Page 124 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 112
which is measured as such according to a certain measurement system’ (Van Dam
1987:16). And if ratings success alone cannot justify VARA’s existence nor define
‘VARA quality’, it is the values of professionalism which provide the main points of
anchorage. This is reflected in some of the variables that Van Dam (ibid.: 17–19)
proposes to operationalize ‘quality’: ‘attention value’ (i.e. is the programme varied and
exciting enough?); ‘accessibility’ (i.e. is the information offered clear and
understandable?); ‘presentation’ (i.e. is the programme sympathetic, inviting, smooth, to
the point?); ‘standing’ (i.e. does the programme reflect good taste?); ‘technical
production value’.
In stressing ‘quality improvement’ as internal policy spearhead, then, VARA
discourse under the leadership of Van Dam has acquired striking similarities with BBC
discourse, where the professional quest for ‘quality’ has reigned since the 1960s and still
prevails in the self-conception of BBC programme makers today (Burns 1977; Blumler et
al. 1986). As we have seen in Chapter 12, ‘quality’ tends to be part of a specialist,
insider’s discourse of judgement, reserved to professional experts not laymen. By
embracing ‘quality’ broadcasters symbolically declare themselves independent of the
exigencies of the outside world: it gives them the alibi for a withdrawal into what Burns
(1977:141) dramatically describes as ‘the autistic world within which they could sustain
the complex system of commitment and belief their work [calls] for’. A world, in other
words, in which the audience must remain at a proper distance, because too much
closeness would disturb the relative security that world, as an occupational milieu,
affords (ibid.: 132–4).
However, VARA’s case makes clear that emphasizing ‘quality’ is not only an
institutional strategy to enable professional complacency. It is also propelled by a desire
to preserve a distinctive identity as a public service institution: in an increasingly
competitive world ‘quality’ has become the preferred marker by which institutions such
as VARA and the BBC now wish to keep themselves from sliding completely into a
commercial working logic. In this sense, ‘quality’ is not just a facilitating discourse for
the broadcasters’ sense of autonomy; at a larger institutional level, it is also perceived as
a pure necessity for public service institutions to stress their ‘surplus value’ vis à vis
commercial institutions. As Blumler et al. have observed,

whereas in American network television, audience maximization is the
test that almost all programmes must pass sooner or later (and more often
sooner), British broadcasters [and VARA broadcasters too] tend to see it
more as a matter of building an audience and retaining its allegiance for a
varied provision…. British programme-makers felt it was possible to have
good-quality programmes in all genres…. ‘Good’ in such cases implies an
attempt to add something to sheer audience-holding ingredients, an
important distinction in support of programme quality that seems much
fainter in the United States.
(Blumler et al. 1986:352–3)

It seems fair to conclude, then, that this vague notion of ‘quality’ serves first of all as a
rhetorical device to boost public service broadcasting’s truncated sense of ‘public
service’. ‘Quality’, as institutionally operationalized and used, is not sought after to