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ratings. this attracts to the station a fee structure they can charge the advertisers. the more of us watching, the more they can charge crazy ted's and local sally's operations, or sony and coke, to put their ad on during that program. they are really buying us, not the other way round! that is what drives tv, in the main. that is why pulp sells. if all the channels have pulp, [the royal] we'll watch something, so watch pulp.
I think you mean. ‘the more of us watching, the less they can charge crazy ted…etc’, but no matter. The thing I don’t understand is why a desire to attract large audiences means that ‘pulp sells’. Unless you believe that popular necessarily equals bad (or pulpy). Quoting Ernie Kovacs isn't evidence to support the proposition that quality is inversely proportional to popularity. And more to the point, the argument that TV is bad because it carries advertising stumbles rather when you consider that *not all TV carries advertising*. The BBC is funded directly from a tax on TV ownership. It doesn’t have ads. Isn’t the ABC still funded similarly? And, as I’ve mentioned before, what makes this interesting is that the output of ITV1 (commercial) and BBC1 (ad free) is near identical.
As for TV news, you can’t really blame it for placing a premium on images and I don’t really see why this is a failing. I think, in fact, it might be an argument for why TV news is better than any other source. Images are powerful. Consider how TV news energised opposition to the Vietnam War (would it have ended so soon without it?). And I’m not really convinced that it skews the agenda particularly. The top stories on any news programme will pretty much mirror the top stories in the papers.
Again, maybe that’s not the case in Australia, but in the UK there’s a pretty strong tradition of serious, often pioneering, TV news coverage. And with modern technology, journalists can take a camera pretty much anywhere they can take a pen or a telephone. I don’t get the impression that they are hamstrung by powerful business interests any more than newspapers or radio. In fact, current regulation on TV news and current affairs is much stricter than that imposed on print. There is no explicitly partisan TV news allowed here, for example.
I think diz makes some good points about how the convenience of TV is a double-edged sword though. It might be easy to turn on, but it’s also easy to turn off. I think this has definitely driven programme makers to make programmes arresting. Although this might put certain kinds of programming at a disadvantage, but I can’t see that having to strive to satisfy demanding consumers is necessarily deleterious to quality over all. Viewers might turn off if a programme starts dully, but they’ll also soon turn off it doesn’t live up to its initial promise. I’d expect that writers, musicians and film-makers have to balance the same considerations – although yeah, perhaps not quite as urgently - and I don't see why a tendency to arrest a viewer's attention has to be a *bad* thing anyway. Perhaps this connected to the idea Ganesh mentioned, that if it's not hard work, it's not as worthwhile. Is that true? No pain no gain? |
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