German guy
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I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but I'd like to share an article I found in a German newspaper about the decline of quality in tv in general. Since media bias is topic of this forum, and I believe a bias towards stupidity is the most prevalent bias in the media on both sides of the ocean, I think you might be interested.
I'm to blame for all mistakes in the translation.
Just for your background information: The German tv channels are separated into two branches, public and private tv channels. The public channels are financed by a fee all owners of tv sets are supposed to pay, which allegedly makes them independent of ratings and is supposed to allow them to fulfil their responsibility of properly informing and educating the public, instead of just entertaining it. Private tv was not legalized before 1984 and since then, many private channels dominate the ratings. The public channels are under criticism now that they have been dumping down their programs in order to persist in the battle with the privates for ratings. This is what the article is about.
Here it is:
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Öffentlich-Rechtliche Sender: Vom Volk bezahlte Verblödung | Gesellschaft | ZEIT ONLINE
Do you have any thoughts on this?
I'm to blame for all mistakes in the translation.
Just for your background information: The German tv channels are separated into two branches, public and private tv channels. The public channels are financed by a fee all owners of tv sets are supposed to pay, which allegedly makes them independent of ratings and is supposed to allow them to fulfil their responsibility of properly informing and educating the public, instead of just entertaining it. Private tv was not legalized before 1984 and since then, many private channels dominate the ratings. The public channels are under criticism now that they have been dumping down their programs in order to persist in the battle with the privates for ratings. This is what the article is about.
Here it is:
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Stultification Paid by the People
(...) If there is a reason [for the decline of quality of public tv], then it is the competition of private channels which caused the rating pressure, which is the mother of all grievances. Whenever a good program is cancelled, they say: The ratings were bad, and when a bad program remains, they say: The ratings were good. To judge over quality and supply of programs based on ratings means for the public stations to behave like mere economic enterprises, without any responsibility that goes beyond that logic. (...)
Without cynicism, a public broadcasting fee can only be justified if [public tv] it liberates quality from the market not only in the niche, but everywhere, or, with other words: If it creates independence which enables idealistic action. Idealism, in this case, doesn't mean anything arbitrary, but something very precize: Orientation at moral, cognitive and aesthetic norms, or short, the good, the true and the beautiful. Program makers will probably refuse such honorable categories, which carry the baggage of 2500 years of philosophical history, for their down-to-earth medium. Yet the categories are neither quixotic nor non-binding, as their application demonstrates.
Let's start with the good -- with morals, whose standing is not that bad. Public television is no evil medium. But when we add lack of corruption to morals, hidden manipulation, everything that can be subsummized by the term betrayal, the picture is not that good. We need to avoid the cases when information programs bought entire reports from the pharma industries, which then, in the guise of medical education or tips for childcare, were allowed to advertize. (...)
An outrageous, recurring example is hidden advertisement, the nuisance of product placement, that against all claims even exists in self-produced programs; think of the car pools automobile producers provide for certain television series. People don't even notice anymore how absurd it is when policemen are shown to have the newest and most expensive cars. (...)
And what about the beautiful, meaning culture and level of programs? (...) Television, far from raising the audience to the heights of civic education (formerly a famous demand of the German labor movement), or even from opening them the chance for participation, is now competing with the cheapest boulevard medias for the basest instincts of the dumbest parts of the population. (...)
Roger Willemsen once played with the thought that television is deliberately withdrawing from the educated demographics, because its share is marginal, because it won't grow and because, brutally said, it is a dying class, as the Bolshevists said. Even assuming that is the case, especially public television must not resignate. Its greatest and most distinguished objective would be its reconstruction and fosterage for a society that puts emphasis on knowledge. (...)
To reject this objective causes further damage. The disregard for education causes a deliberate or unconscious vulgarization, a lingering devaluation of everything and everybody. Because what is vulgar? Vulgarity is -- according to an impressive definition by Columbian philosopher Nicolas Gomez Davila -- everything which must not remain what it is. Vulgarity is the product of taking the inherent meaning out of things.
Vulgar is a quiz show, where knowledge matters only insofar as it leads to winning money, which often only happens even to the educated by guessing. Knowledge becomes guessing: That is vulgar.
