21st Paradigm

Wildlife Television: The Future

I remember wildlife films in the 1980’s had a trend, a common ending that said humans are messing things up. I was deeply affected by these messages, which are in part responsible for making me the activist I am today, proof that television can make a difference.

As an independent environmental filmmaker I have participated for over a decade in a charade of public debate over the capacity of wildlife documentaries to save endangered wildlife and habitat. Aside from a few rare exceptions from a few determined individuals, the debate amounts to lip service for reasons outlined in the essay, “Television: Past and Present”. Television is advertising. It is a medium whose purpose is to sell and promote capitalism for the benefit of the minority who control it.

What does corporate control of television mean for conservation and our future?

In the broadest sense, wildlife preservation is a catastrophic, heart-breaking disaster. This issue cannot be alluded to, let alone debated on mainstream television because, we are told, it’s bad for ratings to bring bad news. Yet real-life “terror” is sold as prime-time fare. Together with it’s own unique jingle, the terror is broadcast because it suits the corporate agenda, for General Electric let’s say, which produces weapons and markets war via it’s network, NBC. If that seems like an unfair link, consider that GE owns NBC which owns National Geographic Channels Worldwide.

As BBC follows suit behind Discovery and National Geographic, what a lost opportunity when someone as infamous and influential as Sir David Attenborough is restricted from delivering anything but a token conservation message because “ratings” require that it be shunted into obscurity. Sir Attenborough’s own argument is that we as messengers must be positive, and that the audience won’t care about threatened nature until they come to know it and appreciate it. But what is knowledge and appreciation without action? What is the point of loving the great apes while unwittingly buying furniture or cell phones that destroy their habitat? Thanks to wildlife programs, we might at the very least mourn the day we read about the creatures’ final end.

The argument of ratings is transparent in light of the fact that Nielson Media Research has been granted a monopoly in the television market to determine viewership using inherently flawed devices delivering unreliable information from a fraction of the population. Since television as a business makes money by selling audiences to advertisers, the Nielsen Television Ratings are the single most important element in determining advertising rates, schedules, and program content. The company is owned by Dutch media conglomerate VNU which operates in over one hundred countries with corporate holdings in companies that benefit from television advertising and mass consumption. But all is not lost as long as Animal Planet continues it’s additional ratings study with forty people in Las Vegas, the city chosen apparently for it’s “wide demographic.”

The danger of today’s genre of wildlife programs is that they falsely reassure audiences with an appearance of plenty, while an entire generation is created with a confrontational view of nature based on human dominance over animals. Victims of the tyranny of formula, popular programs would have us believe the animal kingdom is locked in an eternal, ferocious feeding frenzy. An endless stream of ultimate, ruthless, fanged and fearsome killers on the dangerous battlefields of nature! Really it is us who are feasting on what little remains with a self-imposed entitlement to capture, wrestle, wrangle, throttle, eat, prod, harass, dominate and manipulate our animal subjects at will. Gone is observation of animals left uncontaminated by human intervention. Gone are ethics, for nature too has become an over-exploited commodity to be sold to the highest bidder.

There are enough talented and willing people out there ready to tackle the real issues, and put their lives on the line to do so. For now, their message is censored behind the din of corporate propaganda. I hold out in hopes that the internet will continue to change how we communicate, and that individuals on both sides of the airwaves will begin to hold themselves accountable and believe that they can make a difference. Revolutionize, not compromise; therein lies a greater sense of integrity and belonging, and a much brighter future for us all.

"What is happening in the world lies, at the moment, just outside of common human understanding. It is the writers, the poets, the artists, the singers, the filmmakers who can make the connections, who can find ways of bringing it into the realm of common understanding. Who can translate cash-flow charts and scintillating boardroom speeches into real stories about real people with real lives. Stories about what it's like to lose your home, your land, your job, your dignity, your past and your future to an invisible force. To someone or something you can't see. You can't hate. You can't even imagine. It's a new space that's been offered to us today. A new kind of challenge. It offers opportunities for a new kind of art. An art which can make the impalpable palpable, make the intangible tangible, and the invisible visible. An art which can draw out the incorporeal adversary and make it real."

Arundhati Roy