Tele-Trust

A recent ad campaign on the sides of buses by the local CTV station has left me puzzled and amused. The station has a number of ads with slogans like "Ottawa's News Leader" and "The Name You Trust For Weather". It's interesting how news is always marketed in terms of credibility, when it is actually the last thing that they actually do. Fox News, for example, will always talk about "trust" in their advertising campaigns -- set to a backdrop of a waving American flag -- and yet they could just as easily say something like "The station with the most explosions, action, entertainment, and sensationalism!". I'm not sure this would be totally ineffective. The illusion of trust works brilliantly when you're such a hardcore propagandist like Fox News is, though.

Getting back to this advertising campaign, it is the one about the weather that puzzles me the most. The weather is a quasi-science at best. It's like calling economics a science. It's part mathematics, part Jenga. You hope that you picked the right fucking block... or the whole thing might come crashing down. While I'm on the whole game analogy, how about Guess Who? (the boardgame). That's 50% of what weathermen do, because their predictions are only about 70% accurate for the next 24hrs, and 20% in 48 hours. Long term forecasts are just as much of a guessing game as Guess Who is. "Does your weather system have a moustache? Is it black? Is it Dwayne?"

So, how do you qualify yourself as being a leader in weather accuracy? "The one you trust!" Of course, you attach a friendly, over-photoshopped face to your weather segment, and feature this person prominently in your ad campaign. What's funniest is that those who do the weather segments on TV and the radio are nothing more than broadcasters. They have absolutely no experience whatsoever in predicting the weather. They just get their information from Environment Canada like everyone else, dress up in a fancy suit and tie, and talk eloquently enough about the subject that people take them for experts. I always loved this quote from my great mentor Stanley Kubrick: "If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject you can create the consoling illusion it has been mastered." But, hey... I trust the local newscasters at CTV. Just look at these trustworthy, robotic faces!