Posted on 04/25/2011 8:53:19 AM PDT by Immerito
Media is dominated by the left for the same reason the arts have always been dominated by the left. Leftist politics are the politics of feelings, and artists are people ruled by feelings. Conservatives by and large aren’t drawn to acting and writing and painting as careers, subsequently we’ll never be the majority voice in TV, movies, performing arts or visual arts. As for journalists, remember most journalists are failed authors who found out they couldn’t come up with plot or characters, so they resorted to writing about the real world where plot and characters are provided for free. So of course they’re libs, and bitter ones at that because they failed at what they wanted. Presenters are largely failed actors, so again of course they’re libs. As for the “blackballed” conservatives, they’re the odd men out, they don’t fit in, don’t go to the same social events, don’t always get along with their co-workers. And, of course, putting the government in charge won’t fix that.
The BBC gets its funding from the government. If your government isn’t exercising control over it it’s just out of luck. Money from the government ALWAYS comes with strings, and those strings will be pulled, the only question is when not if. Deny it if you chose but you’re ignoring thousands of years of recorded human history to do so.
Hey it’s 2 hours longer to see it coming than you’ve got. Might not be enough time, but it’s time.
No it’s because government employees tend to be idealists and lifers. Most government jobs you make less money than you would doing the same thing in the private sector, there’s a certain kind of person willing to make that sacrifice, and those people stay until retirement time usually straight out of college. So 40 to 45 years of “service” is not uncommon, so we’ve got people working in the government that got there during the Carter administration, doing their job with whatever ideals got them there in the first place, prioritizing their work according to those ideals, regardless of how those ideals match the current administration’s goals. Corporals run the army, secretaries run the office, guess who really decides what America’s priorities are.
BSG was a remake, but it was dramatically different than anything else on TV at the time, and still now. Much thicker character and plot development, a story largely lacking in good guys because all the characters had realistic flaws.
SyFy channels shows lots of sci-fi. BSG, Eureka, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, Stargate. That’s all SF, and original programming SF. Then there’s all the reruns. 3 hours a week of wrestling helps them pay the bills (it is the most popular stuff on there) but it doesn’t mean they aren’t showing SF. They ARE serving a minority audience, maybe not in a way the minority audience is willing to acknowledge, but nerds are notoriously bitchy.
I won't argue with any of that. In fact it was an even more succint appraisal than mine!
The BBC gets its funding from the government. If your government isn’t exercising control over it it’s just out of luck. Money from the government ALWAYS comes with strings, and those strings will be pulled, the only question is when not if. Deny it if you chose but you’re ignoring thousands of years of recorded human history to do so.
I do so deny it. The BBC gets its funding from a form of public subscription. The government is merely the conduit through which that flows. In the same, commercial TV gets its funding through a form of public subscription. The conduit in this case is pretty much every product you buy. Because I fund it, I as a viewer and a listener have far more control over what goes on the BBC than I do over the UK's commercial channels. With them I am one step removed. I think its a better system because I'm a customer, rather than the product being sold. But that's just me.
Hey it’s 2 hours longer to see it coming than you’ve got. Might not be enough time, but it’s time.
Something like that happens over years, not hours. The old "boiling frog" analogy. Some of the storylines and characterisations that television routinely gets away with now would have caused riots twenty-thirty years back. The trick is to not give in to them. Compromise is fine, but not if only one side of the political spectrum ever does it.
No it’s because government employees tend to be idealists and lifers. Most government jobs you make less money than you would doing the same thing in the private sector, there’s a certain kind of person willing to make that sacrifice, and those people stay until retirement time usually straight out of college. So 40 to 45 years of “service” is not uncommon, so we’ve got people working in the government that got there during the Carter administration, doing their job with whatever ideals got them there in the first place, prioritizing their work according to those ideals, regardless of how those ideals match the current administration’s goals. Corporals run the army, secretaries run the office, guess who really decides what America’s priorities are.
I don't deny the truth of any of that, but I don't believe its solely the truth of the matter. Government chooses how to play the hand, but not what cards have been dealt.
BSG was a remake, but it was dramatically different than anything else on TV at the time, and still now. Much thicker character and plot development, a story largely lacking in good guys because all the characters had realistic flaws.
The character development was thicker, but only on the negative side. The storyline was incoherent and basically boiled down to an exercise in nay-saying. It was RELENTLESSLY dark. No matter what the Humans did, the Cylons always seemed to be one step ahead - no matter how unlikely a plot twist was needed to achieve that. So yes, if you like your drama to vary from deepest black all the way across to dark grey, and to be flagellated constantly for thinking that actually standing up for yourself is an ok thing to do, it was fine...
