Page 180 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Banality TV: the democratization of celebrity 165
Banality TV is characterized by its all-consuming appetite – a generic,
society-defining quality we have previously encountered in Debord’s
The Society of the Spectacle:
Reality TV’s perverse kinship with traditional documentary film,
network newscasting, and ethnographic film, lies in its ability to
absorb the referent. The digestive enzymes of reality TV (its
distracting quality and spectacle, its dramatic story lines and
self-perpetuation) break the referent down into palatable con-
fections that do not represent an absent referent so much as
cannibalize and assimilate it into a different type of substance.
(Nichols 1994: 46)
Nichols is describing here a key aspect of Banality TV that stems
directly from Adorno’s account of the culture industry’s ability to
reduce the particular to the more easily manipulable elements of an
determining general order. Without wishing to pursue the digestive
metaphor in too vivid detail, Banality TV consumes reality and passes
out the referent in an altered, deeply passive form.
The Manichaean channel Nichols refers to above, vividly describes
the black and white duality that news coverage encourages at the
expense of Baudrillard’s call for more seductively ambiguous catego-
ries of meaning. Thus in most Banality TV formats, the ‘goodies’ are
authority figures and the ‘baddies’ are a range of nefarious lawbreak-
ers. The nominally more serious news industry invariably also proves
adept at maintaining this comfortably familiar narrative framework,
even when the narrative positions are reversed. Hence, on the
relatively rare occasions when gross wrong-doing by institutional
forces is exposed – the police now become the ‘baddie’ rogue
elements and the victim can be an innocent member of a formerly
threatening urban underclass. Such a reversal can occur: ‘without
necessarily changing the localized, game-like focus. The surrounding
context in which the interpretive struggle takes place – from what constitutes
appropriate use of force to how crime and poverty can be eradicated …
remains untouched’ (Nichols 1994: 21; emphasis added). This repre-
sents the political manifestation of McLuhan’s axiom, the medium is
the message. The potentially explosive insights into inner-city race
relations created by media events such as the Rodney King incident
and Hurricane Katrina are neutralized by the media’s ability to
frame the story with its own particular grammar. Cultural populism
and its emphasis on audience empowerment fails to confront
adequately the full implications of the media’s relative impermeabil-
ity to interpretive strategies that will ultimately challenge the media
framing process itself. No matter how superficially sophisticated such
interpretations may at first appear, they are invariably circumscribed
in advance by the powerfully defining structures of meaning media
institutions are able to generate.

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