I squirm every time I hear a guest thanking the presenter for having them on their programme.
I don’t know when this habit began, mostly but not exclusively on radio, but it is a fairly recent development and a very unwelcome one. It is a deference to media that is unhealthy.
It can be fobbed off and explained as politeness and good manners and, no doubt, those who engage in the practice would explain it as such – but it is not just that. The deference is a reverential attitude to media that is disproportionate and demeaning of the expectations of the contributor.
I was young and only coming to some value awareness around the time that Andy Warhol, the American visual artist, was telling us that in the new and changing world of the 1960s, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. There didn’t seem to be much transformative or wrong with that: instead of just those with plummy voices or those who seemed to be very smart talking to us on the media, the rest of us ordinary mortals would get a go at it, some time in our lives. That would surely be only fair and democratic.
I had probably moved on to university before I heard of and had to struggle to understand the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. He was a lot more sophisticated and complicated than Warhol in claiming that it didn’t really matter whether we had our 15 minutes of media fame or not. The content, according to him, was not the real issue.
His famous quote was that the medium was the message, that the developing technology would be the vehicle that would bring change to society. The examples given of the truth of that claim was the printing press, which was even more transformative than the books it printed, or the electric bulb, which was radically transformative of human interaction, mostly eradicating darkness.
McLuhan predicted the coming of the internet and the effect that would have on society: every household having a complete and comprehensive library available at the click of a button. Everyone who wants to or needs to can now become a broadcaster and a commentator. All of that has already happened and the next technical revolution is already in the offing. AI is simultaneously exciting and terrifying us.
I squirm every time I hear a guest thanking the presenter for having them on their programme
There is no stopping, no turning back from these radical changes, all of which have happened in a relatively short period of time. Those of us who have had access to the media for a considerable number of years need to be careful that we don’t patronise and demean those who want to be part of the media conversation, but we do have responsibility to point out the more dangerous pitfalls that can arise from a superficial experience, insight and understanding of the media and the medium. One such insight is that it is foolish to throw out the partially soiled clothes before being sure that there are other and better replacements.
In our part of the world, two of the main media outlets, the BBC and RTÉ, are in danger of losing their their authority and their funding. Both of these national broadcasters are public, in that they are owned, managed and fully or partially funded by the taxpayer. For a variety of reasons, they are in peril of losing their standing and their influence within these islands. Many of their woes are self-inflicted, often arising out of greed or arrogance or self-importance. It is those woes that make me squirm at contributors being thankful for being invited.
But public service is presently the best model we have as a balance and counterweight to the already changed broadcasting medium and there is a responsibility to protect it from naysayers who have no vision beyond their own needs and from those within it who service only their own egos.