SyFy channels shows lots of sci-fi. BSG, Eureka, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, Stargate. That’s all SF, and original programming SF. Then there’s all the reruns. 3 hours a week of wrestling helps them pay the bills (it is the most popular stuff on there) but it doesn’t mean they aren’t showing SF. They ARE serving a minority audience, maybe not in a way the minority audience is willing to acknowledge, but nerds are notoriously bitchy.
Well I have been misinformed then.
I totally avoid Syfy like the plague, after watching too many cheesy Canadian low budget disaster movies my thoughts are yuck about their quality.
Now BBc I can watch all day long, which I do especially when I can can record all the Top Gear shows I have missed since it came out, and then we have Dr. Who which is back.
I think Syfy had better realize its mistakes...again, somehow they just keep missing the mark.
The problem with the government “merely” being the conduit of funding is that it puts them in charge. Like I said, what happens to the BBC if the government decides that in this economy with these fuel prices the enforcement vans are just not worth the trouble? BBC funding will drop through the floor as very quickly only the honest people will pay the tax (which might be a higher percentage in England than the US but still will be a drop), that’s all the government has to do to exercise total control over the BBC. And that is the nature of government, to increase its own power, and to never give any back.
you might have a point IF the BBC produced a higher general level of quality than commercial TV. But it doesn’t. Whether it’s purely commercial like most of the US, charity funded like our PBS, or tax funded like the BBC, 99% of what winds up on TV is crap. Because one way or the other they’re still pandering to the taste of the average person (even if it’s a minority subsection of the average person) and the average person is a bleeding idiot that needs to be told not to put their extension ladder in cow poo (actual warning label you can find on ladders in the hardware store). As long as the goal is to get an audience of average people the medium will continue to produce crap, and the path of funding only nuances the goal, it doesn’t change it.
Actually I think it’s the other way around. I think when it comes to characterization they got away with more 30 or 40 years ago. They can show a hell of a lot more skin today, but subject matters have tightened up. One of the deep cable channels had a program about 8 years ago where they brought the heads of entertainment for he big 3 in to discuss how TV works and how it’s changed. For one segment they did “elevator pitches” for popular well regarded 70s TV shows, they didn’t mention the show though everybody always figured out what it was, they just rattled off the 30 second version of the subject, like “sit-com in a front line war hospital”. All three guys said over and over they could never show these shows: MASH, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and a handful of other shows considered classics of TV today. In the modern PC world you can’t have a war sit-com, you can’t have a main character that’s a racist, you can’t have a main character that goes to the porn theater every episode.
But how you play the hand is everything. One of the big name poker players in the 80s when discussing the game would do a “demo” where he’d play somebody and never look at his cards. He always said it was because what you thought of your cards was much more important to his victory than anything in his hand. Again look at the enforcement vans that get the BBC funding. Any low level functionary in the UK government could “decide” to lower the priority of those vans and dramatically change life for the BBC, it doesn’t have to be a high level government decision, anybody in the budget office deciding which department gets how much money for transportation can effect this change. Sure they might get overridden eventually by somebody in charge, but it’ll be months before anybody figures out what the heck is going on. That’s why they say secretaries run the office, one less or more 0 on one form can change everything, it’s the old “for the want of a nail the horse was lost” and knowing who controls the nail allotment.
I never had a hard time following the BSG storyline. And I wouldn’t say it was all nay-saying, it was human flaws bouncing off of each other, but they were always trying to do the right thing, problem is not everybody really knew what it was. It was a classic example of nobody being a villain in their own story. From their perspective everybody was a hero doing what was necessary, it was up to the audience to decide who was wrong. And it should have been relentlessly dark, when your story STARTS with a massive multi-planetary genocide that reduces the human population to a non-genetically survivable number it’s going to be a dark story. The Cylons weren’t necessarily one step ahead, and certainly weren’t at the end, the big advantage the Cylons had was a defined goal, the humans spent most of the series confused and pathless, the Cylons knew from the start what they wanted to accomplish and how. People with a goal will always beat the aimless wanderers. Nobody was flagellated for thinking for themselves, they just got to face the consequences of not thinking it through to the end. There was a lot of consequences in the show, a lot of the show was built around what happens after the quick fix stops working.
