{"id":211438,"date":"2015-12-24T15:42:25","date_gmt":"2015-12-24T15:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/common-dreams-washington-post-promotes-dickensian-marketing-experiment-on-poor-children\/"},"modified":"2015-12-24T15:42:25","modified_gmt":"2015-12-24T15:42:25","slug":"common-dreams-washington-post-promotes-dickensian-marketing-experiment-on-poor-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/common-dreams-washington-post-promotes-dickensian-marketing-experiment-on-poor-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Common Dreams: Washington Post Promotes Dickensian Marketing Experiment on Poor Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Washington<\/p>\n

Adam Johnson’s piece on the Washington Post<\/strong>‘s “emotional pornography” (12\/20\/15<\/a>) was reprinted by Common Dreams<\/strong> (12\/21\/15<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

Much like the popular \u201chomeless guy does the right thing<\/a>\u201d viral \u201cprank\u201d videos, these PR stunts are fundamentally based on two flawed, rather vulgar premises: 1) that the poor are somehow expected to not be altruistic (otherwise, why not run this experiment at a private boarding school?) and 2) the cheap emotional pornography and shallow moralism these videos offer the average social media consumer outweighs the inherently cruel act of making poor children \u201cchoose\u201d between obtaining material possessions they can\u2019t normally have or stripping their parents of the same. The fact that the marketing firm behind the experiment ends up giving the child both gifts is supposed to make it OK, but it doesn\u2019t. This last-minute paternalistic gesture doesn\u2019t justify the voyeuristic act of watching a poor child suffer through such a task for no objectively worthwhile reason.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adam Johnson’s piece on the Washington Post‘s “emotional pornography” (12\/20\/15) was reprinted by Common Dreams (12\/21\/15): Much like the popular \u201chomeless guy does the right thing\u201d viral \u201cprank\u201d videos, these PR stunts are fundamentally based on two flawed, rather vulgar premises: 1) that the poor are somehow expected to not be altruistic (otherwise, why not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-211438","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}