Category: media

The furor over the Janet Jackson Superbowl incident contrasts differences between how broadcast and cable networks are treated by the FCC. “What you’re seeing now is an effect of intense competition from cable. Because of the fact that there isn’t a regulatory regime that impacts their content, they have these award-winning shows that are very — let’s call them `edgy.’ And what it’s done is force networks to try to have edgier programming, but up to a line, and I think that tension is increasing very rapidly. The inequitable regulatory regime is causing that to happen. There’s concern that if you’re trying to get at the four broadcast networks, you have to get at the 104 other channels too. Because they’re all just clicks on a clicker right now for the vast majority of the public.”

This is the year of the woman director in Hollywood. But where are the black women directors?

A new PBS movie about the Medicis plays out like a cheap mafia yarn. “This is reenactment history, with a soundtrack of ominous and sinister music, and a voice-over (by Massimo Marinoni) that tells, in rasping and tremulous tones, a story of epic clashes of personality and temperament. Hyperbole wins the day. Everything is always a first, or unprecedented, or without equal. The Medici, who were very much of the Renaissance, are essentially given credit for the Renaissance. The actual stuff of history, the complex wars that kept the military forces of France, Spain, the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire in endless, internecine conflict, are compressed into unintelligibility.”

Mainstream media companies are battling digital piracy. But perhaps they would do well to look at the pornography industry, which has “always been among the first to exploit new technologies, including the VCR, the World Wide Web and online payment systems, is finding novel ways to deal with the threat of online piracy as well. The mainstream entertainment industry, some experts say, would do well to pay attention.”

The BBC says it will spend £8 million on new arts programming in the next year and a half, representing “the biggest single new commitment to the arts on British TV. The BBC currently spends £50m on arts coverage.”

You can smell the desperation in the air. “Network television — battered by years of audience defections to cable channels and fearing the devastation that personal video recording machines like TiVo could wreak on advertising, its only revenue source — is beginning to embrace tactics considered heretical just a few years ago as it struggles to keep viewers tuned in and attentive.”

Hollywood has been a specialist in happy endings. But lately, happy conclusions seem to be out of fashion…

While American media tut-tetted about the Janet Jackson Superbowl breast (but declined to run uncensored photoes with the stories, the English press gleefully published all. Why the different attitudes? “The structure of the media market seems a likelier explanation. Britain has ten competing national newspapers. Sensationalism jostles with pornography in the pages of the tabloids; softer versions of both infect the broadsheets. America’s papers, which tend to be local near-monopolies, can afford a loftier attitude. Newspapers set the tone for television, and the regulators’ attitudes.”

Movieoke is the latest New York craze. “All you need is a high-quality DVD system with a large screen and decent speakers, a library of films, a gang of friends and you’re off. Slot the disc into the machine and amaze or appal the assembled company with, say, your re-enactment of Robert De Niro’s ‘you looking at me?’ speech in Taxi Driver. An exhaustive knowledge of movies and a lack of inhibitions are helpful but not essential.”

There’s no question that language has grown coarser on TV in recent years. And the number of complaints and outrage about swearing seems less. Yet context still matters. “The problem for both broadcasters and moral lobbyists is that, rather like the gap between the rich and the poor, the gulf between liberals and puritans increases annually. A putative radio or television audience will now include some people who are more tolerant than has ever been the case, and some people more sensitive than society has ever contained.”