PETA

Ah, it has been a while since I have posted. I have been swamped with midterms and the project for this class. Which I must say is coming along quite well. It helps that i have an amazing group and a topic that I am very interested in.
So in class this past week we took a look through the newspaper and counted the number of articles/ads broadly related to health. It was pretty remarkable at the quantity that we cam up with. So there isn't a lack of information out there, it is just the quality of the information that I am concerned about and getting people attention.

One radio spot that got my attention was the vice president of PETA on NPR. He was very well spoken and really drove home a lot of what we are learning in this class. One stood out the most to me was when caller criticized PETA for using Pamela Anderson as a spokesperson. She said she has been Vegan for 6 years and vegetarian for 20 and lost a little respect for PETA when she saw the ad. The vice-president responded politely by saying that she is not their target audience because she already shares the values of PETA. He then continued by describing their audience as being the Frat boys that don't care at all about animal welfare. That brought up a very good point, how far can you go to alienate someone who already believes to capture the attention of those who do not? He also talked about why they use celebrities (naked celebrities at that). His answer was that people don't want to hear about animal cruelty but their interested is peaked when you have a naked person on TV or in an ad. He said they can't even get a spot on the news when only talking about animals and that their only hope to get airtime is to have risky/provocative/sometimes offensive ads. This brings back the topic of wrong reason health-promotion. PETA often uses the wrong reason because people won't pay attention otherwise. I do agree that some of PETAs ads are hard to watch/look at but that is their point. They definitly go for shock value and fear appeal. Here is the link with the MP3. If you have 20 minutes I would listen to it, it is worth it and brings up some very important and intersting points. http://www.kpbs.org/radio/these_days;id=11222