Znaimervision
by John FitzGerald
(originally published in 1999; we are drawing attention to it again to commemorate Moses Znaimer's retirement from television)
I love junk mail. It's free, it's informative, and it's brightly coloured. I've never understood people who put No flyer signs on their mail boxes. I'm overjoyed that every day the letter carrier and various private contractors are stuffing all sorts of free reading through my mail slot. Since I no longer read the Toronto Star, this daily delivery is my chief source of this material.
The other day the calendar of the School of Continuing Studies of University of Toronto (of my two almae matres – or should I say almarum matrum? – the one from which I am not yet estranged, although their adoption of a slogan has made me less well disposed toward them recently) turned up in this torrent of communication. It stood out because it was not brightly coloured, its dominant hues being light and dark brown.
Dull colours, and of course dullness in general, are widely used as emblems of seriousness, which are probably necessary for a university that now has a slogan. It's such a good slogan, too, that I can't remember what it is. It's about minds, I know. "Great minds require a faculty older than the Canadian Shield," or something like that.
The impression of seriousness, though, was shattered by the contents of page 6, which shows Moses Znaimer staring out at us while holding a list of ten pronouncements about television. The accompanying text even calls them the ten commandments of television, just to show what subtle minds all these eggheads at University of Toronto got. Moses, commandments, geddit?
For those of you unfortunate enough to be out of the range of the Chum-City media empire, I will note that Moses Znaimer runs a broadcast television channel, City-tv (sic) in Toronto, and a whole bunch of City-tv clones in other cities in Southern Ontario, as well as a cable news channel, two cable music channels, a cable arts channel, a cable science fiction (whoops, space) channel, and numerous other channels in South America and Europe [Editor's note: This was written in 1999. Mr. Znaimer's empire has since expanded].
The combined budget of all of his channels we get to see here seems to be about a hundred and forty-five bucks (Canadian), so, this being Canada, he's a hero.
Our Canadian heritage (this is being written the day after what used to be called Dominion Day – I won't call it by the new name, not because I prefer Dominion Day [although, for that matter, what the hell's wrong with it?] but because the new name is so spectacularly lame and naff, but then again I suppose that's very Canadian – as I say, this is being written on July 2, so of course we've all got Canadian heritage even more up the wazoo than normal), our Canadian heritage features at its centre a fundamental tightfistedness. We pride ourselves on not being splashy, but that's only because splashiness costs money that we Canadians could do other things with instead, like hoarding it. Anyway, being able to run a worldwide media empire on the budget of the average Mail Boxes Etc. franchise will get Canadians to look at you as almost a godlike figure – like Moses in fact, ready to lead them to the promised land.
Mr. Znaimer even got the CBC, one of his competitors, to give him a series of specials about television. Of course, at the CBC I imagine a lot of the talk at management meetings is on the topic of whether this newfangled television thing will ever catch on (when they're not, of course, talking about what popular show they can cancel and replace with show jumping), so it's perhaps not surprising they thought about getting the opinion of someone they're not likely to meet at their clubs. And U of T has set up for him a colloquium called TVTV: The Television Revolution. The colloquium will take place on October 23, 1999, and will be quite the meeting of the minds. Daniel Richler will moderate! Robert Fulford will be a panelist, as will Derrick deKerckhove!
Yes, I'm being sarcastic. I like Mr. Fulford's work – apart from his autobiography, which was so bloody Canadian that he apparently decided he wasn't worthy to be its subject so instead he wrote about all his brilliant pals, one of whom was in fact Glenn Gould but most of whom were not – and the panel will be better for having him on it, but on the whole the panel is the same old bunch of guys.
Where's the panelist from Vice?. Why not have someone from Telelatino, or the Home Shopping Channel? Why not have one of these guys who make syndicated shows in their basements? Why not have somebody from Quatre Saisons or Radio Canada?
I suppose I shouldn't complain. Mr. Fulford has spent a lot of his life watching Robertson Davies and Lister Sinclair get these gigs. But geez – the panelists are all connected, and you know what that means in Canada.
For one thing, won't nobody be yelling at each other. We do not have in Canada competing intellectual centres. The universities and the press and government form one big happiness machine, which spends its time telling us how hap-hap-happy we all are (yesterday was July 1, did I mention that?). Public forums of this type, then, tend in Canada to have nothing really to disagree about, and, more importantly, no particularly good reason to want to disagree about it.
In the States, you can usually put together a panel discussion which will at moments look as if it's dangerously near to degenerating into a knife fight. In Canada a panel discussion usually looks as if it's dangerously near to degenerating into mass catatonia.
So anyway, what are these ten commandments? What are these important insights about television which have occasioned this assemblage of the acceptable and pallid? Well, the first is...
First commandment."Television is the triumph of the image over the printed word." Have you ever looked at Mr. Znaimer's news channel, Cable Pulse 24 (there's an image, come to think of it)? The CP24 screen is cluttered with printed words. It's chiefly printed words. The promotional announcements on Mr. Znaimer's stations and channels always (and commendably) reinforce the visual images with both a spoken message and printed text. Television, where is thy sting?, I can hear the printed word asking.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Just try counting the times in a day you read printed words. And just see if you can keep track of the reasons for which you read them. You will quickly find that our lives are governed by the printed word and not by images.
Second commandment: "Print created illiteracy. TV is democratic, everybody gets it." The last time I looked, democracy was not defined as a form of government which everybody gets. It was defined as one controlled by the people, and that is a characteristic television manifestly does not have. Mr. Znaimer's broadcast stations are in fact, even more than most television, one long expression of the will of advertisers ("MuchMusic doesn't do anything unless the record label pays for it" – ex-Znaimerian Rebecca Rankin, National Post, December 3, 1999).