That’s how fandom is. They focus on what they don’t like and complain constantly. There’s still people whining about Farscape being canceled, that was 3 or 4 owners of the network ago, but they still hold it against the network today. So from where you’re sitting you get to hear about all the “non-SF”, because that’s all fandom talks about.
And what happens if the US Government decides that a "fairness" doctrine needs to be implemented on Talk Radio? Or that advertising on TV should be taxed? The government has all manner of means to influence and control. Just because it has some connection with the purse strings doesn't make it more or less likely.
In all my fifty years I have never seen a detection van. Are such things possible anyway? How can a van detect the passive reception of radio signals? The truth is its all done by a list of names on a big computer. If you are on that list and havent paid, they will come and find you.
you might have a point IF the BBC produced a higher general level of quality than commercial TV. But it doesn’t.
Yes it does.
Whether it’s purely commercial like most of the US, charity funded like our PBS, or tax funded like the BBC, 99% of what winds up on TV is crap. Because one way or the other they’re still pandering to the taste of the average person (even if it’s a minority subsection of the average person) and the average person is a bleeding idiot that needs to be told not to put their extension ladder in cow poo (actual warning label you can find on ladders in the hardware store). As long as the goal is to get an audience of average people the medium will continue to produce crap, and the path of funding only nuances the goal, it doesn’t change it.
Absolutely so. But there you have the nub of it. "As long as the goal is to get an audience of average people.." But the BBC doesn't have that goal. They never have had. Because it is not dependent on ratings for its income, the pressure to produce cheap tat is nowhere near as strong. That's not to say ratings are of no importance to the Beeb. If the ratings fall very low then people will start asking why we need a public televisual service! But even so, it is much easier for the BBC to experiment and try our new things, and yes...80%+ won't work. But at least they have been given a go. Do you think any Commercial channel would have ever commissioned something like "Monty Python" in the early seventies? Or adapt Rober Graves' book "I Claudius", widely considered to be impossible to film, in the late seventies? Or produce televised versions of the complete works of Shakespeare, four to six plays a year, over a decade? Now, none of those examples might float your boat personally, but our society and out culture is all the better for all of them.
Actually I think it’s the other way around. I think when it comes to characterization they got away with more 30 or 40 years ago. They can show a hell of a lot more skin today, but subject matters have tightened up. One of the deep cable channels had a program about 8 years ago where they brought the heads of entertainment for he big 3 in to discuss how TV works and how it’s changed. For one segment they did “elevator pitches” for popular well regarded 70s TV shows, they didn’t mention the show though everybody always figured out what it was, they just rattled off the 30 second version of the subject, like “sit-com in a front line war hospital”. All three guys said over and over they could never show these shows: MASH, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and a handful of other shows considered classics of TV today. In the modern PC world you can’t have a war sit-com, you can’t have a main character that’s a racist, you can’t have a main character that goes to the porn theater every episode.
Agreed, the world has worstened. Censorship of sex and bad language has slackened considerably, while censorship of political viewpoints has been tightened.
Incidentally, both "All in the Family" and "Sandford and Son" are US adaptions of BBC shows.
I never had a hard time following the BSG storyline. And I wouldn’t say it was all nay-saying, it was human flaws bouncing off of each other, but they were always trying to do the right thing, problem is not everybody really knew what it was. It was a classic example of nobody being a villain in their own story. From their perspective everybody was a hero doing what was necessary, it was up to the audience to decide who was wrong. And it should have been relentlessly dark, when your story STARTS with a massive multi-planetary genocide that reduces the human population to a non-genetically survivable number it’s going to be a dark story. The Cylons weren’t necessarily one step ahead, and certainly weren’t at the end, the big advantage the Cylons had was a defined goal, the humans spent most of the series confused and pathless, the Cylons knew from the start what they wanted to accomplish and how. People with a goal will always beat the aimless wanderers. Nobody was flagellated for thinking for themselves, they just got to face the consequences of not thinking it through to the end. There was a lot of consequences in the show, a lot of the show was built around what happens after the quick fix stops working.
There's nothing wrong with being dark. There's nothing wrong with exploring the failings of Human beings. What's wrong is when you ONLY do that. I don't like shows which basically rubbish Humanity. I accept we are a fallen sinful race, but I gravitate to the "flawed masterpiece" idea myself. This anti-Humanity idea is very blatant these days - its all derived from this neo-pagan Gaia nonsense. It gets its attraction from reversing the traditional good and bad - shows where vampires are the heroes and Humans are the savages. Where Indians are noble and peaceful and the cowboys are ruthless and greedy. There was a shocking amount of moral equivalence BS in BSG too. "Don't call us toasters - its racist and mean and unworthy" - moral lessons from the machines that just attempted to commit genocide on the Human Race. It was all very interesting and enlightening for a while, but there's only so much of that stuff a man can take.
