Content reform could not escape television’s foundational attention-resale model

Evidence

By 1974, the network had retaken nine of the top-ten-rated programs, and television itself had successfully made itself “relevant,” saving it from a slow sapping of its energies, as its first and most faithful viewership began to age and die. … At the same time, Silverman’s success also perhaps showed the challenge and limits of reforming the medium according to Murrow’s vision; for ultimately the business model remained the resale of human attention, and that reality was encoded in the very nature of all the programs. As Paley had first discovered, sometimes you could make the sale with panache; but if not, it still had to be done. Jerry Mander writes, the reformers believed “that television could communicate their message as well as any other….Intent on changing other people’s minds, they did not consider that television might change those who used it.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 583

Categorization

• XREF: The thesis that reform efforts remain captive to the underlying business model echoes arguments about public-interest broadcasting and advertising-driven journalism in earlier chapters. — connects to: TV channels operate as banks loaning out attention capital — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 160; Television’s high fixed costs forced instant ratings success or cancellation — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 490; Television’s persuasive core was the commercial, not its entertainments — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 458 (+7 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive insight that those who seek to reform a medium to change minds fail to see how the medium itself changes the reformer is dense and paradigm-shifting.

Broader Connections

• Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers #expands (0.88) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 219
• Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity #corroborates (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24
• Mass media function as banks for the attention economy #expands (0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 159
• Mass-media profits derive from non-reciprocal attention exchange #corroborates (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 251