What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
TV by and large has become a dime-store business so far as creativity and talent are concerned. The half-hour and sixty-minute series rattle off the production lines like cans of beans, with an occasional dab of ham inside.
If radio news is to be regarded as a commodity, only acceptable when saleable, then I don't care what you call it - I say it isn't news.
We've always known you can gain circulation or viewers by cheapening the product, and now you're finding the bad driving out the good.
In day-to-day commerce, television is not so much interested in the business of communications as in the business of delivering audiences to advertisers. People are the merchandise, not the shows. The shows are merely the bait.
Reality TV has managed to commodify everything we used to think of as the elements of normal life.
We know where the television is - everything has to be a sound bite; everything has to be an image; ideas are okay as long as they don't take more than four or five seconds to explain; candidates and issues are commodities that are sold like cans of soup; entertainment is limited to what a few people believe the lowest common denominator is; and you can't talk back to it.
We have a product for sale called news, and I'm a salesman.
A lot of times, black people were extremely cool, and that's how we've been commodified in TV and film. But now we're starting to see an upswing of material where we're like, 'It's cool to be quirky and weird and smart.'
