(Speech Dr. Rainer Stollmann on the occasion of the
International Congress "Quality on Television"28. - 30.11.2002, Athen)

What is quality in television, and how can we achieve it?

1. High-quality television is intimately linked to the enduring interests of viewers
People expect quality from the things they have been engaged with over a longer period of time, from the things they need on a daily basis. A plumber would refuse to work with a cheap wrench that might be good enough for a layman's occasional use. A translator uses an encyclopaedic dictionary, not a tourist's phrase book. Businessmen and politicians wear finest suits, whereas those who need a suit for funerals and weddings only will be satisfied with cheaper ware. The criteria for quality are therefore durability and reliability. Quality is intimately linked to people's enduring interests, and these are rooted at the same time in everyday life, unlike extraordinary and special interests. Television that addresses or indeed binds itself to people's long-term interests is what is meant by quality television.

Present-day television runs counter to that ideal by focusing almost exclusively on purely transient interests of its consumers. An example of such short-lived interests is when I come home from work exhausted and do not want to be reminded in the next two hours about any of the world's problems. I also look forward to plenty of Saturday evening TV, which my wife and I watch with a nice glass of wine or beer before going to bed.

2. Is there such a thing as 'quality television'?
Neil Postman's critique that entertainment destroys experience by forming a semi-natural framework around all content, is perfectly correct. On the other hand, humans possess a hugely resilient capacity for real experience. To cripple that capacity in children aged between two and six, one would have to force them to consume six hours of TV cartoons a day. Yet children would not put up so easily with such treatment. In run-of-the-mill television, even when it tends primarily to neglect or disdain experience, one can still discover the disruptive influence of long-term interests in the most diverse situations.

Television once pursued the ideal of being a 'window on the world' in every living room. Few would question that this ideal has been ignored or abused for 80% of all broadcasting time. Since the 1970s, relations on the American market have led to a situation in which this ideal is neglected during the remaining 20% of airtime as well. The entertainment industry, Disney, Warner Bros., studio productions, film licensing and merchandising tended to bring the total figure to 100%. The result was Ted Turner's CNN. Turner is an entrepreneur through and through - meaning a person who does not simply manage what is given - and identified the gap on the television market, creating a new business with a combined focus not only on people's interest in entertainment, but also on the interest they also have in real-world events.
Fragments of real-life experience get dragged along on the underside of conventional entertainment. It is by no means the case, after all, that people's crucial, real-life interests are completely non-existent in middle-of-the-road music, soap operas, kitschy love films, detective series and so on, indeed the predominant topics in mainstream TV are always true love, the meaning of life, saving the world from disaster, grand emotions ….. and everyday relationships. Nowhere else are such deeply meaningful sentences uttered, nowhere else do images appeal so intensively to our innermost spiritual being. With one proviso - it is not serious, but always as if an electrician was being sent to repair Chernobyl with a toolbox he picked up at a DIY store. When this process continues for 50 years, voices of protest start to be heard. For a remarkably long time, cartoon series like the 'Simpsons' or 'South Park' have kept in contact with history, culture, politics and real human relationships. By breaking with political correctness and adopting a broader, historical and cultural horizon for the topics they address, certain late-night-shows constitute alternatives to prime-time entertainment because they communicate experience.

In qualitative terms, the quality television that exists within mainstream TV is unable to remove itself very far from entertainment as a form. The 'Simpsons' may deploy the visual language of early comics and include all manner of real-life problems, yet they remain confined and tied to that particular genre in structure, effects, dramaturgy and comicality. The news market contains a different kind of distortion originating in its enmity towards and competition with entertainment. We all know the pictures of Bagdad being bombarded, the film sequences of the Serbian war, some taken by military cameras, and I am certain that negotiations are currently being conducted between the US military and CNN to determine how the pending attack on Iraq can be reported in as close to real time as possible. Totally decoupled in terms of content from what entertainment offers, news journalism is essentially unable to escape the competitive war with entertainment. When CNN ratings are higher during catastrophes than those of feature films or game shows on NBC, ABC and CBS, the reason is that real war is more exciting and scintillating that any Spielberg film. CNN defeats Hollywood because the breathless Angstlust that both are speculating on among the audience can always beguile itself into believing that it is dealing with reality. The fact that CNN has meanwhile returned to the realm of entertainment is not without its logic. We can watch 20 years of news, keeping ourselves permanently informed about all the events in the world, and at the end of it all we will still not possess anything that could justifiably be called 'political', 'social' or 'historical' awareness. The reason lies in the fragmentation of facts, the lack of any real bearing on history, or to any real horizon.

Mention must now be made of those particular programmes that are more substantially distanced from the mass market and which themselves lay claim to higher quality standards - we are referring here to 'culture' programmes, 'political magazines', 'investigative journalism', 'documentaries', 'highbrow films' and the like, in other words everything that costs work and money, conveys difficult material and has low ratings. These can include entire channels, such as ARTE, Phönix, XXP, 3Sat - to name only the German channels of this kind that I know of.
This is the font from which quality television could conceivably grow. Despite some noteworthy successes - the 'Simpsons', for example - I think it is fair to say that this segment of the market accounts for 10% of worldwide production at the very most.

