wow- 60 Minutes segment on Ollis Tonight!

“make great television’ (my words)…..

and will appeal to many people. THe more people know about scams, the better!”

I meant ‘great television’ ironically!! how sick it is that we have (i.e.) the aus idol programme where the cameras follow the fat/cleft palate/ugly/can’t sing at all (i.e. underdog) – watch the judges make mincemeat of them, then they start to cry and the cameras follow them out to the corridor. “how did you FEEL?” sob, sob.

ditto the half drowned kids mentioned above, too.

Those stories aren’t exposing a scam, it’s just that ‘good television’ (used ironically again) so often these days seems to include the ‘battler in tears’ shot.

So of course we expect from our ‘reportage’ – the bigger the scam, the bigger the tears, right?

Contrasting with the ubiquitous “father playing footy with the son in the back yard’ shot – “in happier times…’

Tonight I was in channel 7 all day and all that you could watch was channel 7. At one point there was some heinous current affair programme about a mother and daughter teen pregnancy. The mother was shot crying and no make-up on, big zit on her face, unflattering lighting (they have concealer you know, but the point is they WANT them to look as sad and poor victim low status as possible) and then cut to the daughter, flattering light, dressed to the nines and full avril lavigne make-up, which I bet she didn’t do herself.

The last shot was the mother in tears again, and the segment ended freeze framed on her face crumpled and distorted.

And you can just imagine the editor and director, guaranteeing their job security by creating this stuff that their bosses say makes ‘great television’ in the editing room, cutting the pictures together, and the director going, ‘GREAT! that’s it, that’s our final shot, we’ll end on her face crumpled…”

cue the emotional sad piano music…

I guess the pseudo-emotional manipulation of the thing, the ‘entertainment factor’ is the thing I think is so sick.

Whether it’s a scam or not, see enough old ladies in tears and you’ll have the emotional response they want you to have.

Fear or negative stories seem to be the ones people latch on to more. Maybe it’s the ‘at least it wasn’t me, I feel better’ factor. Or maybe it’s perpetuating the myth that people that make money are scammers.

There was this baddie all over the TV recently a while ago called Saddam Hussein with many bad things screened about him. But he wasn’t ‘marketed’ like that when he was helping the US against Kuwait or whatever it was, a few years ago?
Same guy, different day, different agenda of the media. Of the US. (are those two terms interchangeable?)

There are many worse and bigger scams not shown on TV because the average Aussie can’t relate, and therefore won’t make good television.

I.e. 95 percent of the news in the US is US-related. The population ‘don’t care’ about the rest of the world and will change channels. Then the network loses advertising dollars.
Rest of the world just doesn’t make ‘good television’ in the US.

I rest my case….

PI is a specialised field. Some people think they are experts at it and do there own research. Others rely on professionals to do the research for them and advise them. It is not ridiculous to expect that the banks and solicitors to look after the interests of their clients with regard to valuations. It is clear from these cases that the banks (especially Westpac and ANZ) are guilty of unethical conduct here.

Furthermore, the constant pushing of RE as an alternative form of retirement income is fraught with danger and has seen too many people concentrate of this asset class when traditional avenues like Super are much more suitable for most people. It is understandable that many people are upset at the poor performance of super funds and that fact that no matter how badly the fund performs, they always get paid. This must change over time to a model that only rewards the funds and fund managers based on results. It is something that will be resisted but the change is inevitable. Once this occurs, more peoples hard earned retirement savings should be better protected and more suitably invested.