TELEVISION: Quality of TV Under Fire in Chile

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Gonzalez

SANTIAGO, Jul 30 1996 (IPS) - The quality of Chilean TV – warts and all – came under scrutiny in a supposed closed session of the Senate this month with mixed results, after criticism split along political party lines.

The TV quality issue became the subject of debate when Senators studied the list of possible new members of Chile’s National Television Council (CNTV).

The session in Valparaiso, 120 km west of Santiago, was not kept closed for long and had barely finished before members were telling reporters what allegedly had gone on. Politicians wasted no time in telling TV news teams that Chilean non-subscription television channels were characterised by the low quality of the programming.

Senators were especially hard on soap operas which they claimed transmitted “antivalues” by showing pornography and “marital infidelity”, and of the easy money achieved by illegal means or simply by violence.

News programmes themselves did not fare much better and there was much condemnation of the tendency towards sensationalism, the “horrifying” nature of much of the news and excessive coverage of violence. The judgement of the senators, however, applied only to the State, university and private TV stations, which are regulated by CNTV.

But in April this year, CNTV resolved it would also intervene in cable TV, censoring the transmission of pornographic programmes. The Council’s behaviour has often raised hackles and has led to another group of parliamentary deputies promoting a bill to disallow any programme censorship after 10:00pm, when children are supposedly in bed.

CNTV has more support in the Senate, where there is a larger conservative presence, although the council’s President Pilar Armanet has said the ideal situation would be for the media to be self-regulating on sensitive moral, political and religious issues.

According to Armanet, the introduction of a video-chip on cable television channels could allow parents to regulate home themselves and prevent children from watching things they considered immoral or excessively violent.

Sociologist and former director of the Secretariat of Communication and Culture, Eugenio Tironi, wrote off the Senate reaction to non-subscription TV as “schizophrenic”.

“Politics is the activity which makes most use of the audiovisual media. The politicians seek to stir up the public and they prefer the screen to the street,” said Tironi.

A survey of housewives aged 25 to 55-years-old from all levels of the social strata in Santiago showed 47 percent agreed television was “alright”, 18 percent said it was “bad or very bad” and 35 percent believed TV was “good or very good”.

TV companies defended themselves by saying they were forced to broadcast shows that attracted high ratings in order to win advertising contracts, as the system dictated that all the stations must be financially self-reliant.

The meter system which allows for a cross-section of Chile’s TV viewers to be measured immediately and automatically showed, however, that the programmes with the best “rating” were not those loaded with sex and violence, but the news broadcasts and family entertainment.

According to Tironi, “slavery” to ratings did not really exist, because of the influence of institutions like the Catholic Church, or other agencies disposed to sacrifice some types of programming to preserve a certain image.

Jorge Navarrete, former executive director of the State National Television and current president of a Cable TV network, said the Senate reaction was exaggerated, as the social effects of television were “far smaller that is presumed.”

Alfredo Escobar, president of the National Association of Television Channels, which covers all the non-subscription channels, said “the cultural development of a nation is not the responsibility of TV alone.

“Local television has always been ready to disseminate culture, but only when we are given the resources by the appropriate organisms, with the State taking on its part of the labour.”

Maria Eugenia Tamblay, Journalism student at the State University of Santiago gave a more categorical judgement.

“No one can deny that the small screen offers viewers a doctorate in vulgarity and distance learning in violence, consumerism, baseness and sensationalism. But that’s how it is, and that’s how we are even if we don’t like it, and TV is no more than an X-ray of real life,” she said.