Page 177 - Culture Society and the Media

NEGOTIATION OF CONTROL IN THE MEDIA 167
The people at the networks say they want something fresh, they want
something new, they want something different. You come in with
something new, fresh and different. You work on it a little more and they
say, wait a minute—that’s a little too different. They pay lip-service to the
idea of originality but in actuality the activity takes place along areas that are
somewhat familiar to them. They will buy anything they can relate to
success. They don’t want it exactly like it was before. If you wanted to do
a western that was similar to ‘Gunsmoke’ but not ‘Gunsmoke’, you are in
pretty good shape. But if you do something that is totally different or
something that is exactly ‘Gunsmoke’ chances are you are dead. (Cantor,
1971, pp. 128–9)

Paralysed by the ferocious competition in which they engage, the networks
respond by minimizing all possible risks, hedging all bets. Every year they
commission about 100 pilot shows for projected new series. These shows are
then rigorously pre-tested according to the most sophisticated marketing
techniques available, vetted in special annual screening sessions by the biggest
advertisers, and finally weeded down to the twenty or twenty-five which are most
likely to deliver the goods. The networks commission work to detailed and rigid
specifications in terms of established formulae, and particularly of those which
succeeded best in the previous season.
The image of the audience The economic mechanism is closely linked to
organizational perceptions of audience requirements and behaviour. However,
the relationship of media organizations and communicators to their audience is
essentially ambiguous: Tracey (1978) defined it as an ‘absent framework’ in his
study of the production of political television in Britain. Indeed, there is a sense
in which the organization can be said to develop a model of the audience to suit
its own needs:

It can be shown that the role of the audience extends beyond the creation
and the contents of the mass media product, but affects the structure and
the culture of the mass media industries themselves…. Every mass media
creator, whatever his skill, is to some degree dependent on the validity of his
audience image for his status and standing in the industry. (Gans, 1957, p.
322)

This struggle—between the communicator’s image of the audience, and the
organizational or institutional image of an audience or society in whose name the
organization has been constructed—is illustrated by a particular form of
transaction which emerged in the late 1970s.
A disastrous 1975–6 American television season, in which ratings indicated
average viewing down by nine to fifteen minutes a day, and in which sixteen of
the twenty-seven new shows launched at the beginning of the season were
cancelled and replaced, led to speculation about the possi bility of a change in