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'If television considers itself in any way the moral arbiter of our society, I think it goes a long way towards explaining the awful situation our culture is in... [television is] deforming reality and presenting it 24 hours a day... no wonder we feel so confused, afraid, and out of control when this is the reflection presented to us as 'life'.
Bill Hicks, Love all the people
Bill Hicks' criticism of TV could equally apply to large sections of the tabloid media. In fact the tabloid media distorts reality, spreads misinformation and above all spreads fear in a way that is actually less regulated than TV. Yet, worryingly, the tabloid media still acts as the self-appointed moral arbiter for TV.
This leads to tabloids like the Daily Mail levelling criticism against TV with startling hypocrisy. Yesterday, for example, we have both the online and print edition of the Daily Mail running with this story: Hooked on toxic TV: Teen viewing diaries reveal alarming diet of sex, greed and cruelty.
The article opens with a bold typeface to emphasis the serious nature of TV's degradation:
Cruelty. greed. Graphic under-age sex. Forget the watershed... thanks to today's technology, your children can watch ANYTHING at ANY TIME. We asked four teenage girls to keep a diary of their viewing. What they told us was alarming
The writer was so terrified by the horror of TV that they forgot to capitalise some letters but capitalised whole words elsewhere. The hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness is as usual breath-taking, but sadly not at all surprising. Television is a catch-all folk devil that can be wheeled out with little thought and be blamed for any supposed moral degradation.
Television is the devil in every home (Bill Hicks referred to television as 'Lucifer's dream box') that is out to brainwash our children. In this article an archetypal worried mother tells the 'journalist':
'The messages that shows such as Gossip Girl, The Girls Of The Playboy Mansion, Desperate Housewives and Skins give out is that to get ahead you must be thin, be a sexual predator and treat your friends as ruthlessly as your enemies. It is dangerous and disturbing.'
Now, I'm not actually arguing that TV isn't often dangerous or disturbing, but the point I want to make is how is the Daily Mail any different? Has this mother never flicked through an edition of the Daily Mail, or visited their website? Does she not realise they are talking to a journalist who is paid to construct the kind of 'toxic' messages she is complaining about?
That you have to be thin is one of the central founding tenets of the Daily Mail and that you have to treat your friends as ruthlessly as your enemies is a regular Femail feature. Yet the Daily Mail only ever holds others to account for their behaviour, it never stops to analyse its own role in creating 'toxic' messages. Take, for example, another passage from the article:
this diary, which we could call The Cultural Diary Of A 21st-Century Teenager, records a world where girls are hearing one message loud and clear: sex and money are the most important things in life and you can't start getting them too soon.
And the Daily Mail doesn't rely on sex to sell, or deliver the constant message that money is everything? For the Daily Mail to lecture TV for being puerile, toxic, selling sex and promoting money and greed is like Stalin lecturing Hitler on genocide. As Charlie Brooker recently pointed out:
if TV broadcast the kind of material you see in the press - if it paid women in lingerie to recount graphic celebrity fuck'n'tell stories, or shoved its cameras up the skirts of girls exiting taxis so viewers could wank to the sight of their knickers, or routinely broadcast grossly misleading and openly one-sided news reports designed to perpetuate fear and bigotry - if the box in the corner smeared that shit on its screen for 10 seconds a night, it'd generate a pile of complaints high enough to scrape the crust from the underside of Mars.
Yet still the Daily Mail and Paul Dacre pose as the moral arbiter for TV and wider society in general. A large majority of the mainstream media is feeding this poisonous shite to children and making sure they grow up as the next generation of avid consumers of vacuous drivel. I expect this, I understand this, this is capitalism. TV and newspapers have a product to sell, they need advertising revenue and if they have to defecate onto our screens or newspapers because that is what the consumer will gladly tuck into, then that is exactly what they will do.
It isn't particularly hard to understand, but what pisses me off is when the Daily Mail pretends it isn't a part of this. The Daily Mail fains shock about TV's moral degradation; whilst is splashes images of semi-naked women who they judge too fat or too thin all over its paper and website. It rages against the culture of celebrity whilst it wallows in the excrement of paparazzi photos recording the most mind-numbingly mundane aspect of a famous person's life.
If you want to point fingers and make accusations about why our culture is so distorted, meaningless and shallow then you could do as well to point your finger at the Daily Mail and its fellow tabloids as you could at the TV. For all the criticism TV suffers at the hands of the Daily Mail you cannot help but see that TV contains wonderful comedies, awe-inspiring documentaries and uplifting programs that make the other shite all worthwhile - after all, we all know how to use a remote control to avoid the stuff we don't want to watch.
Above all, TV draws a clear line between programs produced for entertainment and actual news programs. At least when someone tunes into a TV programme they know that it is entertainment - it is not there to inform or deliver moral guidance (and it doesn't have to). When the news arrives on TV you know about it, the programme adjusts accordingly because in the UK TV news has to be impartial and is closely monitored to ensure that it is factual and unbiased.
Newspapers on the other hand have no lines to mark the fact that they have departed from factual news to entertainment. Instead they are a melting pot of misinformation posing as serious news, moralising opinion pieces dressed up as neutral reporting - whilst every day the editor delivers sermons based upon the distorted world view contained within the pages of the newspaper.
The Daily Mail poses as a serious newspaper and pretends to be delivering news when really it is hawking the same puerile messages as TV. It appeals to simple instincts: fear, ignorance, hostility, anger; and thrives on ignorance and serves up easy folk devils for its readers.
So what do we do? Bill Hicks suggests that when faced with the perils of TV there is only one answer: 'turn it off'. Equally I would put forward the same argument for the Daily Mail: 'put it down'. Once we have turned it off or put it down we can take a deep breath, open our eyes to the physical world around us and in the words of Bill Hicks:
open [our] window[s] and listen to the breeze and the crickets and the silence that has nothing to sell to us, but gives freely - this is Reality.
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