That’s one of Heather McDougal’s complaints about TV on Cabinet of Wonders, in her post to which I linked last week:

2. People are trying to sell me stuff the whole time and are counting on me not noticing that they are trying to sell me stuff.2a. When people are trying to sell me stuff, they are willing to do anything they can to get me to buy it, including working really hard at making me hate myself so their product can be the solution.2b. The people who want to sell me stuff are also thinking of my children as a commodity to be bought and sold, and have absolutely no compunction about trying to turn three-year-olds into buying machines (or using the whine factor to try to get little ones to turn me into their own personal buying machine). Also, they want to make my daughters feel bad about themselves so they will buy things. Yuck.

This isn’t a secret, of course; anyone who pays attention (and especially anyone with children) can see it. Still, it’s no end galling how shameless media companies are about it; and perhaps the most galling thing is that the worst of all of them that way is Disney. Condé Nast Portfolio (an excellent magazine, btw, and a great read even if you don’t read business magazines) has an article up titled “How Mickey Got His Groove Back” which makes this appallingly clear. If you’ve never run across any of the Mouse’s cynical exercises in making money off so-called “tweens” (do we have to keep slicing childhood up into ever-smaller marketing segments?), Karl Taro Greenfeld’s opening paragraph should give you the idea:

Perhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get loud, we’re pumping up the party now!”—eight times in a row that morning. Or maybe it was the 16 times I overheard High School Musical and High School Musical 2 playing on the television in the living room, or the several hundred dollars my wife and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the fact that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to profile a Disney tween star and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another publication had beaten them to it. Finally, after my eight-year-old daughter pointed to a picture of Hillary Clinton and said she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, like Hilary Duff,” I decided I had to know: Who is doing this to me?

I wonder what Walt would think.