Even if, like me, you try your best to hide from the constant influx of news, you’d be hard-pressed to avoid this week’s three major ones:
- Balenciaga scandal,
- Royals and Netflix, and
- World football.
Of the three, the Balenciaga scandal is the most worrying. Why? Because it exploits the most innocent and vulnerable among us — young children.
As controversial photos are shared and commented on across endless news and social media platforms, anyone who didn’t know about the brand — does now. Exactly as the time-honoured publicity mantra teaches — there is no such thing as bad publicity, there’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
While everyone responsible, including the photographer, ducks for cover.
On the pretence of not being aware that young children were to be involved.
Really? No. Just No.
One needn’t be a fashion expert or even interested in fashion to know that no photo sees the light of the day without being approved by multiple senior executives. Or that the photographer could have walked away the moment he saw kids on deck.
But walking away would be neither lucrative nor generate global publicity.
Exactly as Balenciaga executives envisioned when they weighed the pros and cons of the campaign based on child exploitation. They concluded that the potential benefits outweighed the potential losses and proceeded to shoot.
Not that Balenciaga didn’t court controversy or exploit vulnerable groups before. They have. If you’d like to find out more, click on the below article written by a fellow Medium writer:
However, this time, the exploited group is utterly dependent on adults.
The same adults, parents, caregivers, custodians that agreed to no doubt lucrative deals. Yes, that’s right. Child exploitation is not only well but thriving in the 21st century.
Sure, instead of the 19th-century tattered rags, mills and workhouses, we have glad rags, plush interiors and, in this instance, sleek BDS equipment, but the core of it remains the same — adults exploiting kids for profit. Period. Knowing full well there will be no real consequences. Because before tomorrow, before dinner time, the world will shift its ever-diminishing attention to a new scandal, a new slaughter, or some other cruelty. Leaving Balenciaga and their cronies to reap the profits.
Until the next time.
British Royal Family members, compliant and rebels alike, continue to excel at generating a steady stream of the most profitable of all the modern entertainment — celebrity scandal. The acquisition of a professional actress not only opened new markets but provided fresh momentum too. While the celebrity stratosphere the unfortunate People Princess had taken them to will most likely forever remain out of reach, it must be said they are certainly trying.
No sooner did the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan’s long-awaited Netflix docu-series, hit the screens than Buckingham Palace announced it would not be commenting on it. Indeed — keeping tight-lipped not only appears dignified and thus dear to royalists the world over but, more importantly, adds a layer of mystery and intrigue.
The time-tested formula never fails — a layer of scandal, a layer of mystery, a layer of victimhood and what you get is divided and, most importantly, engaged, public. That reads, likes, discusses, argues, and shares, generating profit with every click. Never has more money been generated by less effort. The hardened capitalists who had started it all only a hundred or so years ago are either turning in their splendid graves green with envy or laughing their fine socks off… perhaps both!
Harry lamented how traumatic it was for his, at the time, bride-to-be to curtsy to his, now late, Grandmother the Queen, while Meghan chirped that, Truth be told, no matter how I tried, no matter how good I was, no matter what I did, they were still going to find a way to destroy me. Americans, says Meghan, will understand that.
I don’t know about Americans, but it struck me as odd, to say the least, that someone (anyone for that matter) marrying into the most famous Royal Family on the planet and, if nothing else, with access to the internet, would be surprised by the protocol.
Not to mention the mental, emotional and, yes, moral acrobatic needed to swing from departing the stifling and otherwise unsatisfactory royal halls and invading media to raise children in private peace and quietness to, not long after, invite global media into the said private lives and sign the zillion dollar contracts to sell the same. Private details and children included.
Then again…what would all the media and even the small-time scribblers like me write about!
Perhaps this is all there is — the constant churning of media machinery that feeds on endless self-promotion to keep the profit-generating masses occupied. This time by the Duke and Duchess of Netflix!
The world’s football fans have been indulging all their senses in Qatar. Croatia (my birth country) has beaten Brazil in the quarterfinals.
However, just 48 hours before Croatia faced Brazil, the world football’s governing body fined the Croatian football federation 50,000 Swiss francs for the behaviour of the Croatian fans at the match on the 27th of November.
During the fixture at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, Croatian supporters were reported to have shouted insults at Milan Borjan, an ethnic Serb born in Croatia but who fled the country as a child.
Milan and his family left their hometown — situated in an ethnic Serbian region of Croatia — when it was taken by Croatian forces during a 1995 military operation that ended the Croatian War of Independence.
Not to be outdone, the football association of Serbia hung up a controversial flag in the team’s dressing rooms showing a map of Serbia that included the territory of its former province Kosovo and the slogan No Surrender. As a result, FIFA fined the Serbian football association 20,000 Swiss francs.
All in all, the Swiss pocketed some 70,000 francs from never-ending Balkan animosities.
Of the other news…well;
- China is cosying up to Saudi Arabia,
- The Taliban carried out their first public execution,
- German authorities are busy arresting members of the militant right-wing organisation,
- Time declared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the person of the year 2022,
- More than 1,000 reporters and other staff at The New York Times walked off the job for 24 hours, protesting months of contract negotiations in the paper’s biggest labour dispute in more than 40 years,
- Iran has executed the first prisoner convicted for an alleged crime stemming from ongoing nationwide protests,
- Indonesia has outlawed sex and cohabitation outside marriage, and
- The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has found that 67 journalists and media personnel have been killed worldwide this year, compared to 47 last year, while 375 were imprisoned for their work, most of them in China and Myanmar.
It is our (wonderful) world.
Thank you for reading.
