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Vatican vies with SciFi channel for No1 Fiction position
The Vatican declared battle on the Scifi channel this month with a barrage of fictional announcements designed to knock the US Scifi channel from the number one fiction slot.
The Vatican, head of the Catholic church, is said by analysts to be responding to surveys showing that more people in the US now watch the SciFi channel than go to Sunday mass.
"They've done some very basic market research." Bill Owlocks media analyst with Woofter Pilly partnership told BIGfib.
"It says that people tune into the Scifi channel for all the weird shit they show, you know, aliens coming up through toilets and biting peoples bottoms, that kind of stuff, and that they're tuning out from the Vatican because of the complete predictability of everything they say."
The increased creativity within the Vatican's communications is thought to tie in with the build up to the launch of VatiChan, the worldwide satellite TV channel to be launched in September 2004.
Analysts working on programming material for the channel have been warning the Vatican that pictures of the pope reading, the original plan for the 24 hour channel, just aren't going to do it for a worldwide audience, and that the Vatican needs to reinvent it's communications to provide controversy, drama and excitement.
"It's clear that that's exactly what they're doing..." Owlocks told BIGfib.
"Over the last month we've seen a real-life-type-drama of the Pope, will-he-die-or-won't-he... Local drama, in a school near you, with the Vatican fighting for Crucifix's to be put up in Italian schools, the almost biblical transformation of Mother Teresa to Saint status by the pope, astonishing defence of child abusing priests within the US catholic church and controversial communiqués from the Vatican against birth control education in American schools.
But by far the most newsworthy, and quite clearly created in response to the SciFi channels sensational stories has been last weeks Vatican claims that the HIV virus can wriggle through microscopic holes in condoms and that therefore they do not protect users in any way. That the Vatican should be urging Africans to throw away their condoms, when the continent is already devastated by the disease, is nothing short of genocide.
Something this sensational and so clearly opposed to all current scientific knowledge not to mention the personal experience of billions of users who have remained HIV negative thanks to condoms over the last twenty years can only be meant to blast VatChan to the number one fiction slot."
"As a media analyst I think it's a great strategy... It could work. Any publicity is good publicity as we say in the business."
See also : World waits, buttocks clenched, for new pope
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