3. Why is quality television not more prevalent?
What did we see on television about September the eleventh, 2001? First of all, the same images again and again, taken by chance and of amateur quality. It was a stroke of luck that these pictures had to be unprofessional, because the camera shake, poor focus, additional triviliaties convey the sheer reality of the WTC attacks much more authentically than any CNN team could have achieved. Continued repetition did not impair them, because viewers were then able to gain the time they needed to grasp the fact that the pictures could be real. The professional television that followed was comprised of pictures from the site of destruction, interviews with politicians, witnesses recounting their experience, official mourning ceremonies on film, discussions on television and finally a disappointing film about a New York fire station, broadcast worldwide in prime time, in which the impression was unavoidably gained that the poor firemen were totally helpless and at a loss on that fateful day. Terrorism is and was a topic of interest, both then and now. Coined in the French Revolution, the term was applied in a positive sense to the new state, and against its enemies. When the American President declares war on global terrorism, would it not be interesting to discover more about the origins of this phenomenon? About the French Revolution, the history of the partisans, about side issues such as those raised after spree killers run amok, to answer the questions 'what is war?', how is it defined, what are the origins of hostile images, what is an enemy, what forms of behaviour do people develop when dealing with enemies, or, how do people cope with and overcome major disasters, what is mourning, how did people cope with such atrocities in the past, and so on and so forth. There would have been a huge global audience for such issues, and there may still be one today. Why is it that not a single broadcasting station decided to dedicate a whole day or even an entire week to such topics and issues? A wide diversity of formats would have been conceivable. However, this would have predicated changes in schedules planned six weeks in advance and printed in all the TV magazines, and that editors and departments retreat from any jealous guarding of their own 'turf', their slots in the schedule, their particular department and their influence. Broadcasting companies constituted under public law are unable to produce quality television in such a form on account of their highly bureaucratic structure, while commercial channels lack the competence to do so. Quality television fails to materialise not because the public has no interest, nor as a result of market relations, nor due to any lack of competence among journalists, but due to the structural organisation of the institutions involved. Television broadcasting companies, be they public or private sector, are palatial, high-rise greenhouses, sophisticated technological factories with separate departments specialised in breaking down and processing the real interrelationships in the world in such a way and to such an extent that they cause little or no disruption to the customary sequence of a day's programmes. When reality threatens to disrupt their normal operations, they cannot respond in any adequate manner without abandoning their structure. To understand this in detail, one needs to study and apply the sociological concept of 'system' (Luhmann's, for example).

4. What can be done to foster and fortify quality television?
Rupert Murdoch, the world's greatest media mogul, is speculating on bringing television to the Chinese. Anticipating the deal of his life, the networks owned by this old man are already broadcasting an encouraging view of the current political situation in the country, his prospective business partner. Chinese leaders are still somewhat uncertain whether, in return, they should consent to mass Western-style television establishing a presence in the country. If the deal is clinched, this will signify less the establishment of a public medium for a quarter of the Earth's population, but rather China's breakthrough into the age of industrialisation.
Digitalisation (fibre-optic cables, computers, multimedia, satellites, etc.) is the continuity from aircraft, automobiles, conveyor belts, blast furnaces and railways, but by other means. The agenda pursued by all media corporations is fittingly termed the 'industrialisation of consciousness' by sociologists. This refers to the modernisation of industrial communication, the 'wiring' and decentralisation of workplaces. However, nobody today can know with any certainty what it will really be like in twenty years' time, when the process has been completed. We know as little about how such a process will end as a Welsh farmer in 1780 could envisage Greater London in 1850 or the English railway system in the year 1890. However, it would have been better for the history of Europe if the long-term interests of peoples and nations had played a greater role in 19th-century industrialisation. The explosive growth of this self-same industry during and through the wars of the 20th century might then have been less horrific in its consequences. In this connection I would like to mention that some media theorists use the metaphorical concept of 'information bomb'. In a digitalised, globalised world, television will have little resemblance to what we understand by it today.
In 1947, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and others founded the 'Magnum' journal that to this day has set standards in the photographic field. Something similar is needed today for television, namely the creation of a network of independent authors who are interested in producing quality television. The classical 'public', in the sense of Habermas' Öffentlichkeit, is constituted by the streets, marketplaces, the newspapers of the 18th and 19th centuries, theatre, opera, film and parts of television as we know it. The foundations of the classical public sphere are found in the richness of people's experience and in the narrating of stories. We can speak of a classical public sphere as long as we still have direct access to these foundations. The shining examples of everyday culture in the major European cities are the small shops, the arcades of Paris or Bologne, the shopping centres of London, Stockholm and Rome. We all love to stroll in such places and enjoy the sheer diversity and variety of wares. The fact that such shops are able to survive in the face of competition from supermarkets has something to do with tradition, with longevity and enduring values. If we translate these streets into the medium of television, what we arrive at is the concept of 'authors' television', or 'television by authors'. This implies networks of small, self-regulating entities supplying finished products and collectively acting to guarantee diversity and variety, in place of hierarchical pillars of entertainment, information and education; the disarmament of inefficient, inflexible, over-sized departments and editorial groups, and the containment of television centred on costumes and technical gimmicks. Author-journalists are workers, entrepreneurs and shopowners in one. This relates to the special nature of the goods they produce, which are imaginary goods even when they are documentaries. It is essentially impossible to industrialise the production of such goods - because they are not subject to wear and tear, for example, but, like film classics, can gain in aura and patina over the years. The policy objective of such authors' or quality television is to capture one third of the market. In countries with both commercial and public-law television, like Germany, France and England, this means 1/3 private-sector television, 1/3 public-law television and one third authors' television.
We find ourselves today at the beginning of a new century whose dominant medium will be television in modified form. The struggle over the shape, form, design, structure and function of future television is still being waged. The issues involved are by no means confined to the purely monetary. After all, why should entrepreneurs not be interested in successful, long-term business, when addressing the purely transient interests of people can lead also to financial collapse in a short space of time, as the current media market crisis demonstrates?
The main problem faced by quality television is not the power of money or ignorant politicians, but the power of habitude - almost everybody believes that such a project is unfeasible from the outset.