Delmy Varano: You realize everyone in this world are sinners...Not trying to preach but this world is extremely corrupt, dont get your hopes up for and i quote "representatives of down-to-earth, conservative, religious, or family people"
Coleman Deliberato: People produce what sells. And if it's still selling, it's still being produced. People like ****, what can I say?
Nelly Kikuchi: Family oriented movies? Try anything before the 1960s... when there was a strict-*** production code telling people what they can and can't put in movies. And why do you associte "conservative" and "religious" with family? My family is perfectly awesome without conservativism and religion. We're not horrible savage people... And you seem to have a distorted view of "the majority"Edit: If the entire media were controlled by religious conservatives, there would be nothing interesting on TV. It would also make me really angry and an opponent of media....Show more
Rick Duchane:! The majority of us lead lives which are not interesting enough to attract viewers. It is only the extreme in any category that star in media presentations or newspaper articles.
Ervin Overbee: And for those who'll want to say there's something wrong with my question, I'd just like them to imagine living in a world where media is controlled by religious conservatives.
Antone Youla: GIR: I said "or" family-oriented people, I didn't say and. But thanks for being mostly nice about this. You supported my theories. You would be put off by media controlled by religious people, so why is it that 50% of the U.S. isn't put off by television being controlled by atheists or those who don't seem to have morals (doing drugs, going to jail, getting married for the fourth time, etc...) and let it show in their work?
Justin Casten: The 'down-to-earth, conservative, religious, family people' are DOERS; they don't sit in front of the TV or just provide entertainment...they ! go out and ENJOY the world and help people :-) ...Can't plant ! a flower bed or feed a starving kid if you're filming a show
Jene Kostyla: I'm speaking as someone who was born in 1966 and who remembers how TV and the radio actually were in the 1970s and 1980s...not to mention how heavily television channels and local affiliates _leaned on_ prior content in those decades and repeatedly showed movies (made for/formatted for TV) and programs made anywhere from 10-20 years earlier. So I reasonably suspect that I know what I'm talking about. I was around before cable TV got started, seriously.The honest truth is...at least with television, things started out as you described, family programming catering to the most common, conservative and socially "acceptible" interests. There were exceptions, sure, but for the most part you had three _Brady Bunch_ or _Eight Is Enough_ types of shows for every _Three's Company_. Then cable TV hit, and once people realized that they could, in fact, watch movies at home within a month of their debut! at the movie theaters, the shows and programming became more diverse and more specialized to specific tastes, cultures and yes, age groups.Much the same thing happened with radio earlier with the birth of Rock music and the reinvention of popular music as a "youth music" in the 1950s. Much the same thing happened slightly later in News content with the resurgence and rebirth of "news as propoganda": the return of tabloids, the popularity of talk-radio "shock jocks" and their rise to fame on Fox News in the 1980s and 1990s. In both of those cases you had content happen that "didn't fit" or "wasn't mainstream", but in those cases it also opened people's eyes to what was _possible_ within a Mass Media, should it become more diverse and more about the individual than about appealing to any sort of "timeless, mass culture".And it did, in it's own ways, become more diverse. Fairness and balance (and some would say, the blandness it brought to the table) was replaced by pander! ing to individual niches, audiences and cliques (along with the discord! and hostility that would bring).The internet would only speed this up, like it does with everything, by making each niche at once much more esoteric and exotic, and much _easier_ to find.This brings us to now. And right now...at least in the United States, we live in a culture of individuals. Even as members of an audience, we still consider ourselves a demographic of one: we like to think that our interests and subcultures are uniquely formed and combined enough that each one of us is a "unique snowflake". At best. Conformity bugs us. Being a face in a crowd isn't pleasant for us--at best it's creepy and at worst it's a nightmare.For a lot of us, appealing to some "majority" or to "normal people" or to "family people" is a loaded issue on a par with the old socialist appeal of speaking to "the working man": it makes us feel like lemmings who don't think for themselves. We've been taught all our lives that being a face in the crowd and part of a _collective_ is not j! ust wrong, but culturally sinful somehow--a betrayal of individuality.So under the circumstances it would make sense that our Media is all about the celebration of _Individuals_, if not outright _Characters_. Many of us are inclined to think of "normal people" as being not so bright, or plain-looking, or bland, or conformist to a creepy degree. We don't want to see too much of that in our Media, especially if it's meant to entertain us instead. We'd rather be entertained by _Characters_--people who are so individual it hurts, who are so idiosyncratic that it's clear they _can't_ be anyone but who they are on camera in the moment.And in a world with 257 cable channels and nothing on, this tends to make the niche, or the minority, the majority of the content. If TV were still pre-cable, you'd still see the bulk of programming reflecting a "majority" or "normal people" mindset, but now that the Media is so fragmented...."normal" and "conservative" and "conformist" are just! niches too. Martha Stewart gets her own channel, yes, but it's only o! ne of hundreds. Same as anyone else....Show more
Nilda Bafia: What Happened to Originality?
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