Page 32 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The battle between television and its audiences 23
categories reveals an official aversion to one-sidedness. It reflects the wish that televisual
discourse should address viewers in different ways. More precisely, it reflects the wish
that television should not only be producing what is popular among the viewers (usually
located in the category of ‘entertainment’), but should also offer them ‘serious’ stuff (i.e.
‘culture’, ‘information’ and ‘education’).
What is noteworthy is not so much the existence of this opposition between the
‘serious’ and the ‘popular’ (after all, a distinction is also made between a ‘serious’ press
and a ‘popular’ press), but that both modes are intermingled within televisual discourse.
Although serious television and popular television can be seen as two ideologically
contradictory projects which seek to address viewers in contradictory ways and whose
ideals are aimed at creating very different types of textual involvement (see, e.g.,
Corrigan and Willis 1980), they are not expected to be watched by different categories of
viewers. On the contrary, it is one of the ideals of the television institution as it is
organized in the Netherlands—as in the tradition of European public service broadcasting
more generally—to present serious television and popular television as parts of a
package: an evening of television programming usually consists of an amalgam of serious
and popular programmes, and of serious and popular modes of address within
programmes. Thus the two modes are considered as parts of a whole, and not as
independent entities which have no relation to each other. Clearly, this reflects a
definition of how television should be watched: viewers are invited to take up ‘serious’
and ‘popular’ positions in turn; a varied ‘viewing diet’ should be composed.
This seems to be the politics of ‘comprehensive programming’: ideally, it should be
mirrored in ‘comprehensive viewing’. Unfortunately, it is obvious that this is not how
audiences actually watch television. It cannot be denied that an uncontrollable and
‘spontaneous’ split between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ audiences exists, which is reflected in
the well-known fact that the various programme categories have different rates of
popularity (in terms of audience ratings). In other words, the ‘comprehensive viewer’ (the
‘normal citizen’?) turns out to be non-existent. Surprisingly enough, then, despite its
success in transforming so many people into TV viewers, television as an institution
doesn’t seem to have a hold on the way television watching has developed into a cultural
practice of consumption, or on the meanings given to television viewing by the audiences
themselves. Television has largely become an ‘entertainment machine’, whether we like
it or not.
However, the Dutch broadcasting system has yet another important strategy for
securing and regulating heterogeneity in televisual discourse. Since its inception, the
Dutch broadcasting system has been based upon a unique, what could be called
‘subcultural’, or, to use the Dutch term, ‘pillarized’ approach: broadcasting time on the
national TV channels is filled for the most part by organizations which ‘represent a
specific social, cultural or religious current within the population’, as the Broadcasting
Act formulates it. They are then assumed to satisfy the cultural needs of a specific,
socially relevant subsection of the audience, who are defined in terms of their belonging
to a particular religious or ideological ‘pillar’ within society. From the beginning of
broadcasting in the Netherlands (radio started in the 1920s, television in the early 1950s),
five broadcasting organizations have monopolized the system: the Roman Catholic KRO,
the Protestant NCRV, the socialist VARA, the Liberal Protestant VPRO and the ‘neutral’
AVRO. The whole system then was organized around the conception of plurality of