Nowadays, the TV has a low turn-on rate, and it has even been driven out of the family living room and people's leisure time. According to reports, since 2016, the mainland TV start-up rate has dropped from 70% to less than 30% last year. Other data show that in 2023, the retail volume and retail value of color TVs nationwide will decrease by 13.6% and 12.3% year-on-year, respectively. It is an indisputable fact that the survival of television media has entered a cold winter, and there is a general recession.
Some people analyze that it is due to today's fast-paced life, the widespread popularity of mobile phones, tablets and small screens, and the troublesome and cumbersome TV startup. Objectively speaking, these factors certainly exist, but the most fundamental reason is that the erosion of capital and the loss of people's nature are the key to the problem.
Once upon a time, the so-called golden advertising time of TV stations was billed in seconds, and it was said that one second was 100 million. Since anyone on the TV station can take money to knock on the door and take pictures, it is doomed to today's bleak ending. The essence of the gluttonous feast of capital is to eat up and squeeze out all profitable carriers, and then quietly leave. Under the name of opening up and enlivening the TV station, guided by capital and guided by the market, the TV station has completely lost the people's nature and public welfare, and has embarked on the wrong path of no return.
Think about it, the mind of running a television program is only thinking about how to make quick money and making a lot of money, where is the mind to think about how to make a television program down-to-earth and how to produce high-quality products? Where is the energy to be the spokesman of the party and the government and to drum and cheer for the masses of the people? The television station is completely coerced by capital, and it is only for the sake of providing services for money, and when it is turned on the television, it emits a thick copper smell, and the common people naturally do not want to see it and do not like it. You intend to make money, and I have the right not to look at it.
Television stations are supposed to be controlled by the state and are the mouthpieces of the party, and they are supposed to convey serious, orthodox, standardized, and authoritative voice messages, run programs that the masses like to see, and play a very good role in publicizing and agitating public opinion. However, there was a time when many television stations were run into a noisy and exaggerated free market. What is attractive, what is eye-catching, what is "sold fast", what is done. Satellite TV everywhere broadcasts all day long, red men and green women sell cuteness, all kinds of celebrities sell medicines, "famous doctors" of unknown origin specialize in treating incurable diseases, and there are public media fiber pullers, etc., it is not an exaggeration to say that the screen is full of black smoke and miasma. A good propaganda position has been ruined.
Nowadays, almost all the names of radio and television stations in various provinces and cities have hidden the word "people" and are crowned with XX Media Group Co., Ltd. Whether this kind of reform is right or wrong can be known by looking at the current development situation of the entire television media industry, and there is no need to debate it.
For the sake of so-called self-development, some television stations have taken the initiative to seek the introduction of foreign capital and engage in strategic cooperation with various foreign media companies, undoubtedly giving up a microphone to others. Over time, it is likely to be completely controlled and eaten by foreign "foreign monks". This outcome is truly worrying and frightening.
The people are the country, and the country is the people. We should not just stay in words and slogans, although under the conditions of a market economy, money and profit should not be the goal of all undertakings. The key to the fact that the television media industry has lost its people's attributes from being hot and popular all over China to being widely neglected and now being widely ignored and at the end of the road is that it has lost the attributes of the people it should have.
To restore the television boom and revitalize the television media industry, we need to keep capital and money a little farther away. The return of television media to the fundamental attributes of the people is the only right path and starting point for hope and the future. (January 30, 2024, Haidian, Beijing)
Note: The author of this article is Zhou Haoran, a core member of Qin'an Strategic Think Tank, and is an original work on this platform.