The Znaimer broadcast empire should be called Plug-O-Vision 24. Watch Breakfast TV some morning and count the plugs. Or CityLine or Fashion Television or Media Television or MovieTV or even SexTV. Yep, she's a great big democratic world in the Znaimer universe, if your conception of demos is anyone with something to sell. Oh, I suppose you do get to call in your vote on some carefully selected issue of the day. There's your democracy for you, that and the review of the mail.
What we get on Znaimervision is what people with designs on our money want us to get.
Third commandment: "The true nature of television is flow, not show: process, not conclusion." Then why is television dominated by stories? And not stories by Michel Butor, either, but stories with conflict and, near the end, resolution. Why do people turn off a sports broadcast when the conclusion of the game or competition has become obvious? Why is the evening schedule on Mr. Znaimer's flagship station dominated by movies? And not documentaries, either, but movies that tell stories. Whatever the "true" nature of television may be, in fact it is for the moment, and in the foreseeable future, primarily about reaching conclusions.
Fourth commandment: "As worldwide television expands, the demand for local programming increases." Whatever the demand is doing, local television is decreasing. Mr. Znaimer's own empire, thanks to which viewers in Brazil are familiar with the corner of Queen and McCaul in Toronto, demonstrates this trend. Mr. Znaimer actually exports a dance show to Brazil and Argentina! He's to be congratulated and esteemed for that, of course, but we can't in the next breath argue that this shows that local programming is increasing.
In fact, local programming is not increasing. As worldwide television expands, and competition with it, what happens is that the demand for cost-cutting increases, and one good way to cut costs is to cut local programming. If the demand for local programming were important, Mr. Znaimer wouldn't have a business.
Fifth commandment: "The best TV tells me what happened to me, today." Believe it or not, watching Jeane Beker swan about the fashion capitals of Europe tells me nothing about what happened to me today. Neither do all those celebrity interviews on StarTV or the cowboys-and-Indians-in-space saga of Star Trek or the movies which are the backbone of the evening line-up on City-tv (this week's movies: The Grocer's Wife, King Ralph, Backdraft, Die Hard, and something called The Shamrock Conspiracy – that may be your life in a nutshell, but I doubt that it's many people's).
Sixth commandment: "TV is as much about the people bringing you the story as the story itself." Buddy may mean something by this. If he does, though, wouldn't he try to hold on to the people who appear on camera for him and who are continually leaving for other jobs?
Okay, he can't. CBS can pay John Roberts a lot more than Mr. Znaimer can, and can offer him more interesting professional opportunities to boot. But since Mr. Znaimer's operation has survived the departure of so many of its on-air staff, wouldn't he be more consistent to say that it's not about the people bringing you the story? Wouldn't he be more consistent to say that TV is about people being interchangeable?
To look at it another way, Gord Martineau has been anchoring the news for City-tv since the original Moses was in the fire brigade. But what exactly do we know about Mr. Martineau? That he dyes his hair and that he has recently made an admirable and successful effort to learn how to pronounce French and foreign words properly. We're rapt.
Seventh commandment: "In the past, TV's chief operating skill was political. In the future it will be, it will have to be, mastery of the craft itself." Well, the Znaimer empire has a way to go. Having a big room full of cameras before which you pose alternating groups of people is not exactly mastery of the craft, and neither are remotes from the parking lot or a talk show hosted by a sock puppet.
Eighth commandment: "TV creates immediate consensus, subject to immediate change." Well, really. What this means is that either TV creates consensus or it doesn't. Can't disagree with that, eh?
Ninth commandment: "There never was a mass audience, except by compulsion." Well, we all know what Mr. Znaimer is implying here – niche marketing and all that. Nevertheless, when everyone watches television, that's a mass audience. They may not all be watching the same program, but as McLuhan (whose name is rather shamelessly profaned in the promotion of this colloquium) showed us, that's not the point. They are all worshipping at the shrine of the great corporations.
Tenth commandment: "Television is not a problem to be managed, but an instrument to be played." Mr. Znaimer's stations have the distinct air of a problem being managed, and specifically a financial problem. News reporters do their own camera and sound. The remotes on Breakfast TV often are simply promotions for private businesses. There is no out-of-town reporting. Everything is slashed to the bone, and that is the secret of the City-tv look. That's why every English-language show of Mr. Znaimer's is a cobbling together of promotional clips and promotional interviews.
In the end, though, you have to hand it to Mr. Znaimer. Here he is well behind in the race for the Southern Ontario television audience (when was the last time you saw a City-tv show in the Top 40?), but he's a bloody guru. And, one suspects he's using his status as a guru to teach his competitors the exact opposite of the secrets of his success.
Here for the record are the real ten commandments of Znaimervision:
- Television is the triumph of advertising over experience.
- Print created illiteracy. TV created advertisements everyone can understand.
- The true nature of television is show, not flow.
- As worldwide television expands, the demand for local programming decreases.
- The best TV tells me what advertisers want it to tell me.
- TV is about the absolute lack of uniqueness of the human being.
- TV's chief operating skill is cost-cutting.
- TV creates customers, subject to immediate consumption.
- There is a mass audience even for Znaimervision.
- Television is a business.
And television is a business. If Mr. Znaimer is not trying, commendably, to mislead his competition (for is that not what competition, the foundation of all we hold dear in Western civilization, is about?) then perhaps he is following another commendable strategy of trying to make television look special so it can be better marketed.
And maybe even so that he can market it better to himself.
Znaimervision © Coolth, 1999
The title was a coinage of the late J. L. Brady's
