Hypocrite say What?

Last evening on my drive home from campus I did something I rarely do….I surfed a few radio stations. Typically I have sports radio, NPR or the Tragically Hip along for the ride but I was looking for something a little different. I stopped on a station that was playing some classic Journey and stopped right there. When the song was over the host of an evening call in show took to the airwaves and waxed poetic about love, relationships and her latest venture into the dating pool. Then she switched gears and spent some time lamenting the fact that marketing and product placement are taking over movies and media in general. She is clearly not a fan of Skittles being placed in the cinema classic ET or Dell paying millions to have their computers appear in the cult classic Snakes on a Plane. Fine. I get it. I have no problem with her complaint even though I see product placement simply as ad revenue and a sign of the times but certainly not in an apocalyptic way. Here’s the interesting part…..after approx. two minutes of slamming the pervasive nature of advertising in the media, this particular radio show host transitioned smoothly into reading two promos on the air….presumably aware of the verbal assault on ad placements that she had just delivered! She explained how sleeping on a Serta mattress had changed her life and how Weight Watchers had helped her lose more than fifteen pounds this summer. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I waited…assuming there was a punch line to be delivered…..no dice! She was really doing promos on her radio show, for products that she claims have changed her life, immediately after exalting all things negative about that very practice in the media. Wow…..sad…..but entertaining.

I don’t understand why no judge on America’s Got Talent is even American but more importantly I don’t understand this radio host being a hypocrite…which leads me to my point: let’s not be hypocritical. In education, we ask things of our students and as administrators we ask things of our faculty. We need to model the behavior which we are asking to see replicated throughout the classrooms. W should pick up a piece of trash if we ask others to do the same. We should be courteous and listen as much as we speak if that is what we ask of others. I’m in no way immune to this notion myself and plan to do a better job modeling in my role this year as well. Perhaps we all need to consider, prior to asking someone else to do something; would that be a fair request of me….do I model that behavior?