On Television

Hal Hinson

Life being famously short, it's been a while since I last hunkered down with a piece of deep-dish theoretical sociology, but it took only a meager helping of On Television, the latest opus from esteemed French scholar Pierre Bourdieu, to remind me why. After grappling with a prose style so eye-stinging and impenetrable that you're obliged to reread each sentence a minimum of three times, you begin to realize that Bourdieu is the literary equivalent of anthrax -- a little goes a very long way.

Of course, all this heavy lifting would be justified if, indeed, Bourdieu were able to do what he set out to do, "reveal the hidden mechanisms" at work upon the "journalistic field" and make visible the invisible. But is it really a revelation to suggest that television news is addicted to the "sensationalistic"? The author of some 30 books, Bourdieu is ranked in his homeland alongside such formidable minds as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Here, though, he comes across as something of a dilettante. He rarely mentions specific programs or broadcasts, or makes note of recent innovations, such as the proliferation of channels brought about by satellite broadcasting and cable, or the rise of around-the-clock news.

Throughout On Television he demonstrates how a medium designed to record reality instead creates it. "We are getting closer and closer to the point," he writes, "where the social world is primarily described -- in a sense prescribed -- by television." The accumulation of so much "cultural capital" has created a "de facto monopoly," causing TV news divisions to become the bullies of the new establishment. "With permanent access to public visibility, broad circulation, and mass diffusion these journalists can impose on the whole of society their vision of the world, their conception of problems, their point of view."

This creates "censorship," he warns, though not the usual Orwellian sort. These journalists censor "without actually being aware of it," by a process of selection that includes for broadcast only those "things capable of 'interesting' them, and 'keeping their attention,' which means things that fit their categories and mental grid." But in this and in so many other of Bourdieu's revelations, there is a sense of his having arrived rather late in the discussion. As long ago as 1985, American educator Neil Postman wrote about the pervasiveness of television's corrupting influence, warning that television had become "the paradigm for our conception of public information."

What most upsets Bourdieu is the degree to which television news is dominated by ratings. The profit motive, he asserts, is the prime engine driving all aspects of television production, resulting in a banal, homogeneous product that cannot fail to emphasize "that which is most obvious in the social world." But what could be more obvious than to point out the medium's slavish devotion to the almighty franc?

The biggest surprise is that On Television not only generated considerable controversy back home in France, it also rang up enough sales to become a bestseller. But perhaps this reveals more about the relative natures of France and the United States than it does about the merits of the book itself. Or, perhaps something really was lost in the translation. -- Salon

New York Times Book Review

Illuminating... vivid and clearheaded.

Publishers Weekly

Bourdieu's withering critique of television created a furor in France that lasted several months after airing of the two televised lectures that this broadside comprises. The author, a sociology professor in Paris, damns television as an enemy of critical discourse and a tool of social control that reinforces the status quo by decontextualizing events and fostering ignorance and passivity. For American readers, his acid appraisal will provide shudders of recognition, as when he writes: 'Our news anchors, our talk show hosts, and our sports announcers have turned into two-bit spiritual guides, representatives of middle-class morality. They are always telling us what we "should think." ' Tabloid TV journalism, endless trivia and 'human-interest' stories, programs pandering to mass audiences, telejournalists' defining of a narrow agenda of acceptable issues are served up with Gallic intellectualism and a dollop of structuralist analysis.

Library Journal

...In his more interesting but also more demanding work, Bourdieu (sociology, College de France, Paris) critiques the effects of the medium of television on the practice of journalism and, by extension, on other professions, on government, and on all of society. The bulk of the book is made up of two lectures that Bourdieu delivered over his university's television station, which drew heated criticism from prominent journalists and brought this book to France's best sellers lists last year. Because of the origins of the work there are few citations, but Bourdieu didn't dumb down his language, and the sometimes polemical text demands concentration. Though he mostly refers to French examples, the morass of vapid pontificators on 'news' talk shows and the pervasive self-censorship of the marketplace are all too familiar to American audiences. -- Eric Bryant

Library Journal

...In his more interesting but also more demanding work, Bourdieu (sociology, College de France, Paris) critiques the effects of the medium of television on the practice of journalism and, by extension, on other professions, on government, and on all of society. The bulk of the book is made up of two lectures that Bourdieu delivered over his university's television station, which drew heated criticism from prominent journalists and brought this book to France's best sellers lists last year. Because of the origins of the work there are few citations, but Bourdieu didn't dumb down his language, and the sometimes polemical text demands concentration. Though he mostly refers to French examples, the morass of vapid pontificators on 'news' talk shows and the pervasive self-censorship of the marketplace are all too familiar to American audiences. -- Eric Bryant

Jonathan Crary

Bourdieu's book spills over with observations and conclusions that have been commonplaces in TV criticism for at least two decades. . . .[It reflects] a major thinker grappling with his belated realization that cultural prominence and influence (and celebrity and fame) are no longer possible outside of a television system. -- Bookforum

Le Monde

As much an urgent 'intervention' as a magesterial argument; Bourdieu uses persuasion and polemic to alert his readers to a danger, and to convince them to resist....His book provides endless fodder for thought and discussion.

Kirkus Reviews

A Frenchman's overly academic look at television that will likely leave most American readers cold. Bourdieu's principal thrust in these collected lectures (presented on French television—thus the pun in the book's title) is the presentation of journalism on television. He notes correctly that French (and American) television is flawed by its inability to move outside the mainstream in seeking perspectives. It's always the same 'talking heads' who appear on talk shows to discuss hot topics, and more often than not, people with 'differing' points of view are actually good friends. As a result, little or nothing new is ever presented or learned about subjects that may affect large portions of the population. Bourdieu similarly attacks sensationalism in journalism, noting that it appeals to the baser instincts in the population. He uses the example of the murder of a French child and its representation in the local media and shows how members of Jean-Marie Le Pen's neo-fascist National Front eventually ended getting caught up in the subsequent calls for vigilante justice. While all of this discourse is interesting and pertinent, it gets lost easily in the post-modernist vocabulary that Bourdieu uses to discuss his topic. Furthermore, the literary and sociological references that Bourdieu uses to support his argument will be completely lost on readers who aren't well schooled in the disciplines of either literature or sociology. And because his references are almost overwhelmingly French, the non-French reader will likely also feel at a loss. Translator Ferguson attempts to rectify this obvious failure in cultural transmission with a brief note at the end of the text, but by the timethe reader reaches the end, the damage caused by such confusion is already done. Bourdieu's work is thus of interest only to the serious scholar of sociology or postmodern cultural criticism, not to the reader looking for a broad, lucid study of the problems of television.