All the local TV stations are about to launch their winter schedules. They have been selling their wares for some time, and all of them promise substantial improvement in terms of content and presentation.

The audience is waiting, and is anxious to savour the menu. It does so with caution, hoping that the outcome will not turn out to be more of the same.

Across the spectrum of our television audience, there is the distinct feeling that local television, as a medium, could achieve more rewarding and satisfying results.

The audience wants more than formula. Television is a magnificent medium of information and education in the best sense of the word. What excites, educates.

The audience wants objectivity and undiluted information, as well as quality entertainment. It is more sophisticated than many assume.

Room for improvement

Televiewers know they watch a comedy programme for what a comedy can do. Likewise, they watch the news for what it conveys. But they don’t want the twain to meet. There is a lot to be done to improve the recreation business. The standard of production must be lifted in many cases, in terms of product sophistication and in terms of taste.

There are many more things television can do with fiction than one can do with journalism, but journalism is a necessary function in any society where the flow of information is essential to understand the world around us. TV provides a picture of reality as it is captured by camera. The picture has to be explained and the implications it raises have to be elaborated upon.

To merge reality with fiction is to corrupt the one and abuse the other. News and journalism have to be factual and unadulterated.

The source of myths

It is not television that makes mythology. It is the manipulation of the news that is the source of myths.

Misuse of the media in this regard is the engine that drives mythology.

Mythology is made by the interpreters, by the audience itself when it reads into what is reported far more than is actually broadcast.

Television is a medium of nuance and subtlety. It holds at its mercy a captive audience, often in a relaxed home environment, and it exercises its power by skilful use of the sound bite.

Our democratic society is culturally, intellectually, historically and psychologically complex – all of which could not be conveyed through television sound bites. It is perhaps because of this that political speech on the broadcast media has become banal. It is difficult to honour complex ideas on television, unless there are more balanced discussion programmes by participants who are “experts” in their field, and that are open to public participation in order to facilitate reflection in depth.

In this respect, television has its limitations because it tends to flatten everything out by going to the lowest common denominator

Tyranny of time

By its very nature, television compresses time – in the sense that the visual and the image can say more about a complicated situation that needs verbal explanation. Often, it is not out of malevolence or incompetence that news bulletins do not always satisfy. It’s the tyranny of time. This is an added reason why there is a need for balanced, in-depth TV discussion of current affairs in the interest of public enlightenment.

There is one area of popular education, relating to the television medium, which seems to me to have been neglected in these islands – I call it visual literacy.

It is visual literacy that stimulates thinking. Who is sending a particular message? Why did they choose this particular medium to send the message? Why is the camera angle in a certain direction and not the other?

We have neglected this aspect of education. If we had been quick off the mark in the early 1960s, when the first local television station went on air, most of the contemporary viewing audience would be far more discerning and less susceptible to manipulation.

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