Better and more profitable media

By Blanca de Lizaur, PhD, MA, BA, Content specialist.

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Redimensionador de tamaño de fuente

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Redimensionador de tamaño de fuente

INRA

Specialized For media people Para:

ANGELS WITHOUT WINGS: CONTENT POLICIES IN MEXICAN TELENOVELAS, 1957-1997

17 years ago, an international conference analyzed how the Government arisen from the Mexican Revolution, remodelled its people’s culture to secure its permanence in the power. That’s where I presented this paper.

The Mexican authorities’s success was such, that they still preside over the country, and manage to keep a democratical image, despite the close-to-war-like period the country is navigating through.

Back home after presenting this paper, a woman –with a stocking distorting her face, followed me during several days, and threatened me. And because of what she said (amongst other things: she knew that my parents were from Spain), I could tell they had investigated me.

I’ve been living in Spain for 14 years, during which my country has broken into pieces. As I go over this text, I wonder where I got the courage to read it back then, considering the reprisals I have had to deal with.

I now publish it in my web, because Spain’s historical evolution faces a critical dilemma, that this text can help understand and solve:

The current economic crisis forces authorities to eliminate or reduce subsidies, sponsorships, official appointments and employment, and other State-granted privileges to cultural agents and industries. If you take them away, however, you can no longer expect to receive the ideological privileges that you received in exchange for them.

If you pay the musicians, then you can make them play the tunes you like, the way you like them, even if this makes them betray their social function or their personal aspirations. What doesn’t make sense, is to expect them to play it your way –precisely the way the general audience dislikes and won’t pay for–, in exchange for nothing.

It is not that they lack loyalty towards the Governmental agenda. In our modern society –in which only money can be used to exchange goods and pay taxes, everything’s got a price. Even mere survival, happens to be too expensive for anyone with no currency in his/her pocket; and sadly enough, musicians –like every other cultural agent and live citizen, need to eat.

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THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING SPECTATOR has little to do with the Digital Revolution

The Digital Revolution (i.e.: the proliferation of the internet, personal computers, mobile/portable devices, etc.) is currently being blamed for the dramatic sales fall that traditional and electronic media are experiencing. This article, originally published in 1994, witnesses to the unfairness of this myth: The Internet was officially born in 1993, only one year before this article was written, and its reach in Mexico was still scarce at that time; yet media had already been losing sales and audiences steadily –for years in some cases, and for decades in others.

The fact is so evident that few –if any, of the media products’ sales recorded here (including a couple of national newspapers), ever recuperated their previous audiences, and many have disappeared altogether:

Contrary to professionally-generated mainstream-media contents, those internet’s contents that have been generated by the general audience (think of FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, e-mail chains and attachments, and the like), are majoritarianly “clean” (amiable in regards to the general audiences’ values, ideas and beliefs). And people are consuming them massively, close to the verge of addiction.

Society cannot possibly deliver mass media a more conclusive message, or put its case in a stronger way.
What are they waiting for to react accordingly…?

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When and WHY MASS MEDIA DIE

Many say that the Digital Revolution –the birth of the internet, mobile (cell) phones, etc.– killed traditional electronic media (radio, tv and cinema), as well as paper media.
Nevertheless, when we analyse media sales-and-consumption statistics around the world –and particularly in the Western world, we realize that they started to lose credibility, reach and financial viability, long before the Digital Age.
This talk makes a quick review of seemingly indestructible mainstream media along centuries and decades of our history –many of whom we are still familiar with, and how and why they met their end.