Core Response #1 - Sebastian Wurzrainer

     During our last class, we discussed how Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams, though engaged in a public debate about television, were actually in agreement when it came to many of their theoretical stances. It seems to me that the core difference has less to do with baseline beliefs and more to do with priorities; McLuhan emphasizes television as a technology system at the expense of all else, whereas Williams emphasizes the social, cultural, political, and economic factors that shape television. I see a similar paradigm at play in the relationship between Todd Gitlin’s “Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television Entertainment” and Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch’s “Television as a Cultural Forum.” Gitlin emphasizes the notion that television content will always be ideologically limited by capitalist hegemony. Newcomb and Hirsch are more optimistic, emphasizing television’s potential as a “public forum,” yet they acknowledge that this public forum must still operate “within the limits of American monopoly-capitalism and within the range of American pluralism” (566). Likewise, Gitlin acknowledges that “the forms of hegemonic entertainment [do not] superimpose themselves automatically and finally onto the consciousness or behavior of all audiences at all times” (253). By conceding that television spectators aren’t innately dupes to capitalist ideology, he allows for the possibility of the public forum notion, even if in a somewhat limited capacity. 

    Crucially, though, these essays were written in the late-1970s/early-1980s and reflect what American television was at that time. Both essays conceive of television as: a) dominated by commercial interests, and b) manifesting in only a few options, thereby ensuring that people who watch television are more or less consuming the same content. The former characteristic is more important to Gitlin’s analysis, whereas the latter characteristic is more important to Newcomb and Hirsch’s analysis, but both characteristics coexist and are, in many ways, interconnected. Neither of these assumptions ring as true in our current age of streaming, bingeing, and “Peak TV.” I do imagine that commercial interests inform television production, distribution, and exhibition just as much if not more than they did in the 1970s and 1980s. But, as I understand it, because there are now so many options in terms of networks and streaming services, a new television show doesn’t need to appeal to everyone to be successful; it need only be extremely popular with a niche audience. Theoretically (although perhaps not always in practice), this allows contemporary television to explore more experimental and controversial themes and formats. In “Prime Time Ideology,” Gitlin targets the formulaic nature of episodic television because it doesn’t permit characters to grow; instead, it maintains a state of constant stasis, thereby reinforcing a status quo that is inevitably aligned with capitalist hegemony (256). But many of today’s most popular shows are highly serialized and depend on the growth and development of the protagonists. This, in turn, facilitates some of the experimentation that perhaps would not have been feasible when Gitlin was writing.

    While this might mean that television is capable of addressing a wider range of topics, it also probably means that television audiences are more modular. As such, television can no longer create a shared base of cultural knowledge in the way that Newcomb and Hirsch conceive. There are simply too many options aimed at all sorts of different audiences. Ultimately, I wonder if this is the inevitable trade off when it comes to television that is so influenced by capitalist incentives. You can foster a multitude of forums that encompass a diversified set of topics, or you can appeal to as wide a public audience as possible, but you can’t do both. Of course, it’s nice to imagine a de-commercialized television that could function as a public forum in the truest sense. But even if we could achieve that, I remain suspicious of the public part of the public forum. After all, even in its most expansive form, one has to wonder who is being excluded from any definition of “the public.”