You just pointed out more reasons the government shouldn’t be in charge. At least here they’d have to take those extra steps. I never said money was the only way of controlling, but money is the easiest partly because it allows the government to exercise control without ever being overt.
The vans used to detect the magnetic change of a picture tube, which is rather distinctive. Now I think they also look for the heat signatures of LCD and plasma screens, also again very distinctive.
No sorry, you can claim that but in reality BBC TV has just as high a percentage of crap as every other TV system on the planet. That’s the simple truth.
And yes the goal of the BBC is still to get an audience of the average person. If the average person doesn’t want to watch what’s on the BBC then they won’t get the license, they still need the average person to watch to make money. I just pointed out a bunch of great TV made for commercial television, so the answer to your questions is yes yes yes and yes. All methods of funding still result in the same thing: 99% dreck 1% not dreck. It’s easy to point to the good stuff and pretend it’s the norm, but that’s all pretend. The reality is it’s still mostly crap.
Yup, we’ve stolen some good TV ideas from the BBC. Specifically Norman Lear has stolen a lot of good TV ideas from the BBC, I wish they’d consulted him when they made Top Gear America, he could have Americanized it without making it suck.
I don’t think BSG rubbished humanity. There were plenty of moments that showed the characters doing good things, making huge sacrifices. The show HAD to be dark, when you start with a massive genocide there isn’t a whole lot of room for light. That was the problem of the original show, 70s broadcast TV wasn’t prepared for a show that logically progressed from where it started. 00s cable TV could handle it. I never saw the moral equivalencies some people complain about in the show. Yeah sure the toasters didn’t like being called toasters, but they still got called toasters, nobody but them ever said people shouldn’t do it. Meanwhile the toasters spent a lot of time trying to convince themselves they’d done the right thing, and mostly failing. That was one of the big plot elements of the show that most ignore, half the cylons realized they’d done the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.
Not if the money is publically accountable, which it is. If the government decided to cut the licence fee because they wanted to "punish" the Beeb for not being in line with HMG there would be bound to be plenty of people who would make the connection.
The vans used to detect the magnetic change of a picture tube, which is rather distinctive. Now I think they also look for the heat signatures of LCD and plasma screens, also again very distinctive.
To reiterate, I've never even seen one. Again, its all mostly done by names on computer databases.
No sorry, you can claim that but in reality BBC TV has just as high a percentage of crap as every other TV system on the planet. That’s the simple truth.
Attacking the BBC is a national pastime in the UK, but I have never met anyone who has gone abroad and sampled the television there who has not come back admitting the Beeb is best. I've been all over the world and it opened my eyes. I've never met anyone who has come to the UK from abroad who hasn't said the same. The BBC is the best (and certainly the biggest) broadcasting organisation on the planet. It just is.
And yes the goal of the BBC is still to get an audience of the average person. If the average person doesn’t want to watch what’s on the BBC then they won’t get the license, they still need the average person to watch to make money. I just pointed out a bunch of great TV made for commercial television, so the answer to your questions is yes yes yes and yes. All methods of funding still result in the same thing: 99% dreck 1% not dreck. It’s easy to point to the good stuff and pretend it’s the norm, but that’s all pretend. The reality is it’s still mostly crap.
First of all, you need a TV licence in the UK to operate a television, irrespective of whether you watch the BBC or not. You cannot "opt out".
Secondly there's an awful lot of good stuff. It's even technically better. I will admit its not as good as it used to be - increasing costs and the increasing competition from satellite has affected the BBC (as it has everyone else), but even the stuff that doesn't work is a cut above. And you don't have to put up with the thread of storylines being interrupted every ten minutes while someone tries to sell you haemmeroid cream or whatever.
If you honestly think that any commercial channel would have made any of the shows that I listed, then I'm sorry, but you're delusional. None of them would have touched anything like that then (and probably not even now).
Yup, we’ve stolen some good TV ideas from the BBC. Specifically Norman Lear has stolen a lot of good TV ideas from the BBC, I wish they’d consulted him when they made Top Gear America, he could have Americanized it without making it suck.
