Chocolate cake.  Fattening. Lots of sugar. You know, it will destroy your diet. You know why it will.

Yet, there it is (or what’s left of it) sitting on your plate.

So why did you defy your own common sense and awareness to do something against your own health interest and goals?  Because it tastes good. In media literacy and media diet management, the same phenomena occurs.

Even for a refined, experienced media palate, evaluating and managing a media consumable and employing good media literacy skills isn’t always easy. Especially when media products are enhanced with components that are often the most seductive to our senses. The media-added flavors of drama, sex, outrage and emotional appeals can quickly drive our visceral reaction into overdrive and then overwhelm and even lock our intellectual faculties out of the evaluation process.

The sights, sounds, music and words within the media product we are consuming can bathe our mind in enticing, stimulating sensations and seductive emotional appeals. Led by our stirred emotions, we get swept away and simply submit to the pleasure (or the message) of the moment.

Think of it in same way your might eyes roll in the back of your head and you moan in ecstasy as you eat that chocolate cake. Who cares if it’s fattening. In the same sense, who cares if distortions, untruths are in a media consumable that you find fascinating.

I talk more about the seductive elements in media and how it affects media literacy in my book Does This News Make Me Look Fat? Available now at Amazon and iBookstore and Barnes and Noble. Go to www.junkfoodmedianation.com for a free chapter.