As ICT developments helped sanctify the celebrity image, carried by news and entertainment products bursting across increasingly porous national borders and bombarding a growing local audience, in much of Southeast Asia television is taking over where the cinema once ruled. In the early 1990s, there were only a few million cable-television households in the Asia- Pacific. By 2004, multi-channel TV subscriptions had grown to 192.4 million, and were expected to reach almost 300 million by 2015. In 2005, the number of digital pay TV subscribers rose 37 per cent year-to-year, to 14.4 million, led by aggressive deployment in Australia, Japan and Singapore and robust growth in Malaysia and Hong Kong. Asia’s pay tele- vision revenues were expected to reach $30 billion by 2010 and more than
$40 billion by 2015, up from revenues of $18 billion in 2005.1
By the end of the twentieth century, News Corp-owned satellite broad- caster Star TV pumped out 40 channels in eight languages to, it claimed, 300 million viewers in 53 countries (Alkman 2002, p. 43). And, despite a double-digit decline in advertising in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001, which forced many media companies in Southeast Asia either to reorganize or close down operations completely,2the Asia Pacific media and entertainment market continued to grow.
As we have seen in earlier chapters, the global entertainment and media (E&M) industry, as a whole, had entered a solid growth phase and was set to increase at a 6.6 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to $1.8 trillion by 2010. New revenue streams grew rapidly, the growth of physical formats had slowed, and the availability of licensed digital distribution pro- vided consumers with alternatives to piracy. Asia Pacific remained the fastest-growing region, reflecting both the underlying economic growth and local initiatives. The growth was being led by double-digit increases in Internet, TV distribution and gaming, with annual compound growth in spending projected to average 9.2 per cent – the highest of all of the regions – reaching $425 billion in 2010 (PWC 2006).
At the heart of this growth is television. Despite being condemned by its critics for its lack of substance, and being a medium of impression, televi- sion dominated media consumption in Asia Pacific in the 1990s, where it had become ‘immense, affecting the most basic assumptions and practices of daily life’ (Lull 1995, p. 29). Southeast Asians watched more than twice as much television as they read print media, with Thailand topping the
TV charts with an average of 3.2 hours of television viewing a day. The Philippines daily television consumption was 3 hours, Indonesia 2.8, slightly higher than Singapore and Malaysia at around 2.5 hours (NOP 2006). Half of all television homes were in Asia (Hansen 2001, p. 211).
In Asia, consequently, the communications media, as well as the percep- tion industries so closely connected with it, were altering the very nature of politics and the ways in which political leaders relate to those over whom they rule, such that their behaviours are modified to ensure the manage- ment of their visibility over the media and communication planning is increasingly part of professional government (Thompson 2001). The tradi- tional elites of Asia have long understood that to interpret the world is to have power over it, and ‘to circulate that sense socially is to exert power over those who use that sense as a way of coping with their daily lives’ (Fiske 1994, p. 3). In the new mediated world, the manipulation of public image has become increasingly important, but more of a challenge. The mass media enables political elites to reach a wide audience, but the media is a filter, providing its own interpretation and, therefore, demanding increased skill and sophistication from the political elites. Thus, as we will see in Chapter 9, hand in hand with the growth of information-hungry media companies came the development of the publicity apparatus, such that the PR industry, like the communication media it fed, was well established in the region, and set to leave an indelible impression on Asia and Asian politics (Thompson 2001, p. 178).
The flood of cultural products, particularly from the US, as well as the impact of global media developments such as the extension of corporate control and convergence within the industry, and the domination of com- mercial considerations, also meant content was increasingly oriented around entertainment considerations. Even the provision of news and information was being warped into infotainment by the considerations of politics and profit, as spectacle replaced substance, and the media audience was presented with unchallenging clichés and stereotypes. In this new media world, information was tightly controlled, channelled, and manipu- lated by a few giant conglomerates, such that: ‘what we receive at the end of the “news filter” is a precensored, predigested chaff. . . titillation and gossip, lacking both the style and substance of empirical factual reportage’
(Dixon 1999, p. 3).
Media celebrities, whose role it is, increasingly, to endorse the various industry brand names, front these pasteurised media products. As with movie stars from Hollywood to Bollywood, they allow the audience to differentiate between the otherwise undistinguished and indistinguishable.
The rise of the celebrity in modern society has gone hand in hand with the growth of the mass media. They cohabit the entertainment economy, where
entertainment and brand marketing have been grafted together, increasing the importance of fame. Everything from banking, to religion and politics has become entertainment, as ‘the fun-focused consumer pays well to be entertained in their leisure time, and entertainment becomes, first and fore- most, the way to build image by enhancing customer experience’ (Wolf 1999, pp. 80–81).
