From a representative to a plebiscitary media democracy

A recent BBC study apparently found that viewers would prefer the news to be presented by attractive women. Apart from the crushing obviousness of this revelation, I was particularly taken by Rod Liddle's interpretation of this news for the Times:

"Viewers would prefer it if the BBC’s new “bite size” one-minute news slots were presented by nubile young women, rather than boss-eyed old gits, or journalists, apparently. This information has come from audience research, it seems.

Well, if you’re determined to make news programmes for morons, this is the sort of thing you ought to expect. It wouldn’t surprise me if the audience also expressed a preference for white newsreaders, no disabled, mentals or lesbians, and for the babe to conclude each dispatch by removing her top and languorously soaping herself."

As little as ten years ago it was at least faintly plausible (if commercially imbecilic) for a media company to take the view that, irrespective of what its audience explicitly wanted, we were instead going to get what the media company thought was good for us so there. If pre-digital media was a democracy it was a representative democracy - which, as in politics, means the democratic element was largely imaginary, insofar as each of us got to choose not what we actually watched/read/heard but which of a small handful of people we would let make that choice for us.

The digital media democracy is plebiscitary - because the content has been atomised and creation divorced almost entirely from distribution we get to make decisions not merely over which newspaper to read or which of three channels to watch but  over every single piece of content we consume. Which means, of course, that if there is demand for one-minute news bulletins, or news bulletins that are read out by attractive presenters rather than unattractive ones, or indeed that end with a soapy strip-tease (and it seems obvious to me that demand for this final option at least would be considerable) then someone will move to fill that need, regardless of the sneering of desposed gatekeepers that we are morons for even wanting it.