On Television

I used to read Pierre Bourdieu's "On Television" on wintry bus rides before and after work while living in Iowa.

Sometimes, I felt guilty because I was reading it in English translation.

Sometimes, I felt guilty because while other people on the bus were reading their Bibles, I was reading my Bourdieu.

I love Bourdieu and I love his "On Television" (and I'm glad he came out against the French headscarf ban), but he's nowhere near as good as the Bible.

I guess it was ok, though, since I read my scriptures every day anyway, just not on the bus.

I once heard Wole Soyinka say American hotel rooms should not have Bibles in them, they should have good literature. Nobel Prize or not, that is a moronic statement.

After not having any television for about a decade (with the exception of a few months with PBS), we have, in the last two years, had one year of cable and five months of basic cable. This has caused me some serious reflection on the nature of television, and while my reflections in no way reach the level and depth of analysis of Bourdieu's work on the subject, I still would presumptuously like to entitle them "On Television."


On Television

Wheel of Fortune feels like an anachronism. While Jeopardy seems to fit in the twenty-first century (as it constantly updates its trivia to fit new trends and experiences), Wheel of Fortune seems stuck in the eighties somewhere. I wonder how much longer it will last. I think America's Funniest Home Videos nearly suffered a similar threat of extinction, but then YouTube and on-line clips helped to resurrect the "funny video" genre of television. They also changed their name to "America's Funniest Videos," since the phrase "Home Videos" made the title of the show anachronistic, the change showing their keeping up with the times. Like Wheel of Fortune, America's Funniest Videos partakes in a kind of hokey 80s rhetoric that seems somewhat out of place today, but then there must be a market for that sort of thing, since it actually seems to pervade a lot of television, from game shows to local news casts to political debates. My six-year-old daughter pointed out another glaring anachronism on Wheel of Fortune recently when she asked (about Vanna White): "Daddy why doesn't that lady ever talk?" Not that misogyny is anachronistic (it is very much with us, in both new and traditional forms), but the idea of the silent woman who provides a pretty face and does most of the service grunt work (she turns the letters) while the man gets most of the attention and the up-close shots (Vanna is only a distant character) also seems increasingly out-of-date.

Jeopardy is about trivia-- let's not forget that. Trivia, by definition, is not very important. It is trivial. It is lightweight. So when students tell me that a colleague is so smart that he should be on Jeopardy, I cringe. Jeopardy is not about smart people. It is about people who are good at retaining trivial facts. Often these trivial facts are about tv shows, soap brands, and adolescent music tastes. It's amazing how much of the Jeopardy questions serve as advertising for corporate sponsors. "This brand of detergent promises to remove stains at twice the rate of its competitors." What is Tide? The contestant gets $500 for that, and the Tide company sees its bottom line expand. Nothing better than serving up anti-intellectual fare while selling it as classy, urbane, intellectual. Jeopardy has been called the thinking man's game show. Balderdash. The thinking man's game show would ask a question like "What is Art?" and then give contestants three days to write an essay about it. And no one would watch it.

This is why Downton Abbey does so well. More of a middle-brow audience here, but essentially a similar dynamic in operation. Put a soap opera in costume and add some accents, and your audience can now justify its soap opera tastes by masquerading them (literally "masquerading"-- putting them in costume) as intellectual fare. Downton Abbey and a host of other PBS Masterpiece Theater offerings (Selfridge, etc.) have abandoned the BBC bread-and-butter of Austen, Hardy, Eliot, and Dickens in exchange for the constant drama, sudden twists and turns, and explosive conflicts that seem to populate the screen every three minutes on these new shows. This is not the thoughtful, slow food/reading style of the classics, but rather the immediate gratification and short attention spans characteristic of the middle-brow modern age. With the new PBS dramas, not only can you have it your way right away, but you can even feel intellectual about it, and without the requisite effort. When a sudden death, an extramarital affair, an out-of-wedlock birth, and a violent altercation all happen within the span of sixty minutes, we have left nuance behind in favor of carnival barking.

Speaking of carnival barking, I cannot understand why the likes of Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, and Michael Savage have so much power in the Republican Party. They are carnival barkers and circus performers. The more hyperbole, the better. The more nebulous, cloudy, and sloppy the inferences, the better. The left has its barkers, too-- Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell-- but you don't see them giving speeches at major political conferences (the way right-wing radio types do at CPAC, for example). You don't see them engaging in public debates with public officials (like Sean Hannity with Rocky Anderson, the former liberal mayor of Salt Lake City). I reject both Fox News and MSNBC for their obvious political bias and sloppy thinking, but I cannot understand why Republican politicians take their circus acrobats so seriously.

There is also a lot of bullying on television. We rightly decry bullying in our schools, and then we turn on our television sets and see entire shows devoted to it-- people in power bullying those who are powerless, simply because they can. Chef Gordon Ramsey, anyone? Shark Tank, anyone? Political talk shows on Fox News and MSNBC? Piers Morgan, and other testy interviewers on CNN and other stations? Simon Cowell bullied people for years, in the guise of "truth-speaking" or "frank honesty." You can't splatter bullying all over the airwaves and then, confused about its prevalence in our children's schools, decry it as an anomaly that must be extinguished.

You also can't wonder about violence in our schools, given our prime-time (and even plenty of daytime) television offerings. In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, I noticed just how many guns were all over television programming-- I would see in excess of twenty guns featured in the course of two hours of evening television, and that's with me constantly changing the channel to avoid guns. You can't make guns sexy, and glorify armed violence night after night (and even afternoon after afternoon) and then wonder why some people seek glory and sexiness through armed violence. I was shocked-- was my reaction extreme?-- to see a young boy thoroughly accessorized in the faux-weapons of carnage and destruction that we call war toys, at a church Halloween function some years ago. At church! Replete with faux-military uniform and war paint, this boy ran around the building with a fake M-16 and probably fifty fake bullets draped across his body. His violent play took him down hallways that offered pictures of the Prince of Peace--healing the blind, teaching children, expressing his love through ultimate atonining sacrifice-- and the irony wasn't lost on me. Perhaps this young boy-- innocent in all of this, merely reflecting the society into which he was born-- even thought he was being a patriot for Halloween, and I thought of President Kimball's statement:

"We are a warlike people, easily distracted from our assignment of preparing for the coming of the Lord. When enemies rise up, we commit vast resources to the fabrication of gods of stone and steel—ships, planes, missiles, fortifications—and depend on them for protection and deliverance. When threatened, we become antienemy instead of pro-kingdom of God; we train a man in the art of war and call him a patriot, thus, in the manner of Satan’s counterfeit of true patriotism, perverting the Savior’s teaching:

'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

“That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.' (Matt. 5:44–45.)"


There are many other things I might say about television-- about the ironic artificiality of "reality tv" (and about how I had to readjust some of my views of reality television when BYUTV's "The District" came out), about the voyeurism of shows about fat people who lose weight, about everything that was wrong with the show "Splash," about how a show like "Shark Tank" could only succeed in America, and on and on, but this post is already too long.