I prefer to think of it as shared rather than stolen. I mean a lot of work does go into the "americanisation". With regard to Top Gear a lot of its success boils down to a big budget and that mysterious thing called "chemistry" between the main presenters. You either have that or not - its difficult to create it to order. I guess to a certain extent they were lucky there. OTOH, a lot of their success also depends on the fact that they can say what the hell they like about the cars, but the manufacturers cannot put the screws on the BBC. Money again eh?
I don’t think BSG rubbished humanity. There were plenty of moments that showed the characters doing good things, making huge sacrifices. The show HAD to be dark, when you start with a massive genocide there isn’t a whole lot of room for light. That was the problem of the original show, 70s broadcast TV wasn’t prepared for a show that logically progressed from where it started. 00s cable TV could handle it. I never saw the moral equivalencies some people complain about in the show. Yeah sure the toasters didn’t like being called toasters, but they still got called toasters, nobody but them ever said people shouldn’t do it. Meanwhile the toasters spent a lot of time trying to convince themselves they’d done the right thing, and mostly failing. That was one of the big plot elements of the show that most ignore, half the cylons realized they’d done the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.
Nobody ever yelled the attempted genocide back at them when the toaster insult was refuted though. It was obvious an anti-racist stress was in the shows mind.
The plotline was very forced. OK mass military strike to wipe out Mankind, but actually it was always our plan to allow some to escape so we could explore this love thing and Gods idea of procreation? No. Nobody can plan things like that. And most of the major characters turn out to be Cylons in the end, including all the main love interests? No. Sorry, no. Jumped the shark at that point.
But again the government doesn’t have to decide to to cut the license fees. All the government has to decide is that in today’s economy with their current tax revenue and current fuel prices enforcing the license fees is just plain too expensive. Then the rate of collection drops.
You might have never seen one but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. I’ve lived in the desert South West since the mid-70s and I’ve never seen a gila monster in the wild, but I know they exist and probably aren’t too far from my home. The plural of anecdote isn’t fact, you not seeing the vans is an anecdote, the fact is they exist and get used in the investigative process.
Actually a friend of mine moved to London for business, he hates the BBC. He says the shows are mostly the same crap we have on PBS which is why nobody watches PBS.
No the people can opt out. It just means they’d opt out of all TV. We actually wound up with fewer households in America with TVs in them recently, might happen over there too. With the internet and all it implies TV isn’t as necessary as it used to be. There is good stuff, much like there’s a lot of good stuff on American TV, but a lot of that is a function of math. The Beeb has 4 24-7 channels, that’s 96 hours of TV a day, if 99% of it is crap and the other 1% is good that still gives you 1 good hour a day, 7 good hours a week.
We KNOW commercial channels would have made those shows. None of them were that unique. Monty Python was a sketch comedy show, that’s one of the oldest forms of TV there is. Hollywood was built on filming plays and when TV started they continued to tradition and called them teleplays, that’s how Rod Serling built his career far enough to make Twilight Zone. Book adaptations happen constantly, including some of Serling’s early teleplays. There’s nothing that unique about any of those shows, other than being good enough to be remembered many moons later.
Bad comedians borrow, good comedians steal. We ripped you guys off. The bad part about Top Gear America is they approached it like paint by numbers. They needed 3 guys, a driver, some cars, some silliness, and an excuse to get celebrities on. They didn’t really Americanize it, they just tried to do it in a different building. The first thing they should have done was brought in a girl, the super sexy gearhead chick is a very American thing, and tends to make for good TV. Heck real Top Gear even had the perfect girl for it as their Star during the season when they were putting together TGA, big big miss not putting her on TGA. Next thing they should have done was come up with an American name for The Stig, I don’t know if Stig stands for anything but it sounds British, just not a word Americans would come up with. They really needed to step back and understand what TG is, it’s a car show that takes itself non-seriously enough to appeal to non-gearheads, you can do that in America, and you can do it well, we’re really good at ignoring our professed subject matter and just screwing around. But they went for the carbon copy and it just feels hollow.
The toaster insult was never really refuted. The one time it ever came up was when 6 was beating the hell out of Starbuck, and I think she was being sarcastic.
It wasn’t their plan to allow some to escape, they just knew it was bound to happen. Then a certain section of the toasters, the spiritual crowd that wasn’t too sure about the genocide in the first place, started seeing God everywhere in their pursuit of the fleet. I don’t know about all the main love interests, they were really side characters at the beginning. Some of the final five was a bit rough, but it was time to work for closure.
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