-By Warner Todd Huston
A Chicago Tribune TV critic was aghast that Americans often enjoy the commercials during the Super Bowl. Apparently he was upset about all that capitalism going on and mad that Americans don’t rise up and throw their shoes at their TVs in revolt. Corporations are apparently all venal and wasteful, he alleges, and we shouldn’t stand for it.
In his February 5 critique, Trib’s TV scribe Phil Rosenthal got his dander up several days before the Super Bowl as the nation had already begun talking about the commercials everyone was looking forward to seeing. The prospects of capitalism seemed to have put Rosenthal in a foul mood.
The columnist’s first assumption about why we enjoy many of the commercials was one literally no one believes.
“It’s as if the fact that some marketer spent $5 million per half minute — up about 11 percent from $4.5 million last year — to pitch more than 100 million of us in the Super Bowl 50 audience obliges us to actually pay attention,” he wrote.
No one watches Super Bowl commercials imagining they are obligated to do so because they are so expensive to air. No one.
But from this argument so early in his piece, one can begin to note the anti-corporate and anti-capitalist bent of the rest of the article.
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‘Chicago Tribune’ Critic Slams America’s Love of Entertaining Super Bowl Ads”
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