CommentaryTV, Willing Willie, the Public Sphere
In this country, television is free. Media rely on advertising. Except for cable channels, network television needs those commercials. We surrendered network programming to the executives who watch the bottom line and to advertisers who want to sell their products to as many who will tune in. We have not had too many critics point to the weaknesses and lapses, the sameness and lack of alternatives in television programming, in a time when television has grown so much that it has become the main source of news and information in this country.
It has taken this shameful incident to stir the public to react.
Angry criticism rocked the public square in cyberspace, with so many people deeply offended by the sight of a young boy, barely 10, miming sexual moves.
The audience applauded on cue, the relative was overjoyed at being called onstage, getting to hug a celebrity host for a quick 3,000 pesos, and then to take home more cash for the boy’s performance. Government and religious officials, artists, experts, and civil society leaders have voiced what has been a long-standing disgust over not just this show but also the general model of many daytime shows, the banality of which has long been accepted as a standard for winning mass audiences.
TV Times, a weekly television magazine, which I edited in the seventies, featured critical articles to accompany the guides for TV programs and the notes of the week’s highlights.
Even then, we noted how the dynamic medium was set back by the dependence on advertising revenues and the insistence of advertisers on the sole criterion, ratings.
Ratings measured the viewers of the program, and the monitoring of these audiences has become a thriving separate industry.
The dependence on this measurement, above all else, has kept programming fixed on the level presumed to appeal to the many. With no other objective than to get as many people registered for viewership, television programming necessarily declines.
Unless networks and advertisers themselves decide to provide an alternative, to provide as in a diet, a better menu, this state of affairs will remain.
All the other questions about the abuse of the child and his rights may be resolved. But it will not address the central question: How badly or how low do we allow television to take the mass audience?
We know now how low things can get. WW, like its predecessor in ABS-CBN 2, Wowowee, succeeded in the ratings because it was giving away money, not as a prize for winning a game or talent show, but just by being there, for doing nothing. A few are asked to enter into whatever silly activities have been cooked up for the day.
The show packaged the doling out of money with the host now giving away what the audience presumes as his money.
And the audience continued to grow. In a poor country, getting into the show is a chance at winning daily lotto. Advertising followed him and the insulting concept from one channel to another. How dumb can that be?
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