’s drinking water! I dunno, just seems like an odd juxtaposition of the add campaign. “Foster’s: Australian for Water.” Really??? It worked for the beer, because it was uniquely, distinctively crappy. You could drink it, grimace and purse your lips and think, “Huh, I guess that is Australian.” But is the water really that distinctive?*
I haven’t spent a lot of time in front of the TV, so that’s probably why ads have made the biggest impression so far. And none of this is to say that I don’t have more contextual, thoughtful observations from the last six weeks in Afghanistan. I wasn’t blogging for the last six weeks, though, and after a Foster’s commercial just now, this was the post that popped into my mind…
*Given that the water in my bathroom–which the company swears is potable–smells distinctively of sewage, I shouldn’t discount the possibility that Australian/Foster’s water, like their beer, is uniquely crappy…
Tags: al Jazeera, beer, sewage