Vulgar is a folk music show, where folk music is not allowed to remain folk music, but has to become chart hits, with singers who become stars, and thus are not common folk anymore.
Vulgar is a news program, where all problems, even those with structural or systemic causes, are personalized. A structural problem is not allowed to remain a structural problem, but has to become a personal problem: That is vulgar.
To confront the audience with something that is not what it is, but only what is expected to be eagerly consumed, is a contempt for the viewer a system cannot afford that is financed by the viewers. This contempt, of course, is hidden in a winking agreement with the resentment of the uneducated -- with the resentment of the one who is actually suffering from his lack of education, but hiding his suffering within the resentment. (...)
Part of this vulgarity is the nuisance of celebrity cult -- the creation and maintenance of fake celebrities, of people who have no other merit but their regular appearance on tv. How far this monkey business has come already becomes apparent when looking at the practize of making celebrities of even necessary function owners of television, like news anchors, talk masters, moderators. Television even reports about those.
With the nuisance of celebrity cult, the question for the dealing with truth is touched already -- as this monkey business includes politics and fosters the stultificating personalization here too. By far most problems in our modern world are structural and systemic problems, pretending them as if they were personalized problems makes them incomprehensible -- and in a democracy, that means unsolvable. (...)
It becomes even more absurd when talkshows are hosting actors from the same channel, or that channel's program is the topic discussed. Another example for the infection with the logic of entertainment is the choice of news anchors or moderators. Why do anchors need to be sympathetic and female moderators good looking?
It's absurd enough that the ratings of news programs are even measured at all. For what? Is the viewer supposed to decide between popular and unpopular news? The importance of news the viewer cannot judge, after all, because for doing so, he would have to know which news is not shown, thus have a broad insight only the editorial staff enjoys. So when the editorial staff bows down in front of ratings, it bows down in front of an imagined opinion among the viewers. (...)
Fortunately, this look on ratings only concerns topics so far. But what if finally, even the suspected opinion tendency of the audience will be reflected? If, for example, in order not to alienate viewers, there is pejorative reporting about foreigners? A marketing study might find anti-Semites do not feel well represented by public tv. When they are an estimated 18% to 20% of the population, that would be 15 million potential viewers, which might considerably improve ratings, if they are just pampered a little. Not that this is possible -- but it demonstrates the final consequence of rating measurement in case of news.
There are clues that support the suspicion that within the tv channels, rule of ratings is confused with democracy. That's why maybe, it's not superfluous to emphasize that democracy is a kind of government that cannot as analogy arbitrarily be transferred to other fields of society -- certainly not on public television, because in that case, its independence would be gone.
There can be no poll or voting on the true, the beautiful and the good. Not on the true, on knowledge and news, because a statement is either true or false, regardless of what a majority wants to be true. Not on the beautiful, the culturally important, because it is principally incommensurable (according to a word by Goethe) and because it always enstranges in the form of the new or the forgotten. So when a report about the painter Giotto has bad ratings, it doesn't mean it should not have been broadcast -- just that the common knowledge of the viewers needs a little extra education. There can be no vote on the good either, on norms or morals -- out of 100 people, maybe only two recognize the morally necessary, while the remaining 98 rather want to see the mob hunted foreigner bleeding to death in the pieces of a broken window glass. (...)
Actually, there are few reasons to assume television programs are just a proper reflection of society. As the new run on universities and higher schools demonstrates, there is a considerable amount of ambition regarding education. Why does television not care about that? Or, differently worded, why does it focus on those parts of the population that don't participate in that? And if it locates its objective within these demographics -- why doesn't it do anything to improve their cognitive state?
Those are the questions that have been asked for twenty years, without the tv stations ever giving an answer -- except for the one that ratings are proving the viewers don't want to improve their education. One could even get the Satanic thought the program makers even like what they are doing, that they are fans of [cheap folk music shows, campy soap operas] and inferior music programs. The alternative is not more optimistic: They are cynicists who despise the masses for consuming something they themselves would never watch. (...)
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Öffentlich-Rechtliche Sender: Vom Volk bezahlte Verblödung | Gesellschaft | ZEIT ONLINE
Do you have any thoughts on this?