Page 166 - Culture Society and the Media

156 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
and the audience research figures gave a quick and easy measure of cost-
effectiveness. (Jay, 1972, p. 23)

The other strategy developed to cope with competition was the ‘art of scheduling’.
Huw Wheldon, former Managing Director of BBC Television, has commented
that ‘It is always difficult for people to accept the brutal proposition that
competition means putting Like against Like but the fact remains that it is so’
(quoted in Smith, 1974, p. 136). The knowledge that certain sorts of programme
attracted a much larger audience than others and the discovery in the 1960s of
the ‘inheritance factor’—the factor which tended to cause the viewer, once
‘caught’, to stay with whatever channel had originally grabbed him—has led to a
drive not only to fight like with like, but to begin the fight earlier and earlier.
This drive is evidenced not simply in a standardization in the substance or
content of programmes but also in their form and style.
In Britain, certain potential excesses of commercial competition are to an
extent limited by the relationship of both the BBC and ITV to government: in
fact Burns (1977), who describes the programe scheduling activities of both
organizations as a mutually convenient ‘pacing’ rather than competition in any
real sense, finds the competitive relationships ambivalent and in some respects
fictional. In the United States, on the other hand, the spirit of the First
Amendment and the tradition of complete personal economic freedom militate
against any governmental control of the editorial process and result in an
immensely powerful competitive ethic. At the same time, the dominant social
ethos of private enterprise creates its own constraints: if the British media are
rooted in a broadly-based social control, American media organizations are
bounded by powerful economic control mechanisms which are extremely
influential on both the organizational context of media production and the nature
of media output.
In the early days of network broadcasting the production of programmes was
the almost exclusive province of advertising agencies. During this period the
networks—NBC, CBS and later ABC—contented themselves with profits made
from the purchase and resale (to advertisers) of transmission time on groups of
stations. But in the 1940s each network began to develop programme packages
for commercial sale. This meant increased revenue, which now came from the
sale of programmes as well as of time. This development has, of course, led to
further concentration of network control: since the network holds an option on
the most desirable transmission times on stations coast to coast it will inevitably
fill those times with programmes in which it has a financial stake. Indeed the
three networks now originate 95 per cent of all programmes transmitted
throughout the USA.
Supported by revenues from advertisers, the network is primarily interested in
reaching the largest possible number of ‘buyers’ for the products advertised. The
function of the local station is to deliver this audience to the network, which in
turn sells it to the advertiser. Various systems—for example, the Nielsen