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September 16, 2006
Free-to-air television may be a licence to print money but it's a brutal business overladened with mythmaking. Its a culture industry, whose reason for existence is making money by selling selling captive audiences in mass markets to advertisers. Alas, there is a downturn in advertising revenue as corporate advertisers drift to the internet. That means cost cutting, dumbing down programs, and going tabloid.
Geoff Pryor
The commercial free-to-air TV stations are in a mature market and they will decline during the next five to 10 years. As they face increasing competitive pressure from the proliferating new media, the networks continue to lobby to buy time and stave off the inevitable. The foundations on which the industry was built are crumbling with the shift to full-time digital streaming of any kind of programming on demand via the internet. What do they do?
Currently, they are making themselves subjects in their own soapie about themselves --- it's postmodern infotainment.
Nicholson
This Day Tonight and A Current Affair have become a parody of Frontline.
Update:19 September
The cannibal saga of tabloid TV buys into, anbd recycles savage primitiveness as the other of Australian modernity. As Sarah Hewat points out in The Age:
Primitiveness" is, after natural resources, a prize commodity in Papua and tour operators have perfected the art of selling "first contact tours" while never naming them as such. I have known locals who have been paid a measly sum to take off their clothes, brandish spears and speak of a barbaric past to satisfy the voyeurism of white tourists, journalists or filmmakers seeking a close encounter with our ancestral past. The cash-strappedlocals who stage such performances are, unfortunately, adjuncts to people who get paid much more to bring Westerners to them.
She also points out that the savage primitve Korowai that appeared on the original 60 Minutes report wore shorts, were holding black plastic bags were speaking Bahasa Indonesia, rather than, as was claimed, an ancient dialect. 60 Minutes was selling primitiveness.
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I wonder if the writer of the above lead-in wrote it before or after tonight's "Media
Watch" interlude. The insufferable, infantile and Machiavellian antics of Nine and Seven and their apologists and the despicable history behind the West Papua antic are indeed, "post modern".
They extend beyond nausea, to a soul-destroyed Dante-esque sadness, before the racist black propaganda paradigm that this example surely is, is even examined on those terms; merely as to the unplumbed depths of inhumanity exposed.