Do you know you can see hush money pass hands everyday. In fact I know that you are seeing it but do you recognize it when you see it ? I’ll bet not.
Let’s take a few examples by looking at advertising.
For whatever reason, I have paid close attention to adds for decades to see if they are a effective add and why is it effective. I have certain questions I ask after the add has shown. But Energy Company adds had always dumbfounded me because they were/are spending a extremely high amount of money and what was the message from the add ?
Exxon-Mobile and BP, both some of the largest energy companies, shell out a bunch of advertising dollars to tell you how great they are for the environment. Not why you need to buy their gasoline or oil but “they are being good to the environment”. Not sure that is going to make anyone race out buy their product. Or feel better about that product especially when all the news reports from environmental disasters they have created. Any many more you often never hear about in a national forum.
Yes they have a image problem in that area but when is the last time you seen a add telling you a good reason to buy their product. You know “ours is better than theirs” or “ours is cheaper than theirs”. Or just “ours is the best !”.
It turns out there is a reason for each spending 100’s of millions of dollars every year to pretty much say nothing that is going to change anyone’s mind to increase sales. After all, if you are not promoting your product, what are you doing ?
Generally, those energy companies have no influence with media organizations. But if you were the network that I was spending all those millions with in advertising, and your news department were about to say something unfavorable about my company, I can now have much influence by the threat of withdrawing my advertising with you. That is a lot of control. Hence why many environmental disasters never make it past the local level to the national news unless they are so big they can not be ignored.
This in effect is HUSH MONEY !
So the next time you see a multimillion dollar add that pretty much says nothing, it should make you wonder. What it tells me is the media company is likely to skew the news. Not report completely if at all on certain issues. HUSH MONEY !
I had my suspicions before the big gulf disaster but after watching BP make all those other disasters disappear on a Google search by a network of advertising like none I have ever seen before or since, I was sure. Well they did not disappear but were now found on page 100+ into the Google search. When is the last time you went past page 5 in a search. Most of the additional pages were from sites saying something good about BP. Gee, I wonder how much a team of search engine optimizers writing blogs costs.
I could go on and talk about the Big Banks and others but I think you get the moot idea now.