Certainly, it was about time for them to look into the entertainment media. I treat showbiz news as plain entertainment but when I see too much of it, Ihe feel nothing but disdain towards the news program or a newspaper.
In fact, I switch off the television in the newsroom once in a while, when I am sick and tired of watching either TV Patrol or 24 Oras giving too much time on entertainment news. I hear gasps when I shut off the television at the height of showbiz news especially during the Ruffa-Ylmaz issue, but hey I do it as a sign of protest against networks that have created the lives of shoqbiz personalities as a frame of reference to many of their televiewers. Most of the time the entertainment news is stretched, like Actress A denying that she is jealous over the success of Actress B.
The PJR issue struck a chord because I, myself, tried to answer lingering question why entertainment news and 'celebrity culture' has become so much a part of daily life. I made a paper out of it last summer when I took media studies as one of my cognate courses for my MA in Journalism. Maitel Ladrido was our lecturer.
One thing is for sure, entertainment stories do not deserve front page treatment. That is why I felt kind of guilty promoting 'celebrity culture' when I wrote about the James Yap-Kris Aquino-Hope Centeno love triangle, which also found the front page of our newspaper
It was understable that the story is in our paper. James Yap is a local boy from Escalante City and of course, we all know Kris. Hope meanwhile flirted with fame but faded in the swarm of showbiz wannabees. So the story passed the criteria of proximity and prominence James being a standout basketball player.
This post is meant to share and not gloat about the paper I did. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve it from my gmail. I felt bad about my grade in the class that I did not bother check on the feedback on my paper. But when I had the courage to face the reality of having a lower grade than I expected, I checked out my paper and filed it.
Here it is
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This paper explores the relationships between celebrity culture, the blurring of news and entertainment and the commercial capitalist system that perpetuates the entire situation in news organizations. The paper, however, is not limited to the relationship of the three concepts. It will also intend to defy the present predicament based on texts from Robert McChesney’s “Rich Media, Poor Democracy” and the Public Service Model, where audiences are addressed as political beings and not as consumers in a democratic society.
Journalists have struggled to make news interesting and entertaining in an effort to engage their readers. Certainly, no one writing the news ever set out deliberately to make his report unentertaining and dull. Take the case of Henry Luce, who launched Time Magazine in 1923. Luce’s objective was to lure readers by entertaining them, by appealing, as he said, “to the gentleman from Indiana”. Through the years, Time has established a reputation as a serious publication that covers politics and relevant issues like conflict, culture and business, among others.
But not all publications have treaded the path taken by Time Magazine. Other news organizations, especially the ones from the television industry have gone on to be part of a process of ‘tabloidization’: the (news) media as turning to sensationalism, entertainment and the realm of private affairs. This is what happens when media becomes so captivated with celebrity culture and manufactures them to the delight of the audience. This has drawn criticism from many scholars and audience with majority of them pointing out that the focus on the lives of famous people is part of a move away from issues deemed of public interest, thus constituting a weakening of democratic processes.
British media critic Bob Franklin amplifies this argument: “The intimate relations of celebrities from soap operas, the world of sport or the royal family are judged more newsworthy than the reporting of significant issues and events of international consequence”. While the statement is not completely true in the case of serious publications, there is definitely a cause for concern on the rise of celebrity and tabloidization and its growth in the mainstream media.
Altschull writes that the precipitate rush toward more and more entertainment has led to a boom in the field of advertising as well as to massive shifts in popular culture and to giant amusement industry that provides the fodder served up by cable, antenna, and satellite systems. “News, as we have seen, has not been immune to these developments,” he said.
The demand for profit arises not because the owners are greedier than their predecessors were but because the financial challenges they face are tougher, writes Marc Gunther in his article “The Transformation of Network News: How Profitability Has Moved Networks Out of Hard News” that came out in the Neiman Reports in the Summer of 1999. Gunther notes that the American TV entertainment business, in particular, has deteriorated because programming costs are rising while, due to more competition, ratings are falling and hit shows are harder to find and struggling to find its way.
“The networks’ entertainment and sports operations are so troubled that news, particularly in prime time, is becoming one of the networks’ most profitable businesses. To some extent, news programs are now looked to as ways to subsidize entertainment and sports offerings --- just the reverse of the way things used to be”.
Gunther suggests that this may be the reason why more and more entertainment and celebrity stories are finding their way in the newscasts. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, authors of the widely-acclaimed book Elements of Journalism, call this the info-tainment approach. The overused phrase for this approach is the blurring of the lines between entertainment and news.
Atschull says the overriding moral imperative of today’s editors seems to be to publish and air the news --- with little attention paid to the consequences of publication or airing. Even in these cases, editors felt great pressure to publish to get out the news for the edification and interests of readers. The primordial concern is that the reading and the viewing public must be reached; they must me entertained. Given the choice between publishing and not publishing, the inclination was to publish, and it “grew increasingly clear that the kind of news that most attracts readers and viewers is the news that is entertaining, appealing more to the emotions than to the mind”.
The case is not isolated in the United States. This situation is also prevalent in the Philippines, where celebrity, scandal and entertainment news get prime spots in newspapers and television newscasts. A number of factors have compelled news organizations to fall into this trap. One of them is the race for profits, which, I believe, have pushed towards the trivialization of newspapers and television shows. Newspapers and televisions have become closer to what Joseph Pulitzer had feared: Business people getting close to the editorial office.
