TV gives too much money to too few people
So just turn it off and spend time with the kids
By Gerry Bowler • Special to ChristianWeek
While Canadian television viewers snooze gently in front of their sets, American network executives have been waging an expensive and vicious war for the right to entertain us. Though more battles are yet to be fought, some winners and losers are beginning to emerge from the smoke of combat. NBC recently failed to keep Seinfeld on the air despite the offer of $5 million per episode to its star.
The loss of this sit-com immediately gave greater bargaining power to other popular programs on the network: the producers of the medical drama E.R. then succeeded in increasing the price of each of their episodes from $2 million to $13 million and have won a multi-year contract that is worth over a billion dollars. The National Basketball Association recently found a network willing to double the price it paid for its broadcasts, while the National Football League just sold a package of viewing rights to its sleep-inducing product for more than 26 billion of our deflated loonies.
What makes these battles even more senseless is the fact that these inflated prices are being paid for programs that deliver fewer viewers. NFL and NBA ratings are actually down, and the numbers of those watching network television has been in decline for years. How then can network executives justify paying those indecent prices to the suppliers of their programming? The answer is not a comforting one for those who worry about the state of contemporary popular culture.
Enormous sums paid
There are more than 100 million televisions in North American homes, and those sets are on an average of seven hours a day. For the right to broadcast commercials during this time advertisers pay networks enormous sums (e.g., $1.3 million for 30 seconds of the Super Bowl) and viewers pay for their "free" entertainment by submitting to a bombardment of these sales messages.
A Canadian child will see more than 20,000 of these a year; by the time she has graduated from high school she will have watched 350,000 commercials. A 40-year-old will have been hit by a million appeals to spend his money and a senior citizen will have endured more than two million. Not surprisingly the number of ads per program is increasing. In return for the billions they spend on football the networks now have permission to increase the length of the average NFL broadcast by 10-15 minutes of advertising time.
Moreover, the networks themselves are advertising vehicles for the media giants that own them. The Disney Corporation, for example, owns ABC and ESPN, which it uses to trumpet the virtues of its newest movie, its theme parks and other of its mega-corporate ventures. Vertical ownership in the media has meant that the company that owns movie studios will also own television networks, cable channels, book publishers, bookstore chains, magazines, comic books, video game companies and computer software manufacturers.
All of this adds up to a troubling situation. Though we have more leisure time than at any point in history we are spending more of that time as passive viewers. We, and our children, are increasingly at the mercy of a consumer culture that seeks to colonize us--to treat us as beings with no other purpose than to buy advertised goods and services.
Worse yet, our culture is in increasingly fewer hands: the books and newspapers we read, the movies we watch, the television we see, the computer games we play are sold to us by only a handful of transnational corporations.
Though we can never completely escape the hold this culture has on us, we can lessen its effect on our families. Viewing less television, playing sports with your kids instead of watching millionaire athletes play them for you, reading Charles Dickens instead of Tom Clancy, going on a picnic instead of to Macdonalds will all serve to loosen the grip of an ad culture grown fat on our passivity.
Gerry Bowler teaches history at Canadian Nazarene College, Calgary, and is director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Contemporary Culture.
