On Telly

"Media bias" is an oft-quoted phrase, so it's a shame that the conspiracy theories are so contradictory. The obligatory far-right will tell you that the BBC / broadsheets / RTÉ / international media are promoting a broad left-wing agenda, while those on the left will claim that exactly the same organs are promoting a pro-establishment neoliberal doctrine. The most well-known biased outlet is Fox News, spewing - as it does - right-wing ill-informed drivel to a frightening percentage of the world. And yet, fans of Fox News will tell you that it's not biased, that it simply counteracts the bias of the rest of America's news output. It calls itself "Fair and Balanced", and many people believe quite firmly that it is.

So, amid the accusations of bias in various directions, it's easy to draw the conclusion that there really isn't any bias at all, or at least not much of one; that the complaints are made by people that don't consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they're the ones with the bias. It's a slightly fatuous response, but there's more than a grain of truth in it.

However, many people seem to miss the central point; the media's innate bias isn't to the right or the left, but to itself.

"Media" is increasingly a vague term, but I see the main problems with bias being connected to cultural output, which as any right-thinking person knows is more important that trivialities like news. However, it would be churlish not to pick the obvious news-based example here, because it illustrates this point so clearly.

The strange, almost universal truism about the George Lee affair was that Fine Gael failed to use Lee's "talents". There have been differing opinions on where the blame should be apportioned, but most of the commentary predicated itself on this sense of loss. And yet, the key point is this: there is little or no evidence that George Lee had any real talents at all.

I already feel like I've been stating the obvious, so I might as well go further. Politics, grubby trade though it may be, is a particular type of occupation with all sorts of skill-sets (most of which revolve around lying, cheating, and being a two-faced wanker). Assuming someone will definitely be good at it, on the basis of a media career, is as fundamentally wrong-headed as assuming that a cast member of Holby City can carry out open-heart surgery, or that Martin Johnson will automatically be a good rugby coach. Lee would appear to be well-intentioned and intelligent, but there's no reason to assume he'd be any use as a politician. I mean, I've got some pretty decent political policies (I still maintain my idea that you're allowed to vote in one thing per year, i.e. if you express a preference in X-Factor you lose your vote in a General Election, is pretty much flawless), but I'd be useless, since whenever I appeared on The Front Line I'd be too busy punching Breda O'Brien to answer the questions.

So the core assumption, that Lee is a form of political dynamo / economic maestro, seems to be based on him being smarter than the other people who work for RTÉ. Lee is by no means the most brilliant economist in the country, but television doesn't really care about the rest of the country; it's only aware of its own ecosystem. EDIT: I really shouldn't have forgotten to mention Dermot Bannon being described as "one of the country's leading architects" on an episode of The Restaurant, which is the most extreme example of this insular delusion.

(I should clarify that television is by no means unique here; any institution ends up operating according to its own rules. This is why doctors ended up acting as a self-appointed elite, politicians become detached from their electorate, and architects managed to systematically fuck up their own industry and then blame it on everyone else.)

You could pull up all sorts of examples of this if you wanted, such as the news referring to the "poor public performance" of Politician A when in fact it was only the TV camera crews that were unimpressed, or - to pluck out a more recent example - the constant reports of "mounting pressure" on John Terry, when all the "mounting pressure" was generated by the news outlets themselves.

However, I'm not that interested in this phenomenon in the news. I'm more interested in its effect on our culture.

You might start with this from That Newspaper I Read. It's a(nother) story of the death of television and the convergence with the Interweb, based largely on what looks like some hard work from SeeSaw's PR agency. At the core of a ooh-changeing-face-of-the-industry piece is this: "Microsoft research that suggests one in seven 18-to-24-year-olds no longer watches linear TV".

Now, no-one's going to argue that this isn't a significant change, but nor does it indicate cataclysm. This means that 6 out of 7 of these people do, which isn't exactly terrible market penetration. However, television isn't really interested in people, it's interested in "People". It's an insular environment that listens to trends and demographics, and doesn't question the narrative assembled by its peers. TV People listen to other TV People, and It's About The Internet, Stupid is their prevailing mantra. This is just an expansion of this (news-based) opinion piece by Dan Gardner, courtesy of Charlie Brooker.

If 6 out of 7 of the most internet-savvy demographic are still watching television, then it clearly has a cultural role to play. However, it's so unaware of how the populace views it, so isolated from its own users, that it doesn't even seem to consider what that role might be.

Television can do something that internet streaming never can. The first is straightforward, TV presents its entertainment in such a way that everyone watches it at once. This might seem fatuous, but it's no more ludicrous than the fact that the principle, lingering attraction of theatre is that the performance is happening right there in front of you. There's an immediacy to a television broadcast that isn't there when you watch exactly the same thing on DVD. More importantly, there's a social cohesion from being able to discuss a broadcast the next day at work. Cinema has been chasing the notion of the "water-cooler movie" for years. This is something that TV can just do, but it seems to be forgetting this. Before Doctor Who was relaunched in 2005, TV channels were openly disdainful of its chances, because conventional wisdom was that Viewing By Appointment was a old hat. In fact, it was one of the most defining things about the series. Life On Mars, The Office and even (god help us) X-Factor ride on the same wave.

The related benefit of television is best illustrated by another quote from the Guardian article; "watching it online means you can avoid the annoying ads and you can watch whatever you want whenever you want". The best way to sum this up is Choice, and everybody likes choice.

Or do they? Perhaps the most noticeable thing about contemporary television is that it no longer even ackowledges the importance of scheduling. It's not so long ago that every channel thought in terms of providing an evening's entertainment; where a trailer at six in the evening would list every single programme between then and midnight. And, frankly, there's something pleasant about putting your viewing in someone else's hands. There's a skill to scheduling, just like there's a skill to a DJ composing a set; this used to be tangible, but it's now limited to nostalgia-trips like The Liver Birds Night on BBC 2 or Some Minor Celebrities Show Us Programmes They Used To Watch. That one's on Channel 4, natch. Instead, we're being sold the line that digging up our own programmes, as recommended by review sites we found on Google or someone mentioning it on Twitter, is automatically a better option than finding a channel you trust and letting them present you with an option.

And there lies the rub; for that to work, the programming has to be good, and so much of it is now so bad. Ultimately, focusing on the method of delivery has allowed the channels to stop questioning the quality of what they provide. It's obvious to anyone that there hasn't been a decent British comedy since The Office - Peep Show is a partial exception, but Peep Show is no better than all right - but why would anyone notice, when the executives and back-slapper writers are laughing and pretending that The IT Crowd and Pulling are works of genius?

Too many people disparage popular culture, but television remains the single most powerful medium in Western society. At the moment, we're seeing the results of a near-terminal detachment. Television tends to be self-renewing, but the internet argument is different; the talk is of tipping points and revolution. This is a spectacle of a medium ignoring the very things that can make it unique; this current argument resembles a theatre responding to falling attendances by putting on worse and worse acts, then sending its best artists out to busk in the streets for business.