Financing media

[6155GUASTELL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I should say first that I've been very attentive to the discourse
on media funding, and I think it should prove to be at least a
lever for unraveling some important political and economic issues.

I'm wondering, however, if maybe we've gotten away from the initial
premises of this thread, which APPEARED to be (please supply necessary
correction of course) that commercial funding of the media is undermining
political integrity by promoting (a) biased views on the part of the public,
or perhaps (b) political apathy through programmed brain death. Both
(a) and (b), IMO, should be considered as separate mechanisms, although their
confluence should be noted.

Regarding (a), there does not appear to have been any real evidence brought
forward that commercialization biases the media, at least not in any
generalizable sense. In the USA, the points of antagomism between
government and media have been, within the last decade, that the media is
"too liberal" or critical of the government. Frankly, what should one
expect from a government that bashed freedom of speech and other
constitutional liberties as fast as they could urinate into a bottle?
Ronald Reagan went on record as saying that freedom of speech should
only apply to WRITTEN POLITICAL SPEECH. YEOW!

The government controlled the coverage of the Gulf War such that
reporters could only gather news about events from an office in
SArabia that essentially showed them what they could say "for national
security." The only footage of actual shelling was a 45-second piece
smuggled to a network by a European journalist. We saw it over and over
and over and over and over -- a haunting reminder that we couldn't get
any more.

Whenever a major election takes place (presidential), parties produce
their own commercials, present their material in their own way, and
buy commercial time. There are equal time rules to prevent distorted amounts
of time being allocated to one candidate or another. Lucky is the
candidate that looks good on TV. Talk about insipid content, though:
this could be an example. On the other hand, independent organizations
sponsor presidential and vice-pres debates, which are aired on TV,
and which utilize strict rules of equal time. Point is: the advertisers
have little to do with political sway in this context; time is bought
on all the major networks. The independent stations provide alternative
programming for people who don't want to watch the debate, the Gulf War, etc.

BTW, Radio is not a preferred method for political advertising in the US, so
please pardon my slipping from radio to TV. There are all sort of reasons
for this, but that's going astray for the moment.

Now let's go to item (b) -- program quality.

From: Trond Andresen <Trond.Andresen@xxxxxxxxxxx>

>No problem. Let me again use radio as an example. Establish a public
>agency which monitors listener support. Pool all radio commercials
>through a common office. Place the radio spots in
>all radios so that the advertisers reach the contracted  number of
>listeners for the price paid. This means that radios having fairly few
>listeners get proportionally less revenue per spot. Through this system
>the advertsers reach as many listeners for a given price as before, but
>they do not any more have the possibility to decide which station they
>want to survive. Now what is most important: That competing stations
>have a fair chance to earn revenue in proportion to their listener
>support, or that advertisers shall still be the prime decision makers

The concept unfortunately confuses popularity with quality. Our
popular communications experts (notably Frank Zappa) reason that
popular programming, which has the largest number of listeners or
viewers, is one that panders to the least common intellectual denomonator.
To be a top 40 hit, one must be just the right kind of mediocre.
Of course there are other paths to success: High quality pieces that
become "hits" are such because they contain something for many sectors
of the audience. Others are successful because they focus on a specific
and more limited audience that wants what they do -- e.g. Zappa who only
had one top 40 hit in the mid- 70's, "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow."
"Valley girl" was written to be an arcane slice of Los Angeles, but
became a bigger hit than the Zappas realized; not sure if it was as
big as yellow snow. (I'll forego the temptation to rant on the
music business and get back to central issues.)

Another issue of importance: Does media immitate life,
or does life immitate media? Trond's thesis seems heavily centered
on the latter, but media writers and programmers deliberately
try to capture the former -- people want to see themselves on TV,
at least sometimes. Sometimes they want to see the opposite of their
lives or shows that hyperbolize their existing value systems or lifestyles.


>This is really too much. Do you have to be an academic in the social
>sciences not too see the forest because of the trees? I can't for the
>life of me see of you can have a representative democracy when
>representaives have to spend millions of dollars on TV commercials etc.
>for the chance to be elected. In Norway political commercials are
>(still, but just wait..) prohibited in TV and radio, and thank God for
>that.

So how is Norway's political expression any more conducive to understanding
than that of the USA? Any political expression medium at the time of an
election is a persuation attempt, i.e., a sales call, a commercial.
I suspect the ban on political commercial on Norway's media is related
to the government control of the media; the medium owner cannot be
acused of throwing the election one way or the other.

Anyhow, that's how it looks to me today, Folks!

--Stephen Guastello
Assoc. Professor
Industrial Psychology & Ergonomics
Marquette University
Milwaukee, WI 53233 USA