Blog 11: The Yes Men

The critique of the media by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men is that it is primarily a means to benefit corporations monetarily. All of their pranks that were shown in the film "The Yes Men Fix the World" were done in an attempt to show this reality to the public. The assumption that the Yes Men made was that people accept that the corporations are making the best decision for the public when in actuality, they are doing a lot less than they could because is would make them less money. The pranks, such as when Andy pretended to be an executive of the DOW company attempted to show the public otherwise. This and all of the other political hoaxes were essentially the products of idealism, showing that companies could be making decisions to benefit the masses, but are not. In most of the cases, the Yes Men tried to give the other officials they were speaking to a glimpse at the reality, trying to perhaps make them feel some remorse for their purely capitalistic doings. However, none of these attempts ever seemed to get through to them. Fortunately, the regular people that were victims of the pranks seemed to take most of them very well and were in fact glad that someone was putting their situations in view of the rest of the nation and even the world. The most appropriate concept from class that applies to these pranks/situations is false consciousness. The Yes Men make the point that most people just assume the government and corporations are doing what is best for the public and try to bring reality to them, showing the real atrocities.