Page 174 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Banality TV: the democratization of celebrity 159
to watch people sleeping under duvets. Banality TV exemplifies
McLuhan and Baudrillard’s development of Adorno’s persistent
emphasis upon the systematic, industrialized nature of mediated
culture. In their analyses, such predigested banal becomes a symp-
tom of the way in which media form dominates its content. Thus, both
Adorno and McLuhan scathingly rejected the purported differences
between commodities. Adorno argued that: ‘the difference between
the Chrysler range and General Motors is basically illusory strikes
every child with a keen interest in varieties’ (Adorno and Hork-
heimer 1997: 123), while McLuhan claimed that the significance of
industry (whether physical or cultural) is its assembly-line nature.
The actual content that comes off those assembly lines is largely
irrelevant: ‘In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our
relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the
least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs’ (McLuhan
[1964] 1995: 23). In a similar fashion, Baudrillard’s whole media
theory is based upon the related contention that media fabricate
non-communication in which the expression of meaningful symbols
becomes less important than the technically efficient transmission of
signs (as emptied-out symbols). Critical media theory’s focus upon
content’s subjugation to form directly opposes the frequent tendency
of cultural populism to substitute the description and categorization
of the culture industry’s products for their critical interrogation and
evaluation.

Emancipation and Empowerment: the case of
the docudrama

… there is an inherent conservatism in the structure of such
programmes and … this conservatism has something in com-
mon with Foucault’s ‘spiral of power and pleasure’ as it is
played out in tabloid culture. Here we encounter both ‘the
pleasure that comes from a power that questions, monitors,
watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light’; as well as
‘the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee
from it, fool it or travesty it’.
(Dovey 2000: 118)
Both Gamson (1997) and Dovey (2000) question the emancipatory
potential of Banality TV because it tends to be premised upon a
process of titillation for subsequent condemnation. This provides an
immediately black and white ideological closure that would seem to
leave little room for nuanced or alternative interpretations. Indeed,
Dovey forcefully argues that: ‘there is an astonishing concurrence
between dominant ideologies of late twentieth-century capitalism

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