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August 2, 1998
Tube Boobs
Television, a French sociologist explains, dumbs itself down.
Related LinkFirst Chapter: 'On Television' By CASS R. SUNSTEIN
ON TELEVISION
By Pierre Bourdieu.
Translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson.
104 pp. New York: The New Press. $18.95.
n 1996 the eminent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, concerned that ''television poses a serious danger for all the various areas of cultural production -- for art, for literature, for science, for philosophy and for law'' -- and is ''no less of a threat to political life and to democracy itself,'' set out ''to reach beyond'' (as he describes it) his usual academic audience. The two television lectures he gave from the College de France were transcribed into a passionate, occasionally scathing book, which became a surprise best seller in France. Thanks to Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson's excellent translation, readers of English can pick up ''On Television'' and see what the fuss was all about. As is often the case in French-American export-import relations, some portions of the argument travel well, but others are an awkward fit.
Bourdieu's most important assertion is that television provides far less autonomy, or freedom, than we think. In his view, the market -- the hunt for higher ratings and so more advertising revenue -- imposes more than uniformity and banality. It imposes, as effectively as a central authority would by direct political intervention, a form of ''invisible censorship.'' When, for example, television producers ''pre-interview'' participants in news and public affairs programs, to insure that they will speak in simple, attention-grabbing terms, and when the search for viewers leads to an emphasis on ''the sensational and the spectacular,'' he says, people with complex or nuanced views are not allowed a hearing.
Bourdieu illustrates his point with the unlikelihood of seeing on television important but unscheduled news involving the status of foreigners in France or events in Algeria. ''Press conferences or releases on these subjects are useless,'' he writes. ''They are supposed to bore everyone, and it is impossible to get analysis of them into a newspaper unless it is written by someone with a big name.''
An especially unfortunate consequence of the demand for more viewers, Bourdieu says, is the premium placed on being ''fast thinkers, thinkers who think faster than a speeding bullet.'' Because there is a ''negative connection between time pressures and thought,'' and because people asked to discuss complex issues are being told to ''think under these conditions in which nobody can think,'' the only solution is to offer ''banal, conventional, common ideas.'' Public discussion is transformed into a series of pseudodebates, in which absurd questions are met with rapid-fire answers -- a ''conception of democratic debates modeled on wrestling.'' But even as television seeks to grab attention, Bourdieu says, it ends up being innocuous: ''It must attempt to be inoffensive, not to 'offend anyone,' and it must never bring up problems -- or, if it does, only problems that don't pose any problem.''
The effect of all this is far from an innocent one. Any simple report -- the act of putting something on record -- implies, Bourdieu asserts, a kind of social ''construction'' of reality that can mobilize or demobilize people, by, for example, making them think that there is a trend in one direction rather than another (like increased crime) or that most people are concerned about one problem (like nuclear power) rather than another (like growing poverty). Bourdieu thinks that television's culture is degrading journalism as a whole, because it favors not substance but ''human interest stories,'' which ''depoliticize and reduce what goes on in the world to the level of anecdote or scandal.'' And he is especially concerned about the broader effects of the ratings mind-set even among avant-garde publishers and intellectual institutions as well as among academics, who often ''collaborate'' with this process of ludicrous oversimplification.
Although Bourdieu's analysis is rooted in the French experience (which involves more Government regulation of the media than ours), American readers will have no trouble coming up with their own parallels. It is illuminating to see an analysis that takes sensationalistic talk shows not as deviants but as an extreme example of a trend affecting the news and supposedly more substantive programming as well.
There are, however, several gaps in Bourdieu's argument. The most important involves the rise of new communications technologies, a subject on which Bourdieu is unaccountably silent. With the coming of cable, satellite and digital television, and even programming on the Internet, most viewers are now (or soon will be) able to choose from an enormous array of options. Homogeneity is a large part of what concerns Bourdieu, but heterogeneity is the wave of the future, with multiple niches and with some channels defying the tabloid mentality. The word ''censorship'' is a hopeless oversimplification of the coming situation. Nor does Bourdieu pose an obvious question: Aren't market pressures starting to produce the same kind of differentiation that both France and America have long seen for music and books?
This question raises a more general one, involving what Americans tend to see as the crowning virtue of free markets -- providing people with what they want. Even if broadcasters and journalists don't always like doing what they must to attract viewers, the result is to cater to the tastes, or preferences, of the public. This position is captured in the famous dictum of Mark Fowler, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who said television ''is just another appliance . . . it's a toaster with pictures.'' The only way to respond is to insist that there is a difference between the public interest and what interests the public -- perhaps on the (eminently reasonable) theory that television should serve educational, civic and democratic functions that ought to be carried out even if many members of the viewing public would like something less high-minded. Here, however, Bourdieu has little to say.
As for remedies, Bourdieu is a sociologist, not a policy maker, and his interest is in understanding, not in solutions. But if he is right, what follows? Should there be more support for public broadcasting? Is there a place for mandatory programming, educational television for children, say, and free air time for candidates? Should those who produce television adopt a code of good behavior? Bourdieu has not answered these questions. But he deserves credit for providing an unusually vivid and clearheaded account of why they are worth asking.
Cass R. Sunstein, the author of ''Free Markets and Social Justice,'' is a member of the Federal Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters.
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