Page 33 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Audience-as-market and audience-as-
public

So far, I have unproblematically described the operation of the television institution in
commercial terms. But of course the institutional arrangement of television broadcasting
is not always based upon commercial principles. While the United States is the home of
the most full-fledged commercial system, the nation-states of Western Europe are the
historical base of a range of public service broadcasting systems, embodied by state-
regulated and collectively-financed organizations such as the British BBC, the Italian
RAI, or the Dutch ‘pillarized’ system (see e.g. Kuhn 1985). The two systems are both
formally built upon the communicative framework of broadcasting, but they differ
fundamentally as regards assumptions about the cultural and political purpose of
broadcasting, and this difference is inextricably linked to a marked distinction in how
each system prefers to define the institution—audience relationship. In other words,
although all broadcasting institutions must by definition imagine the audience as object to
be conquered, the meaning, intent or import of the conquest is not construed in the same
way in the two systems.
The pragmatic philosophy behind the commercial system is the easiest one to unravel,
because its axioms are simple and straightforward. Commercial television can be
characterized at several levels, but in its barest form it is based upon the intertwined
double principle of the making of programmes for profit and the use of television
channels for advertising. Thus, the driving force of the system is ultimately a purely
economic matter: it is principally connected with the capitalist concern of making money.
As Jay Blumler (1986:1) has observed, ‘individual broadcasters [in American
commercial television] may be moved by aspirations of communication excellence, “love
of television”, social purpose or sheer creative autonomy. But in the end, all such aims
must be subordinated to the overriding profit-maximising goal.’
In principle, the workings of the system are relatively simple. Programmes are
transmitted by commercial television networks and stations in order to carry
commercials, which are usually inserted between programmes or sections of
programmes. The advertisers whose products are offered for sale in the commercials pay
large sums of money to the broadcasters in exchange for the air time they acquire to
disseminate the messages. The system operates according to the laws of the capitalist
market economy, so that advertising time in the most popular programmes is generally
the most expensive. Thus, in the autumn of 1985, a thirty-second time spot in NBC’s The
Cosby Show, then the programme on American prime time television that was measured
as drawing the largest audience, cost $270,000 (ibid.: 5).
It is for this precise economic reason that audience maximization has become so
paramount a principle in commercial television, and concordantly, why the production of
ratings through audience measurement has become an absolutely crucial subsidiary