It’s Hard Work, Watching Television

Anybody who has taken economics 101 knows that in the business world you have to have a product to sell. That product can be a service, as well. That product is produced by the worker, who generally receives some sort of benefit out of producing the product in the form of wages or commissions. The product is purchased by the consumer. Theoretically, the more the consumer buys, the more the worker produces, the more money the person providing the capital makes on his or her investment, the more happy everybody is. Worker –> Product –> Consumer = $$$

When we look at the television industry, we might be tempted to consider ourselves, the viewers, to be the consumers. But this is not so! We are not the consumers. We are the workers. How do you figure that, Big Daddy, you ask, as well you might? Well, the television isn’t getting any money from us, for one thing. Their money doesn’t come from the people watching. Their money comes from the advertisers. You see, television isn’t selling programs (and that’s good, because I wouldn’t buy any of them). Television is selling viewership. Television guarantees to the advertisers that a certain number of people will be watching a given program. The advertisers then purchase the program.

So the advertisers are the consumers. What television is selling is our viewership; therefore we are the workers. The other way to tell that we are the workers is that watching television is no fun. At least watching the ads isn’t fun. That’s why we try to get out of watching the ads by doing other stuff while the ads are on, such as using the bathroom or making a snack. And this is why television is so bad.

You see, they don’t really care if we like the programs or not. They are not trying to interest us in the programs. They are trying to interest the advertisers. For us, all they care about is that they get our attention, which they do every time they put something lurid are bizarre on the screen. We watch television the same way we watch an automobile accident, with that same kind of fascination. Once they have our attention, then the advertisers can sell us shit.

The television’s job is to produce programs as cheaply as possible so that they can make a big profit, like any other factory. If they could outsource our viewing to another country, I’m sure they would, but they can’t. Advertisements, on the other hand, have big budgets. Nearly as much work goes into producing most ads as goes into a big budget Hollywood movie. That’s because they need to make the commercial entertaining so we will watch it, and watch it the ten or twenty times we need to watch it in order to be suitably brainwashed. A lot of money goes into those commercials, including research that allows them to make a commercial that will still sink in even if you see it in fast forward mode while you’re speeding on to the next bit of the program you Tivo’d.

Another way to know that we are the workers in the television industry is to note how much we work. The way that capitalism dealt with the labor unions’ insistence on an eight hour work day was to find ways that the same amount of work could be done in fewer hours. That’s how we got the assembly line. As most of us have noted, the number of commercials per hour in television has steadily increased. Late night, I’m sure you have noticed there are often seven minutes of commercials for every four minutes of program. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

Moreover, the duration of each commercial is getting shorter and shorter. At one time, the average commercial was one minute in length. Now it’s much shorter, often even less than 15 seconds. That way they can get more and more commercials in a shorter period of time. Commercials are what the networks are selling. So for each hour of television we are getting less and less program and more and more commercial. In other words, they are making us work harder, longer hours. And we don’t even get paid!

So if you wonder why the news media makes such a big deal about stupid little things that politicians say and why they spend so much time trying to scare us, it’s because they want us to watch their news so we see the ads. And we do. They just need us to do our job. The news industry took a big hit back in the Reagan years when the FCC ruled that reporting the news fell under the same category as any other programming, thus relieving the networks from the responsibility of having to keep the public informed. In other words, new programs now have to make the same profit as any other program. When I was a kid, the two big political conventions were all that was on television those nights. Now, the conventions are banished to cable networks, which still show ads during the coverage.

Even the film industry isn’t immune from this. Increasingly product placement has become a bigger and bigger part of film making, along with all merchandise associated with the film. Now I’m not trying to paint television as the great evil or anything. But this is why the programming is so bad. Still, it’s amazing how much you discover when you stop watching television. For example, there are these strange things called books with which we were familiar while children, but with which, as adults, we spend less and less time. And as a reminder to those of you  who spend more time reading than watching the tube, get back to work!