Untitled, 2005, by Heimo Zobernig
Though the two lectures comprising Pierre Bourdieu’s short work On Television (1996) more or less exclusively focus on news programming, and predate the blogosphere, if not the internet — which is important to the extent that so much of what he has to say here concerns ownership of the means of information production, — the conclusions he reaches could just as well extend to syndication in general. –Needless to say, the book is a tough, damning diagnosis of an industry that exerts tremendous power over its ‘consumer’ base, i.e. the populace.
The first thing to gather from On Television is that the news industry is and is-not an industry. It’s an industry to the extent that it is run by corporations with private interests, revenue, sales, and a bottom line, but it’s also an industry unlike any other, in that a large percentage of the populace interfaces with its political representatives exclusively through it. This is an astounding fact that should give us all pause. We only really know what’s going on through the news, through a corporation.
This is no doubt an obvious, and by now somewhat banal, fact — but for Bourdieu even the banality of our gut cynicism is a manufactured symptom of the news industry rather than a reaction to it. Obviousness itself is part of the problem. Everything, by necessity, is obvious to the newspeople — and perhaps also to the news consumer. With wry humor Bourdieu recounts one perfectly symptomatic “interview with a program executive for whom everything was absolutely obvious. When I asked him why he scheduled one item before another, his reply was, simply, ‘It’s obvious.’ This is undoubtedly the reason that he had the job he had: his way of seeing things was perfectly adapted to the objective exigencies of his position.” (Bourdieu 26)
This kind of self-enclosed obviousness is perhaps the first obstruction to rigor pervading the news industry. Which is itself so obvious it is easily missed. If you turned on the news right now it could hardly be avoided. Bourdieu, for instance, at one point observes that, in general, the news talks almost exclusively about the political world itself rather than its effects on the world it’s supposed to govern. “They are more interested in the tactics of politics than in the substance,” he writes, “and more concerned with the political effect of speeches and politicians’ maneuverings within the political field (in terms of coalitions, alliances, or individual conflicts) than with the meaning of these.” (Bourdieu 4) This is undeniable on a simple, empirical level. News-talk about the coming stimulus has focused almost entirely on the political actors, crossed party lines, and shifting alliances within the government, with little or no discussion about the bill itself, what its effects are most likely to be, which stratifications will benefit and which one’s won’t, and so forth. The result, he suggests, is a general alienation of the public.
“This exclusive attention to the political ‘microcosm’ and to the facts and effects that can be attributed to it, tends to produce a break with the public, or at least with those segments of the public most concerned with the real consequences of these political positions on their lives and on society at large. This break is duplicated and greatly reinforced, particularly in the case of journalism’s big television stars, by the social distance that comes with high economic and social status.” (Bourdieu 5)
This structural break from the public’s interest can likely be credited with a great deal of the anxiety and confusion provoked in the viewer, the populace, the voter. Add to this the news industry’s programmatic disinterest in causes and conditions, in favor of the spectacular and the event, and one begins to see how, in a rather uniform way, the news model itself contributes to the production or reinforcement of a certain kind of world, one that seems unintelligible, spontaneous, and unavailable to regulation. The news hour itself — that is, the montage series of segments that comprise it — suggests as much, if on an almost formal level.
“The result is a litany of events with no beginning and no real end, thrown together only because they occurred at the same time. So an earthquake in Turkey turns up next to proposed budget cuts, and a championship sports team is featured alongside a big murder trial. These events are reduced to the level of the absurd because we see only those elements that can be shown on television at a given moment, cut off from their antecedents and consequences. There is a patent lack of interest in subtle, nuanced changes, or in processes that, like the continental drift, remain unperceived and imperceptible in the moment, revealing their effects only in the long term. This inattention to nuance both repeats and reinforces the structural amnesia induced by day-to-day thinking and by the competition that equates what’s important with what’s new – the scoop.” (Bourdieu 6–7)
Though the news seems to always be on — and with the advent of CNN and the dozen or so C-SPAN channels, it literally always is, — very little sustained commentary is actually produced, despite the open schedule and clear need for original content. Repetition and subtle variation seem the rule of the day more strongly than ever and can no longer be attributed to a tight, competitive prime time news hour. Shock, and a kind of glancing skim over events, are at at once the formal model and the philosophy of the world to which the populace is invited, through the news, to subscribe. The “journalistic field represents the world in terms of a philosophy that sees history as an absurd series of disasters which can be neither understood nor influenced. Journalism shows us a world full of ethnic wars, racist hatred, violence and crime – a world full of incomprehensible and unsettling dangers from which we must withdraw for our own protection.” (Bourdieu 8 )
If “this worldview fosters fatalism and disengagement, which obviously favors the status quo” (Bourdieu 8), one could easily get the impression, watching commentators rip into each other, that at least they’re engaged, impassioned, and sincere. And I’m sure some of them really are — but, again, on the whole, those who appear on the news to engage in polemical, vicious debate typically do so for a living, in a highly staged manner, traveling from show to show, appearance after appearance, debating the same group of people over and over again. The oppositions we are supposed to take as total, personal, and political are often in actuality timely, performative, and completely at odds with their off-screen relations. In perhaps the most remarkable passage in the text, Bourdieu recounts a moment where one such ‘debate’ — between Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Attali, as it were — was accidentally revealed for the stagecraft it really was.
