This article from Le Nouvel Observateur goes to the heart of a theme we often discuss on USTV, that of the role of television as a main tool for ‘manufacturing consent’ in self-proclaimed democracies. In this case, its essential use in the rise of power of Italy’s neo-fascist coroporatist Silvio Berlusconi.

We know that television does not function like other media that have to differentiate themselves, to exalt their differences to sell. Commercial television must level, must promote equality - not of rights, but of behavior and consumption. After the introduction of commercial channels, television transformed itself into a mechanism for the production of desires. And those are desires for material consumption, since advertising is geared to that. But the mechanism instigated by the reading of the audience has quickly taken on wider and more worrying aspects, to the point of subjecting politics itself to its logic.

News broadcasts, by introducing the use of polls to comment on and evaluate problems of social importance, have rooted an equation in the public mind between majority and truth. The most worrying aspect is the tendency to give the poll the value of truth. For the first time, truth and power are expressed in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. Terms like “teledemocracy” and “videocracy,” apparently opposed to one another, express a single concept. The dictatorship of the majority is realized in the video era.

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