Page 16 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 4
makers, critics and communication scholars alike are used to emphasizing the profound
differences between public service and commercial arrangements of television
broadcasting, not just at the economic level, but more importantly regarding the cultural
values and intentions that sustain both types of systems. These differences are important
indeed, but it is at least remarkable, as I will clarify in Part III, that the institutions of
West European public service broadcasting have gradually come to appropriate similar
ways of knowing the television audience as their commercial rivals, including an
increasing reliance on the kind of knowledge provided by audience measurement.
This convergence has been possible, I suggest, not just because public service
broadcasting has somehow been contaminated by commercial thinking, but more
fundamentally because in the end all television institutions, irrespective of their founding
principles, are seeking their own survival and continuity in a complex and uncertain,
highly competitive social environment. In other words, when it comes to constructing the
institution/audience relationship, public service and commercial institutions share more
than is commonly acknowledged. The very real differences between the two have been
outweighed by a massive concordance in their adoption of a specifically institutional
point of view from which ‘television audience’ is known as an objectified category of
others to be controlled.

THE CHANGING TELEVISION LANDSCAPE

This is a particularly suitable time to disentangle the problematic nature of current
knowledge about television audiencehood because television institutions on both sides of
the Atlantic have been in major turmoil since the late-1970s. In the United States, the
virtual hegemony of the three commercial networks ABC, CBS and NBC has gradually
been subverted by the emergence of hundreds of independent stations, cable and satellite
channels, a development that was instigated by the deregulation policies of the Reagan
administration (cf. Gomery 1989). By 1988, the balance of power within the American
television business had shifted considerably in favour of the cable companies at the
expense of the networks. For example, CNN, the 24-hour Cable News Network owned by
media mogul Ted Turner, made more profit in that year than the CBS and ABC networks
together (Broadcasting 12 October 1987; Foges 1989). As a result, competition has
intensified and is unlikely to slacken, at least in the near future. It is a competition that is
ultimately fought out over and about the audience: as a market, it is now in ever greater
demand.
The advent of new television transmission and distribution technologies such as cable
and satellite has also transformed the landscape of West European television. The time-
honoured public service tradition in Western Europe has been thrown into a severe
crisis—a crisis which is articulated by the growing influence of commercially-run
channels. For example, Turner’s CNN is only one of the American cable channels that
has already entered the European airwaves through satellite, while a host of other, mostly
European-based national and transnational channels such as Sky Channel, Sky
Television, Super Channel, Sat1, RTL Plus, RTL Veronique, TF1, Canal Plus, TV5 and
VTM, have made their way into people’s living rooms in diverse countries. In the
European context too then increased competition is the direct consequence of these recent