“Now we must take on the question of televised debates. [...] These people know each other, lunch together, have dinner together. Guillaume Durand once did a program about elites. They were all on hand: [Jacques] Attali, [Nicolas] Sarkozy, Minc … At one point, Attali was talking to Sarkozy and said, ‘Nicolas … Sarkozy,’ with a pause, between the first and last name. If he’d stopped after the first name, it would’ve been obvious to the French viewer that they were cronies, whereas they are called on to represent opposite sides of the political fence. It was a tiny signal of complicity that could easily have gone unnoticed. In fact, the milieu of television regulars is a closed world that functions according to a model of permanent self-reinforcement.” (Bourdieu 30)
On the subject of the TV guest Bourdieu is at his most original. Why do we see the same guests over and over? What makes a good guest a good guest (as they say)? Why do we see very few non-industry, non-prepped, ‘real people’ on the news? Beyond the well-known, short answer — stagecraft, theater, entertainment, — which explains very little, Bourdieu elaborates the real, far-reaching consequences of the erection of this formidable wall between the news and the new industry, and the kind of approach necessary to make the news format more hospitable to non-industry types.
“Obviously, all discussants in the studio are not equal. You have people who are both professional talkers and television pros, and, facing them, you have the rank amateurs (the strikers might know how to talk on their home turf but…). The inequality is patent. To reestablish some equality, the moderator would have to be inegalitarian, by helping those clearly struggling in an unfamiliar situation [...]” (Bourdieu 33)
Which only further supports Bourdieu’s general thesis, that the news industry is enclosed upon itself, is indeed an industry and in this regard can only fail at the democratic function it’s supposed to serve but can’t. In every respect, it seems, untenable, anti-democratic norms are imposed, by the news industry, on the production and distribution of political commentary. In a sweeping passage, Bourdieu describes the kind of thinking that the news industry in its current form necessitates.
“At the beginning of this talk, I claimed that television is not very favorable to the expression of thought, and I set up a negative connection between time pressures and thought. It’s an old philosophical topic – take the opposition that Plato makes between the philosopher, who has time, and people in the agora, in public space, who are in a hurry and under pressure. What he says, more or less, is that you can’t think when you’re in a hurry. It’s a perspective that’s clearly aristocratic, the viewpoint of a priviliged person who has time and doesn’t ask too many questions about the privileges that bestow this time. But this is not the place for that discussion. What is certain is the connection between thought and time. And one of the major problems posed by television is that question of the relationships between time and speed. Is it possible to think fast? By giving the floor to thinkers who are considered able to think at high speed, isn’t television doomed to never have anything but fast-thinkers, thinkers who think faster than a speeding bullet … ?
In fact, what we have to ask is why these individuals are able to respond in these absolutely particular conditions, why and how they can think under these conditions in which nobody can think. The answer, it seems to me, is that they think in clichés, in the ‘received ideas’ that Flaubert talks about – banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally.” (Bourdieu 28–29)
Anyone familiar with the format of Bill O’Reilly’s talk show, not to mention his cultivated attack dog personality, would have a hard time demonstrating its openness to sustained, thoughtful debate. Now, one could argue that patience and deliberation are themselves aristocratic notions, where the passions and real world stakes attached to so much discourse are expected to vanish, in favor of cordial conversation; but, again, the kind of nuanced debate that Bourdieu seems to have in mind, and which we have all witnessed in forums and formats other than TV news, should not be opposed to passion. The old, familiar choice between dry, academic cant and lively, political passion is a false one — and we shouldn’t be tricked into thinking otherwise. The so-called ‘academic’ talk that the networks seem to think would kill their ratings, would do anything but. As Bourdieu at one point remarks (45), “If a vehicle as powerful as television were oriented even slightly toward this kind of symbolic revolution, I can assure you that everyone would be rushing to put a stop to it …”
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. On Television. Translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. New York: The New Press, 1998.
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