Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have spent years dedicating their energy and/or Microsoft billions to good causes. Their latest recipients? Some of your favorite TV shows. According to a story in today’s New York Times, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the giant health-and-education-focused charity that also receives backing from do-gooding tycoon Warren Buffett, has worked with series like ER (specifically, the episode featuring George Clooney’s return, pictured), Law & Order SVU, and Private Practice to insert messages involving disease prevention, surgical safety, and other noble causes.
Now the Gates Foundation is set to expand its involvement through a new deal with Viacom (the parent company of MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, and BET) with message placements much like the embedded promos for Coca-Cola, Victoria’s Secret, and other commercial products that EW noted last year with considerably less enthusiasm. The difference here, however, is that the mode and the means are far more altruistic: to promote education, safety, and health.
It’s hard to argue with the intent, but are you a little disturbed by the idea that mental vitamins will be snuck into your TV junk food? Could it turn the shows we love into dreary public service announcements? Or should we trust Bill Gates, a guy with a brain as giant as an old mainframe computer, not to let us down with preachy, oversimplified messages?
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I guess a hellva lot more people watch popular tv than would watch a PSA or documentary so why not go for it? It’s an interesting idea for sure.
Not that I have anything against health or education or safety, but isn’t a “message introduced into an entertainment medium” more traditionally known as “propaganda”?
In other words, it sounds like a fine and noble idea, until someone pays to introduce a message that you disagree with.
Nothing Bill Gates does is fair. He’s been running afoul of the law – not to mention the ethical norms most of us live by – ever since he attended Seattle’s exclusive Lakeside School for Boys. Microsoft is essentially a criminal empire, as is Gates’ other mega-corporation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates is a liar and a corporate whore.
oh,bill gates is going to start injecting propaganda into our sex,drugs
and rock roll propaganda freedom machine hey it’s all propaganda,bill gates has a right like all the rest of the propaganist’s to put on his
public messages