My former secretary, a conservative Christian, and I agree on one thing: television programming is almost all garbage. Materialistic, shallow, degrading garbage. We are on opposite sides most of the time, but we both wrote letters to fight against media consolidation. Neither of us likes 25 minutes of commercials in every hour; we both cringe at the idea that shows like 'Fear Factor' find an audience and we wish that serial killers hadn't become ever-present on the Discovery Channel.
Does she know that commercialism and corporate greed is behind the sorry state of what is on TV? Does she know that
sleaze and violence are a natural outgrowth of commercialism? When I encourage her to think about it logically: probably, yes. But deep in her heart does she blame "corporatism" or does she blame "liberals"? I strongly suspect she blames "liberals". The emails from 'Concerned Women of America" and other conservative groups don't seem to make the commercialism connection.
TV culture = Corporate residue. Wish we could get our fellow citizens to see the one as the byproduct of the other. Instead, ironically, the very people who are making money off of this type of entertainment (not the artists, but the owners) have convinced the conservative Christians to collaborate with them
in the fight against file sharing.
We
should be framing issues of TV quality as "Commercialism / corporatism is filling our kids with garbage for the mind".
We should be collaborating with rightwing TV-reformers in the fight for worthwhile choices on television and for regulations that would restore public control over the public airwaves.
Instead, Hollywood corporations are using this opening (file-sharing) as a way to shape the perception that their hearts are in the right place, that the owners are not the problem. Media giants can conclude that the new hefty FCC fines for obscenity are okay --
won't it eventually drive out small radio startups while having no impact on the media giants? -- and it gave a sense of success to the rightwing TV-reformers. (Go rest, now, we've taken care of that Jackson nipple problem.) Now, the focus shifts towards controlling the Internet, which
conveniently places those rightwing TV-reformers
on the same side as the Hollywood
corporations.
Eventually, maybe they will shift the dialog so that future battles over programming content can be framed as 'Hollywood corporations partner with Christians to restrain entertainment liberals' or something similar. And more than framing, they can set a framework for future collaboration (think McCarthy) or at least for the entertainment industry to make compromises in window-dressing, to avoid opening up the airwaves for more fundamental changes.
Most importantly, they can ensure that the rightwingers who want less garbage on TV and the leftwingers who want less garbage on TV continue to fight against each other.