As we have already seen, theoretical attempts to explain the phenome- non ranged from early interpretations by Boorstin (1992) and others, which sought to show how the growth in consumer culture had led to a decline in values and standards, emphasizing the superficiality and lack of conse- quence of these public personalities, through to the works of Dyer (2004), Gamson et al. (1992), Marshall (1997), and others, who trace the meaning of the public individual and the nature of celebrity as a constructed, but unstable, marketable commodity. In these analyses, celebrity is created from a complex negotiation between cultural producers (the media, the public- ity apparatus and the celebrity) and the audience, and provides a fulcrum legitimizing the individual’s role in modern consumer society/capitalist democracy.
Nor should we forget an ambivalent public, that plays an important role in the triumvirate of audience, media and celebrity. Fed by an endless pageant of novelty, excitement and gossip, they are envious for the adven- turous and incredible lives of the celebrities and desirous of the fame and fortune that accompanies it. And yet, in a search for what is seen to be ‘real’
and a lust for titillating scandal, the same audience reveals an almost per- verse enjoyment at any evidence of the fallibility of these ‘popularly-elected gods and goddesses’ (Gamson 2001, p. 265).
The emphasis on the creation of celebrity places it firmly alongside the media, the institutions that produce the famous, and the development of the mechanisms available for garnering attention. A clear link is estab- lished, then, between the growth of the publicity apparatus and the birth of modern consumer culture, and its roots in the newly-expanding urban markets and the leisure business boom, with show business, the film industry, and the star system at its heart (ibid., p. 262).
In Southeast Asia by the beginning of the twenty-first century, as with much of the world, there was a profusion of news and entertainment media available to disseminate these celebrity images. Television had developed a pervasive influence as, disaffected by the human lot, people hungered for stories of misfortune and death as ‘our existential emptiness send us on a desperate quest to bring meaning to our lives . . . (that) drives us to con- spicuous consumerism’ (Dixon 1999, pp. 35–6). As a result, television had emerged as the most significant new outlet for image creation, as ‘areas tra- ditionally perceived as non-entertainment (news in particular), come to
depend on the practices of the entertainment industry, and celebrity in par- ticular’ (Gamson 2001, p. 271). The rise of infotainment has served to further reinforce the cult of personality in the industry. Celebrity images have meant huge sales for television, as well as for the more traditional outlets of magazines and fanzines (Dixon 1999, pp. 10–12).
Even the increasing dominance of technology in the television business and the trend towards the commodification of news due to corporate control of news organizations and convergence within the industry has meant the production of its own star system. The cost and logistical demands of the technology of collection and dissemination, the needs of ever-more hungry news rooms, as well as cosmetic contrivances such as
‘stand ups’, themselves seeking to reinforce the fact that ‘we are there’, encourage the trend of reporters as celebrity (MacGregor 1997, 186–7).
Along with the celebrated faces that front the news reports, these media stars have become the fodder of marketing departments, promoting partic- ular channels and media products.
In the celebrity culture, where the borders between politics and enter- tainment are increasingly vague, the celebritization of politics poses complex questions regarding image and reality. Political leaders, them- selves, often seem to be little more than celebrity endorsements for power- ful elite groups and party political machinery. The areas of public relations, media agencies and opinion polling, which themselves developed as part of the entertainment industries, now ‘provide models and mediating dis- courses for the organisation of contemporary political culture, in which the political leader attempts to embody the mass public affectively’ (Marshall 1997, p. 240).
The role of the media, and television in particular, is key in allowing politicians to create an intimacy with their public, a careful construction of political characters, avoiding the articulation of ideology or political posi- tion so as not to alienate any elements of the electorate. ‘Television news provides the material for establishing a narrative of politics. Political leaders in this reconstruction, become leading characters in a continuously unfolding drama’ (ibid., p. 229).
These political leaders are often juxtaposed with television personalities, particularly news anchors – the media stars in the political narrative. These anchors are already familiar faces to viewers, guiding them through life’s daily confusion of information and events, showing control, interpreting events, and providing security in a chaotic world as they are inserted into the ‘construction of significant moments’ (ibid., p. 124).
Is it no surprise, then, that these personalities slip easily across the already frail frontier between entertainment and politics as they have in the Philippines. While the political elites in Malaysia moved to control the flow
of information across and within their borders as the global media com- panies extended their reach across Asia, eroding monolithic state owner- ship, as competition forced the concentration of media capital, in the Philippines, the emergence of People Power after 1989, more participatory democratic reforms and a tradition of privately-controlled media, meant an enthusiastic local industry continued to blossom largely unencumbered;
increasingly a ‘political battleground – an important contested space for conflicting forces and aspirations’ (Atkins 1999, p. 4).