Television program agendas in Europe : from public policies to cultural industries

From the very beginning, intellectuals received TV as a secondary and, worst, degraded medium compared to traditional media such as theater, sports, news, etc, with the result that the creative potential of TV was denied and TV itself was abandoned to politics and business. But, in fact, TV is a complex and expensive cultural form. At the beginning, the possibilities of the medium were not well-defined and it became terrain for craftsmen and experimenters. On the other hand, public broadcasting was mostly oriented to education and learning, citizenship and civil society, but the introduction of advertising and the shift towards entertainment generated the the change from the "viewer" to the "audience". At any rate, following Mc Luhan and Baudrillard, one can say that independently of its content, the logic of TV is the logic of the flow : any content whatever follows other content without any reason based on the content, but only on catching audiences. The programmer becomes more important than the producer, and its strategy is guided by marketing logics, the rationalization and the concentration of the production. In this way, TV has moved from small-scale audiovisual production to the standards of industrial capitalism. Nevertheless, there still are regulations tending to promote diversity and protecting fragile programs such as documentaries.

Jacques Guyot. Television program agendas in Europe : from public policies to cultural industries. Glimpse. Phenomenology and Media, 2011, volume 11.12, pp.62-67. ⟨halshs-00648780⟩ - lien externe