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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26436 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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I think @The_Nybbler has the right of this one. Are you familiar with the Rural Purge in 1970s television?

By 1966, industry executives were lamenting the lack of diversity in American television offerings and the dominance of rural-oriented programming on the Big Three television networks of the era, noting that "ratings indicate that the American public prefer hillbillies, cowboys, and spies".[4]

CBS vice president Michael Dann personally hated the rural-oriented programming he was airing (as did most television executives), but he kept the shows on the air in acknowledgement of their strong overall ratings, which he considered the most important measure of a program's success. Dann's superior, CBS president James T. Aubrey, likewise believed rural sitcoms were a crucial part of the network's formula for success, noting that at the time, advertisers wanted the audience that watched rural sitcoms.[5] Robert Wood, an incoming president of CBS, pressured Dann to cancel the rural programs. Dann was forced out shortly after his response to Wood: "Just because the people who buy refrigerators are between 26 and 35 and live in Scarsdale, you should not beam your programming only at them."[6]

All three of the major television networks, but especially CBS, cancelled popular, highly profitable programs for ideological and aesthetic reasons, and their oligarchical grasp on TV programming at the time meant that no one else was able to pick up the money they were leaving on the table.

But content production has much less oligarchical capture, these days.

True in some fields (sports writing, for example), less true in others. What non-woke group has the financial capacity and coordination ability to produce new worthwhile movies and TV shows? Who can compete with Disney, Netflix, or Amazon? No one, not even the Daily Wire, so when those companies choose to produce only woke content, consumers’ options are either consume that material, or consume nothing.*

*That is, nothing new, which doesn’t bother me the way it seems to bother most people. If I chose to consume only public domain movies, books, music, etc., it would still take me multiple lifetimes to run out of new material.

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