From: ChipWave-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 14:43:57 EDT
Subject: Bourdieu book review on NYTimes





Tube Boobs
Television, a French sociologist explains, dumbs itself down.

 On Television
 By Pierre Bourdieu.
 Translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson.
 104 pp. New York: The New Press. $18.95.

By CASS R. SUNSTEIN


  In 1996 the eminent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, concerned that
''television poses a serious danger for all the various areas of cultural
production -- for art, for literature, for science, for philosophy and for
law'' -- and is ''no less of a threat to political life and to democracy
itself,'' set out ''to reach beyond'' (as he describes it) his usual academic
audience. The two television lectures he gave from the College de France were
transcribed into a passionate, occasionally scathing book, which became a
surprise best seller in France. Thanks to Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson's
excellent translation, readers of English can pick up ''On Television'' and
see what the fuss was all about. As is often the case in French-American
export-import relations, some portions of the argument travel well, but others
are an awkward fit. 

  Bourdieu's most important assertion is that television provides far less
autonomy, or freedom, than we think. In his view, the market -- the hunt for
higher ratings and so more advertising revenue -- imposes more than uniformity
and banality. It imposes, as effectively as a central authority would by
direct political intervention, a form of ''invisible censorship.'' When, for
example, television producers ''pre-interview'' participants in news and
public affairs programs, to insure that they will speak in simple, attention-
grabbing terms, and when the search for viewers leads to an emphasis on ''the
sensational and the spectacular,'' he says, people with complex or nuanced
views are not allowed a hearing. 

  Bourdieu illustrates his point with the unlikelihood of seeing on television
important but unscheduled news involving the status of foreigners in France or
events in Algeria. ''Press conferences or releases on these subjects are
useless,'' he writes. ''They are supposed to bore everyone, and it is
impossible to get analysis of them into a newspaper unless it is written by
someone with a big name.'' 

  An especially unfortunate consequence of the demand for more viewers,
Bourdieu says, is the premium placed on being ''fast thinkers, thinkers who
think faster than a speeding bullet.'' Because there is a ''negative
connection between time pressures and thought,'' and because people asked to
discuss complex issues are being told to ''think under these conditions in
which nobody can think,'' the only solution is to offer ''banal, conventional,
common ideas.'' Public discussion is transformed into a series of
pseudodebates, in which absurd questions are met with rapid-fire answers -- a
''conception of democratic debates modeled on wrestling.'' But even as
television seeks to grab attention, Bourdieu says, it ends up being innocuous:
''It must attempt to be inoffensive, not to 'offend anyone,' and it must never
bring up problems -- or, if it does, only problems that don't pose any
problem.'' 

  The effect of all this is far from an innocent one. Any simple report -- the
act of putting something on record -- implies, Bourdieu asserts, a kind of
social ''construction'' of reality that can mobilize or demobilize people, by,
for example, making them think that there is a trend in one direction rather
than another (like increased crime) or that most people are concerned about
one problem (like nuclear power) rather than another (like growing poverty).
Bourdieu thinks that television's culture is degrading journalism as a whole,
because it favors not substance but ''human interest stories,'' which
''depoliticize and reduce what goes on in the world to the level of anecdote
or scandal.'' And he is especially concerned about the broader effects of the
ratings mind-set even among avant-garde publishers and intellectual
institutions as well as among academics, who often ''collaborate'' with this
process of ludicrous oversimplification. 

  Although Bourdieu's analysis is rooted in the French experience (which
involves more Government regulation of the media than ours), American readers
will have no trouble coming up with their own parallels. It is illuminating to
see an analysis that takes sensationalistic talk shows not as deviants but as
an extreme example of a trend affecting the news and supposedly more
substantive programming as well. 

  There are, however, several gaps in Bourdieu's argument. The most important
involves the rise of new communications technologies, a subject on which
Bourdieu is unaccountably silent. With the coming of cable, satellite and
digital television, and even programming on the Internet, most viewers are now
(or soon will be) able to choose from an enormous array of options.
Homogeneity is a large part of what concerns Bourdieu, but heterogeneity is
the wave of the future, with multiple niches and with some channels defying
the tabloid mentality. The word ''censorship'' is a hopeless
oversimplification of the coming situation. Nor does Bourdieu pose an obvious
question: Aren't market pressures starting to produce the same kind of
differentiation that both France and America have long seen for music and
books? 

  This question raises a more general one, involving what Americans tend to
see as the crowning virtue of free markets -- providing people with what they
want. Even if broadcasters and journalists don't always like doing what they
must to attract viewers, the result is to cater to the tastes, or preferences,
of the public. This position is captured in the famous dictum of Mark Fowler,
a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who said
television ''is just another appliance . . . it's a toaster with pictures.''
The only way to respond is to insist that there is a difference between the
public interest and what interests the public -- perhaps on the (eminently
reasonable) theory that television should serve educational, civic and
democratic functions that ought to be carried out even if many members of the
viewing public would like something less high-minded. Here, however, Bourdieu
has little to say. 

  As for remedies, Bourdieu is a sociologist, not a policy maker, and his
interest is in understanding, not in solutions. But if he is right, what
follows? Should there be more support for public broadcasting? Is there a
place for mandatory programming, educational television for children, say, and
free air time for candidates? Should those who produce television adopt a code
of good behavior? Bourdieu has not answered these questions. But he deserves
credit for providing an unusually vivid and clearheaded account of why they
are worth asking.  

Cass R. Sunstein, the author of ''Free Markets and Social Justice,'' is a
member of the Federal Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of
Digital Television Broadcasters.



Sunday, August 2, 1998
<A HREF="aol://4344:104.nytcopy.6445375.574106743">Copyright 1998 The New York
Times</A>
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