Broadcast audience feedback mechanisms chiefly serve broadcasters, not audiences

Evidence

The unilateral nature of modern broadcasting. Radio and television are essentially forms of one-way transmission, in which small professional elites speak to widely dispersed and heterogeneous audiences. Feedback (by complaints or switching off) is weak and ineffective. The favored types of “feedback”—audience research, viewing figures, and Talkbackstyle programs—serve the interests of broadcasters, not audiences. They enable the broadcasters to “win consent” more effectively for their products in the public arena. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 846

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces and extends the reader’s insights from One Square Inch of Silence about one-way listening technologies and how audience instruments serve institutional power. — connects to: Talk radio succeeded by giving alienated audiences a voice, not by informing them — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 137