Page 108 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 96
middleman. It seems right to state that this style has not only gradually become
naturalized as the preferred mode of presentation, but also that being ‘professional’ in
general (as opposed to ‘amateurish’) has become accepted as the taken-for-granted goal
each contemporary broadcaster strives to achieve.
But the problem with the discourse of professionalism is that it implies an inward-
looking, production-oriented attitude which, logically, insists upon the autonomy of the
professionals in making judgements about the ‘quality’ of the product, without
compliance to ‘outside’ demands. In other words, it is a discourse which tends to protect
and cut the professionals off from those who do not belong to the profession—including
the audience-out-there for whom the work is, logically, ultimately done. For example,
Philip Schlesinger (1987), who has undertaken a close ethnographic analysis of BBC
news production, has noted that ‘the audience’ remains an abstraction in the day-to-day
routines of broadcast journalism. He concludes that ‘“the problem” of the audience it not
an urgent one for the communicator’ (Schlesinger 1987:107). Furthermore, the obsessive
reliance on peer group competition and recognition as points of reference for the
broadasters tends to bring with it an implicit distancing from, and even a devaluation of,
concrete feedback from actual audiences, articulated in what Schlesinger (ibid.: 107–8)
has observed as ‘the apparently general conviction that “the bulk of audience reaction is
from cranks, the unstable, the hysterical and sick”’. Professionalism then is an essentially
self-indulgent discourse, in which the audience is ultimately relegated to the domain of
the irrelevant.
On a more general institutional level, what this amounts to is a radical loosening of the
ties with the audience as inscribed in the BBC’s philosophy of broadcasting. Burns has
struck the point extremely well in remarking that

the transition of broadcasting from an occupation dominated by the ethos
of public service, in which the central concern is with quality in terms of
the public good, and of public betterment, to one dominated by the ethos
of professionalism, in which the central concern is with quality of
performance in terms of standards of appraisal by fellow professionals
[marks] a shift from treating broadcasting as a means to treating
broadcasting as an end.
(Burns 1977:25)

To put it differently, the reformulation of public service commitment in terms of the
obligation to provide a mirror of society has led to emphasizing the professionally-
accountable production of the mirror—operationalized in terms of a broad and diverse
‘range’ of programming of good ‘quality’ (cf. Blumler et al. 1986)—at the expense of a
preoccupation with the potential meaning or impact of that mirror on the audience.
While the classic ideal of cultural enlightenment presumed the construction of a
disciplined audience, today a much more noncommittal attitude towards television is
expected from the audience. It would now be absurd, for instance, to even wish to draw
up guidelines for the right way of watching television; nowadays it is accepted as given
that audiences are free what to watch and how to watch. As Richard Rose has remarked
in his book, Ordinary People and Public Policy (1989:178), ‘a defining characteristic of
a free society is that there are limits to the obligations of citizenship’, and it is this