This Article shows us how we are, and how we are being educated with TV Shows. A wonderful medium being used for the wrong purpose... profit, personal gain, commercialism if you may...
Balanced programming? Notice: 3hr of news Daily, an hour of children's show and all the rest are Teleserye, shows, games, sitcoms, commercials... These are not informational shows...
Our brain never stops learning, and we learn from what we see, hear, feel... now tell me... what will we learn?
Viewfinder : Difference in tone and treatment
, June 30, 2005
Updated 08:59pmam (Mla time)
Nestor Torre entertainment@inq7.net
Inquirer News Service
ON RECENT trips to China and Japan, we were able to compare the TV programming in those Asian countries with the shows on view on Philippine screens.
The most immediately noticeable difference is that of tone and treatment, especially when it comes to news and public affairs programs. In the Philippines, the race for ratings has led to the infusion of "entertainment" elements into these traditionally less show biz-y program formats.
Filipino newscasters no longer simply report the news, they try to make it more dramatic, melodramatic, colorful and even comic, by way of vocal flourishes and occasional subjective reactions.
These, in turn, are further jazzed up by the heavy use of background music, stingers, hyped-up visuals, spicy sound bites, and an inordinate number of crime, scandal and show biz stories.
Those excesses were happily absent from the newscasts we viewed on Chinese and Japanese television, which gratified us because they were able to restore the correct, objective focus to TV news reportage and discussion that we had been missing on Philippine screens.
We also noted the greater number of Japanese and Chinese TV programs that were devoted to the coverage of traditional and modern cultural issues and activities. We again found this gratifying, because it showed that television needn't limit itself to ga-ga entertainment, and can also sustain viewers' interest and involvement with shows that address their more enlightened concerns.
Contrastingly, only a few TV shows in the Philippines do this, since the intense competition here for ratings and revenues has led to the decline of cultural programming, in favor of more profitable show biz-oriented shows that cater to the least common denominator of viewership.
Instructively, while we did catch some loud and lively game and variety shows on Japanese and Chinese TV screens, there were no corollaries on the noontime slot to the slam-bang, sexy variety and game programs that are telecast here.
Neither were there Chinese or Japanese versions of the overlong evening telenovela programming that now obtains on Philippine TV. In Japan and China, TV people still believe that variety is the spice of televiewing life, unlike here, where viewers are served up pretty much the same melodramatic kind of entertainment for hours on end.
Finally, we noted that Chinese and Japanese TV features more children's programs than we do-a testament to those countries' TV people's greater appreciation of their duty to be of positive service to young viewers.
These perceived programming differences could also be the result of more committed supervision of the TV scene by those countries' government offices charged with making sure that television lives up to its commitment to provide balanced and responsible programming. Would that their counterparts in the Philippines were as proactive in their supervision.
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