Two topics have been frequently discussed among Taiwan's TV journalists. One is the cover story in the April issue of Common-wealth magazine, "Retarded Media." The article lashes out at the airing of political wrangling, crime, scandals and gossip. No one knows when this practice became mainstream. Does the Taiwan media have a tendency to march collectively toward retardation and anti-intellectualism?
The other topic concerns TV coverage of a brawl between stray-dog activist Ko Szu-hai (
A closer look shows that both of these topics were linked to viewership ratings.
Every day, 10am is a time of anxiety for TV station managers because that's when AC Nielsen's viewership ratings report comes out. People jokingly call it the "daily lotto." From the general viewership rankings to graphic charts showing changes in the ratings every 15 minutes or three minutes, to minute-by-minute analyses, everything is a must-read for the station managers. The analyses have to be synchronized with every news piece, including the order, content, length, picture frames and sound-on-tape (SOT) recordings, to look for explanations for changes in the viewership curve. That's how the collective anxiety of TV journalists came about.
But what is the significance of high viewership ratings? A recent article in the China Times headlined, "Who needs 24-hour news?" pointed out that psychoanalysts believe the faithful viewers of round-the-clock news channels suffer from neurosis, and that in serious cases the "newsaholic" phenomenon can arise.
In fact, people's voracious intake of 24-hour TV news originates from the anxiety caused by feelings of helplessness and worthlessness -- signs of neurosis. In other words, viewers boost the ratings of the programs they watch but do not get the benefits they deserve. They can only look on as the social milieu deterio-rates by the day, and their feelings of helplessness increase accordingly.
Since its inception, cable TV has thrived and expanded to offer almost 100 channels. It has completely changed the TV media environment and created a new way of absorbing news. Cable TV penetration has risen from more than 40 percent of households in 1994 (which was lower than the US' 62 percent) to around 80 percent now, surpassing the US. In some metropolitan areas, the rate is as high as 91 percent.
Cable TV operators have the advantage of having a large num-ber of channels. They have also incorporated terrestrial channels into the content products they sell. The cable TV channels have enough advertisements and viewership to stand up to their terrestrial counterparts as equals. The transmission quality and channel allocation by system operators influences the loyalty of terrestrial channel viewers. These factors have blurred the traditional boundary between terrestrial and cable channels. Viewers no longer use "terrestrial or cable" as a standard for their choice because everything is in the same remote control.
Cable is challenging the terrestrial stations' dominance. Now, the four terrestrial stations have been defeated by cable channels in the noontime slot -- whose importance is second only to the 8pm prime-time slot, according to AC Nielsen's viewership analysis.
After 9pm, terrestrial stations have for a long time lagged cable channels in viewership ratings.
The 7pm evening news is an important lifeline for terrestrial stations, but an AC Nielsen sur-vey of the 7pm to 7:50pm slot showed that the viewership ratings of cable channels has gone up from 4.94 percent in 1994 to 10.27 percent in 1999. Meanwhile, the ratings for terrestrial stations have fallen from 21.94 percent to 16.76 percent.
The resources that a society invests in the mass media is fixed. If a new channel is accepted by viewers and the advertisement market, then it will naturally edge out an existing channel.
Take the TV news for example. To grab market share, the cable TV channels broadcast stories primarily about crime and gossip, stressing the dramatic effect of conflict and showing a fondness for sensationalism. Seeing their defense line in danger, some of the terrestrial stations go along with the tide and join the race for vulgar content, contributing to the decline of media performance.
Facing such a situation, aren't the TV journalists aware that such news production is an aberration from real news and is becoming fragmented information in the style of variety shows or entertainment? The difficulty of becoming an outstanding journalist lies in challenging the pressure created by viewer ratings on advertising revenues. Social responsibility is often sacrificed to the dictum of ratings.
As Taiwan faces the hegemony of viewership ratings, stations in other countries (the BBC of the UK and CBC of Canada, for example) are gradually developing qualitative research in addition to their quantitative research.
But the fundamental solution is for the TV stations to do their own research and not just rely on ratings gathered by someone else. For Japan's NHK, private ratings companies are only supplementary tools. NHK uses the "General Lifestyle Survey on Citizens" and the "National Individual Viewership Ratings" as an important basis for its programming.
Deplorably, the media in Taiwan cannot hope to do what the BBC or NHK has done. However, if they do not jointly seek breakthroughs, any opportunity to reform the "retarded media" will remain distant. The debate over viewership ratings and viewers' rights will continue and collective anxiety will get worse.
Ho Gwo-hwa is deputy manager of the news department at Taiwan Television Enterprise.
Translated by Francis Huang
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