There’s nothing that current affairs television likes more than a good stoush, particularly if its a debate between polar opposites over issues touching on religion and culture. For producers, it’s easy: Just bring the warring parties into the studio, light touch paper and stand well back.
SBS Insight showed how it was done this week when it invited Young Liberal pin-up boy and noted dog whistler Corey Bernardi to sit alongside fervent Muslims in a live on-air debate about banning the burqa. This was rather akin to asking British historian David Irving to a roundtable with Holocaust survivors. One knew before it began that it would not end well. And sure enough, there was lots of shouting and popping of veins.

60 Minutes pioneered these “mixing-fire-with-gasoline” community hall specials many years ago and was widely condemned for exploiting emotionally charged community issues for entertainment value. So it was rather sad to see the ethnic broadcaster provoking a fight for the sake of it.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with television current affairs shows tackling difficult issues. But this approach of just sticking extreme advocates together in a room and having them scream blue murder at each other in front of a live audience does seem a tad, well cynical.

It’s also cheap. Instead of going out into the field and interviewing the protagonists separately, providing background and historical context and aiming primarily to inform, discount broadcasters like SBS can put the whole thing together in the studio with no script, no editing and little research. Best of all, it rates its little socks off, while cementing every viewer’s existing prejuidice, for or against.

Thinking about this television ethic of entertainment above everything, it is rather reminiscent of what that great mythical broadcaster ‘Howard Beale’ said on a fictional TV network 34 years ago:

“Television is not the truth; television is a goddamned amusement park; television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, actors, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. Folks, we are in the boredom killing business. You won’t get any truth from us.”

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2 Comments

Anonymous · September 23, 2010 at 2:29 AM

I see it a process of general decline. Superficiality suits those with enculturated short attention spans. And it has an inherent appeal to cash- and imagination- strapped networks. Hence the audience and the networks feed off each other in their need for superficiality, and downward go the standards in a self-perpetuating inward spiral.

This superficiality reached its nadir (so far) during the election, with the media skirting around policies and issues of substance, in favour of 'drama', 'contest', and the propagation, without due journalistic skepticism, of inflammatory talking points from the Opposition.

The Abbott Opposition, for its part, contributed substantially to the decline. Its three-syllable slogans (“Stop the boats”) were calculated to resonate with the lowest common denominator in the electorate, and were thus seized on hungrily by the unaspirational media that chase such foundational audience.

Unfortunately there's not much on the horizon to give hope things will improve in the near term. The mainstream media seems to have its future trajectory already mapped out – in the shape of a angle sloping downwards. Theoretically, blogs, Twitter, and other social media (the Fifth Estate) could open up the territories of discourse, but their influence is minuscule in comparison, with a mighty long way to go to catch up with the likes of News Ltd and their ABC.

Mr Denmore · September 23, 2010 at 2:47 AM

What the MSM still have is audience reach, but it seems clear the most interesting and individual voices are coming out of the new social media.
And I think that reflects that most journalists, despite their protests to the contrary, still see the communication as largely one-way.

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