If you’re in the television industry, Wade Rowland’s recent essay, Fatal Attractaction in the Literary Review of Canada is a must read.

Although Rowland has a point to make about CBC, his explanation of the economic underpinnings of broadcasting is something we all need to keep in mind.

A few quotes:

The market that the broadcast industry has created consists not of audiences bidding for programming from a variety of program suppliers (broadcasters), but of advertisers bidding for audiences from audience suppliers—which is the role broadcasters play.

The late Israel (Izzy) Asper, founder of the Canwest Global media empire based in Winnipeg, after acquiring a 20 percent stake in New Zealand’s TV3 in 1991, gathered 200 employees of the station in the cafeteria for a pep talk. “You’re in the business of selling soap,” he informed them. Patrick Le Lay, the CEO of TF1, France’s first commercial television outlet, was even more explicit: “TF1’s mission is to help Coca-Cola, for example, sell its product. Now, for a commercial message to be received, the viewer’s brain must be available to it. The mission of our programs is to make those brains available, to amuse them, to relax them between two commercials so as make them receptive. What we are selling to Coca-Cola is available human brain-time.”

As early corporate broadcasters such as NBC and CBS sought to address their responsibilities to shareholders by maximizing advertising sales, they created content that was amenable, by design, to advertising. Program schedules that had initially been heavy on high culture and educational themes quickly devolved into a standard format of comedy, soap opera drama, popular music, and minimal news and current affairs, all of which were designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience while avoiding instances in which commercial messages might seem out of place amid more challenging content.

In a commercial broadcast operation a low-cost production will always be favoured over a higher-cost production that attracts much the same audience.

”business corporations in general and broadcasting corporations in particular are indifferent to the public interest. As rational economic agents, all publicly traded corporations are perfectly egoistic—they operate only in the interest of maximizing shareholder return, as they were designed to do.

”in the actually existing broadcast market, audiences are not the buyers or sellers, but the commodity being bought and sold. The market is set up to produce not the best possible programming, but the best possible audiences (in advertisers’ eyes).

”the whole idea of market democracy in media, on which the criteria of ratings success rests, is highly suspect, if not utterly bogus. A seldom-heard truth is that audiences cannot want what they do not know exists; put another way, they can vote only for or against the programming that is offered to them. Furthermore, experience with gadgets that offer audiences the chance to avoid the commercial content that now makes up about a third of broadcast content (gadgets such as the remote control, VCRs, personal video recorders) has clearly demonstrated that advertising content, at least, is definitely not something the audience wants—as a rule, they avoid it whenever possible. Still, it is what they get.

It’s a great piece.  You should go read the whole thing.