Even in the era of affordable, homemade, hand-held TV equipment, the power remains in the hands of the powerful. Still today, one hears complaints that TV does not afford everyone a voice. This is true to a dismaying degree. (I once attended a lecture delivered by Mark Starowicz, Executive Producer of The Journal, in which he promised us a people’s revolution of TV thanks to handicams. A colleague sitting beside me whispered, "Yeah. And when they invented the typewriter everyone became a novelist.") Think how quickly the technology that exposed the beating of Rodney King and promised the democratization of the news has devolved into slick, banal, so-called reality shows, desert island survival adventures in which no one is ever seen leaning against a palm tree and reading a book – not Sun Tzu, not Machiavelli, not Napoleon – in order to get ahead.

But the intellectuals are to blame as well. Like so many other critics, for example, Pierre Bourdieu complains in On Television about the inherent constraints of the TV format – seven-second soundbites, trumped-up polarizations of opinion, and all that. My first thought on reading him was, "My God, I’ve seen French television, and no longwinded philosopher is wanting for airtime there," but I also wondered, given his impenetrable prose, who exactly he imagined was going to invite him on.

Similarly, one of our esteemed colleagues here at Living Literacies once gave me a very hard time when I was at TVO. Taking offence at comments made about her on Imprint, she demanded equal time – demanded it, I felt, in a rude, intractable, imperious and opportunistic fashion that quickly led to an escalation of rhetoric (public, on her part) and a hardening of both our positions. Equal time? I finally said. okay, let’s calculate it. You, Madam, were commented upon for precisely one minute and fourteen seconds. I’ll be generous: You may have two minutes. This resulted in her excoriating article about the white media establishment and me, “2 Minutes in the New Jerusalem,” which caused me considerable pain, since I’d always imagined myself to be sympathetic to the grievances of visible minorities. Why, I wondered, weren’t there pickets outside the egregiously insensitive, starched, and exploitative mainstream TV studios? It struck me as cowardly on her part to be stabbing at the soft underbelly of white liberalism, and above all counterproductive not to plead her case more imaginatively.

On the other hand, I’ve never been happy with the way our quarrel went. Why couldn’t we have been more accommodating? What would it have cost us to give this or any other person an entire show if they asked for it? I know that we felt besieged. We felt that the public could not be allowed to dictate our content. We spoke of principles and precedents. And yet, and yet, were we not a publicly funded station?