Broadcasting
In the 'eighties
Hans Keller One of our era's outstanding characteristics IS its tendency to give birth to new professions which are anxious to establish their claims to be amongst the major benefactors of mankind: as soon as we do something well, we are inclined to assume that it's good for People, whoever they are. Ever since Immanuel Kant, philosophy has been aware of the conflict between duty and inclination, Which psychoanalysis, more subtly perhaps, has renamed the conflict between the superego on the one hand and the id and/or the ego on the other. In our own time, 'thorough professionalism' has become a major solution: narcissistic skill-satisfaction reinterprets itself as altruism.
Psychoanalysis itself, one of the most obtrusive new professions of our age, has turned itself into a saviour of the world in no time—to the extent of always being able to tell you what's good for you, whether.you like it or not. Pace this young science's towering achievements, one result has been the infantilisation of a considerable section Of cultured society : directly or indirectly, People submit to the diainoses and therapies SUggested by the psychoanalyst, firmly installed in loco parentis. To the independent intellect, the Situation is as clear as it is complex: the psychoanalytic professional IS wholly aware of the good he can do, and utterly unaware of the harm he can do—in the pseudo-parent's dehumanising, denidividualising role. The birth of the broadcasting professional IS of yet more recent date, and although superficially his activities have little in e,°rnmon with those of the psychoanalyst, 'is psychology is pretty much the same: Perfectly aware of how to serve, he remains Oblivious of the inevitable danger of turning service into domination. Like the psychoanalyst, the broadcaster is becoming ever more professional, ever more specifically conscious of his usefulness—without ever devoting the slightest attention to the damage he may be doing in his uniquely Powerful position. If we, professional proadcasters, want radio to grow up in the eighties, we have to be prepared, for the first tinle in our youthful existence, to face selfless self-criticism—the kind of criticism Which we would demand if we did not nkaPPen to be broadcasters, yet knew about °roadcasting as much as we do. After all, eelllY we are capable of such criticism, .,quiPped as we are with all the knowledge luat must form its basis. r,1\113w, once we can bring ourselves not to ,'st content with being demonstrably ssucceSsfur, the task of self-criticism becomes s4rroountable. What, in fact, do we mean by ueeess? Be it said in our honour that the
quality of a programme plays an essential part in our verdict. But a major fallacy creeps in immediately after we have satisfied ourselves about a programme's quality : we automatically regard it as more successful if many people have listened to it, and as less successful if only few people have, the implication being that the more listeners there are to any given programme, the better —regardless of what they would have been doing had they not listened to it. We drive this hunt for the listener so far that we often run the risk of worrying about people who are not particularly interested in a given subject or piece of music—at the expense of those who are: we shall go out of our way to present a difficult programme temptingly, even if the tempting presentation bores the pants off those who don't find it difficult.
We accept as axiomatic that it is a good thing to make a listener turn on a programme, and that it is not a good thing if he turns off a programme, even though he may be turning from a passive into an active human being in the process. The thoroughly professional radio man's unconfessed worldview is simple: the populace's aim in life should be to listen to the radio as much as possible (or have it on, anyway), the only defensible alternative being television, whose viewing will meet the professional requirements of his colleagues over the road.
The professional broadcaster replaces life by radio and television.: he tries to make himself indispensable—whereas the mature educator tries to make himself unnecessary. As a broadcaster, I consider I have done my job when you turn off a string quartet I have produced, because my previous productions have made you take up the fiddle again, and you now want to play that quartet yourself instead of listening to it on the radio. News and traffic information are one thing, intellectual and aesthetic experience another. The one has to be available at fixed points, the other has to be offered as an object of free, deliberate, considered choice, if the listener's intellectual autonomy is to be respected and indeed promoted : the only influence we are entitled to exert is influence towards increased individual independence, towards the listener's remaining master of his mental fate, rather than towards our mastering it.
It follows that news channels apart, all generic broadcasting is unethical : inevitably, it turns music, even speech programmes, into a drug, until the listener is afraid of silence, of being alone with his own thoughts —a symptom which, today, can be observed right across our civilisation. Mixed programming alone affords the possibility of sharply and meaningfully contrasting programmes which, throwing each other into relief, invite the clearest possible choice: what the BBC Third Programme should have been, but wasn't always (snobbery was a big temptation!), might serve as one forward-looking model.
In any case, the primitive inclination towards conversion which tends to hide behind what the professional broadcaster
regards as his public duty has no ethical justification: radio is not a religion, except to its high priests. It is for us, the selfappointed priests without any justifiable congregation, to start all over again on a realistic level, to measure success in terms of the listener's increased independence, not (like a pathological teacher) in terms of increased dependence.
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