Criticizing Criticism: What A Media Writer Has Gotten Wrong About Television, Part 1: TV Is Sometimes an Art. It's always a Business

 

 

I have spent many years writing about the fundamental flaws so many of the people in my business have in regard to TV and to media. Yesterday, I read a long column by Jeff Jarvis, who worked briefly in television and has spent the decades since leaving the field criticizing the media and internet. He wrote a long column about the current flaws in television. I criticized his writing in two comments, one which he basically ignored and one where he faulted me for not remembering his job history. That was my mistake. That said, the make up of the column he wrote (which I will not highlight) disturbs me because it has all the hallmarks of someone who wants to complain about television without fundamentally understand – or perhaps even caring – how it actually works. Since both are legitimately possible – this is a big world and not all people, certainly not me, understand how television works – I consider this an open letter to him. On the off chance he ends up reading this column, Jarvis fundamentally needs to understand what he either has forgotten or ever acknowledged about the medium he chooses to write about. Because fundamentally, it demonstrates several flawed arguments. There is a possibility he made read this column and consider me a hack or pretentious. All I will say I love television dearly and I am concerned about its eventual fate as much as he is. But his column seems not to take into account several realities. As I have written about them recently and believe they apply here, I feel qualified to write about them.

Those of you who remember the last column I wrote in this series may remember the fundamental disconnect that so many critics and scholars seem to see about the relationship of art as it applies to commerce. I will now quote that same column:

 

Every professor of English literature, every New York film critic, basically anyone who has looked at any form of art basically ignores any idea that it was make money for someone, certainly not the artist. Whether they were a poet or a painter, a musician or a filmmaker, no matter how long ago or what country they were in, they were doing solely for the purpose of making art. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Tennyson wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade, and yes, Orson Welles made Citizen Kane only for the purpose of making art. They did it for free. They didn’t need to eat or pay rent. No they created art solely for posterity and their patrons and absolutely no other reason.

That’s some weapons grade bullshit. All of these scholars and academics will go through the motions of saying, it’s a shame that Renoir and Keats or Chopin died in poverty and unknown at the time, but they live on through their arts. Somehow the horrors of poverty, homelessness and disease only seem insignificant when it comes to artists.  I guarantee you that Rembrandt or Schubert or any of the dozens or hundreds of other artists would have gladly sacrificed the idea of being remembered if they could have had heat in their home or food on their table.

 

And television has never been any different.  Hell, they’ve told us that right up front in the names of some of the stations. The ‘C’ in both NBC and ABC stood for ‘Company’. The last two letters in HBO stand for Box Office. That would seem to indicate that networks are about making money first and art, secondary if at all.