While it could not be denied that entertainment or celebrity news help newspapers and news programs sell, it is not the only reason that these kinds of news have made their way to the mainstream news. The media is merely feeding the audience’s hunger for celebrity news that is rooted on the celebrity culture that the media itself is guilty of creating.
Richard Dyer, a British professor, who studied the rise of Marilyn Monroe and wrote his findings in the 1979 book “Stars”, came up with a number of reasons why audiences have become captivated by celebrity news and one of them is the ‘ordinary/extraordinary’ paradox, a notion that stars are constructed as being ‘ordinary’ (like ‘us’), yet simultaneously distinctive and ‘special’. Rather than simply some ‘special’, ‘magic’ quality of the individual, a star’s ‘charisma’ is a product of the ways in which their image engages social issues and dilemmas, Dyer said.
Dyer termed bearing ‘witness to the continuousness of [the self’]’ and, returning us to the ideology of the self, the appearance of sincerity and authenticity are two qualities which have historically been ‘greatly prized’ in celebrities. Dyer also points to the ways in which stars work through its anxieties, articulating both the promise and the difficulties of its status.
Perhaps, this sheds light as to why Filipinos are glued to their television sets and are reading gossip columns when celebrity Kris Aquino reveals details of her personal life or actress Ruffa Guttierez talks openly about her marriage in one of the many entertainment platforms in Philippine television networks.
Does this suggest that the media promote values that are socially unacceptable? Not necessarily. But as earlier pointed out, when media gives more time and space to entertainment and celebrity culture, they weaken a democracy and show that there is little space for public debate and discussion on relevant issues.
Hodding Carter, president of Mainstreet Television productions and a veteran media critic, said he fears television was allocation its resources not for the kind of news a democratic public needed but for scandal. “TV itself is a scandal”. If you believe that your mandate is to make a buck, that’s scandal,” he adds.
Another sharp criticism on television comes from Neil Postman, who has labeled the television era “the age of show business”. Television, he writes, “has made entertainment the natural format for the representation of all experience”.
“Newscasters tell viewers to tune in tomorrow for more fragments of tragedy and barbarism, thereby letting us know the news is not to be taken seriously,” he said.
Postman may be exaggerating but he has made a case: “News has been packaged as vaudeville, political discourse has been rendered empty and American viewers no longer talk to another”. At the same time, Postman also acknowledges that television is at its best in “presenting entertainment” and “serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse and lumps them into entertainment packages”.
Another critic, W. Lance Bennet, has dubbed the age of television “an information based on mind-numbing stereotypes”, while Edwin Diamond says that “disco news” and “news hype” on television began even before 1980 when the United States had “approached a model of journalism that was practically all entertainment and zero information”.
History, however, suggests that going for tabloidism or sensationalism or the “info-tainment” approach is not financially feasible in the long run. According to Kovach and Rosenstiel, organizations that tip toward the information spectrum prevail over those that tip toward the entertainment end. The two authors cited the great newspaper war in the 1960s when tabloids and serious newspapers battled for survival. The survivors? No, they were not the tabloids but the serious papers like Washington Post, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe.
McChesney has offered media reforms to counter the phenomenon that has spawned news organizations almost all over the world. He said the starting point should be the establishment of a non-profit and non-commercial media. This actually exists in the United States but I think this concept will not completely work in the Philippines, where a free capitalist market dictates the trend. Plus, the costs of creating a more democratic media system are simply “too high”. The government, however, can do its share by lowering costs on mailing and tax deductions if it is given out to non-profit media, McChesney says. In the Philippines, however, this could turn out to be tricky because of the current political situation. The government has its own interests and the possibility of the government trying to meddle with the editorial content is not remote. It could only work if the government understands the media's role that it is there to be an independent monitor of power. That, of course, is easier said than done.
McChesney also recommends the increase regulation of commercial broadcasting in the public interest. Experience in the US and abroad, however, indicates that “if commercial broadcasters are not held to high public service standards, they will generate the easiest profits by resorting to the crassest commercialism and overwhelm the balance of media culture”. He adds that this approach will not completely work if commercial broadcasters are permitted to buy their way out of public service obligations.
McChesney’s fourth tactic is easier said than done. He said that a creating a more democratic media system means breaking up the largest firms and establish more competitive markets, thus shifting some control from corporate suppliers to citizens. The system, McChesney said, would put emphasis on valuing the importance of ideological diversity and non commercial editorial content.
With reduced barriers to entry in specific markets, new firms can join in and could lead to the radical reconfiguration.
Finally, McChesney said the only way to wrestle some control over media and communication from the giant firms that presently dominate the field will be to mobilize some semblance of a popular movement. As Saul Alinsky noted, the only way to beat organized money is with organized people. Media reform is a necessary component --- even a cornerstone --- for any democratic movement. I believe that media literacy will complement McChesney’s options.
It is important that audiences will be able to negotiate the meaning of media texts. The audience should have the ability to distinguish needs from wants; ability to appreciate the various processes involved in message production, and how these messages comprise cultural texts, and maintain a critical and objective distance to cultural texts while retaining the ability to enjoy them
With knowledge on the negotiation of media texts, audiences can offer some sort of resistance and demand more from its media. A paradigm shift may well be on its way when this happens. And the shift is more likely to veer away from the entertainment and celebrity news that the media continues to feed the audience.
