The Arbiters of Media Success

Mass media inundate contemporary American life.  TVs, the Internet, and cell phones supply information, entertainment, and communication on demand.  Billboards loom over streets; magazines tempt captive audiences in every supermarket checkout line.  Modern media has achieved unprecedented ubiquity and significance, which some media critics lament.  The pervasiveness of mass media, those critics argue, has brainwashed audiences and consumers into mindless imitators of media images, many of which, critics say, promote sexual promiscuity, drug use, violence, and diseases such as anorexia and bulimia.  For instance, in her article, “Anorexics Are Victims of Society's Obsession with Thinness," Susan Renes accuses the media of causing eating disorders in women through its portrayal of thin models as desirable in her article.  Renes writes, “We are bombarded by advertising and mass media messages that say women must be as thin as the models in magazines and on television,” and, consequently, women “disregard their need for...a sufficient amount of food to adequately sustain them,” placing their health at risk to live up to a media-perpetuated standard.  Although eating disorders are a serious problem, however, overweight American consumers far outnumber eating disorder victims, contradicting Renes's contention that the standard of beauty commonly promoted by the media poses a grave danger to American women.  The average American's diet and lifestyle demonstrate an apparent resistance to the pursuit of thinness and fitness the media promotes.  In fact, media critics' perception of a one-sided causal relationship between media and consumers assigns a disproportionate power to the media and assumes extreme passivity in consumers.  A closer examination of the media/consumer relationship uncovers substantial consumer influence over the media.  What the media shows does affect consumers' tastes, aspirations, and values, but the consumer market itself dictates what the media decides to show.


The reciprocal interaction between consumer and media creates what The Merchants of Cool documentary producer Douglas Rushkoff calls a “giant feedback loop.”  Through interviews with advertisers, producers, and critics working in media, Rushkoff shows that entertainment and advertising corporations do not impose arbitrarily chosen marketing and entertainment messages on consumers.  Instead, corporations research their target markets' interests, tastes, and aspirations to create offerings that will appeal to consumers' sensibilities.  Consumer response then helps the corporations decide how to capitalize on those sensibilities for maximum profit by manipulating audiences' preexisting tastes and aspirations to create or increase demand for what the corporations hope to promote.  The consumers' sensibilities come first.  Therefore, before developing any programming or advertising campaign, most media corporations first invest in market research to determine consumer sensibilities to exploit, and then continue to rely on market research for consumer reactions to their attempts.

The media corporations' reliance on market research disproves the theory of an influencing media and passive consumers.  If consumers were merely passive followers of media messages, corporations would not need market research.  They could simply tell consumers what to want, without regard to the consumers' preexisting desires.  That the corporations do study consumers disproves the theory that the power to influence rests only with the media.  Market research itself exists because of the consumer's influence.

The consumer's influence over the media stems from simple economic reality.  Without the cooperation of the consumer, the majority of mass media could not exist.  Most broadcast media depend on advertising dollars to recoup production costs and make profits; so do mass-market periodicals.  A drop in ad sales can lead to collapse.  As the New York Times reported in April 2009, “In filing for bankruptcy recently, Sun-Times Media Group...disclosed in court papers that it had...[lost] 30 percent [of ad revenue].”  Advertising dollars depend directly on consumers.  And since, for maximum impact, advertisements must appear in the programs or publications the advertisers' target markets watch or read, advertising-dependent media must produce content as appealing to those target markets as the advertisements themselves.  The consumer market therefore wields enormous influence over the mass media.

Because of the consumers' influence over the mass media, as the consumer market changes, so does the media corporations' output.  Consider More to Love, an upcoming Fox reality show.  Like The Bachelor and other dating competitions, More to Love follows a standard format.  Twenty bachelorettes compete for the affections of one bachelor.  What makes More to Love unlike other Bachelor-style shows, which generally feature slim, fit, and conventionally attractive contestants, are its stars:  plus-sized bachelorettes and a 330-pound bachelor.  More to Love eschews the mass media's traditional aspirational paradigm, in which consumers are presented with images of people who conform to physical, social, or economic standards unattainable, but considered desirable, by most of the public.  Insead, More to Love “follows one regular guy's search for love among a group of real women determined to prove that love comes in all shapes and sizes (emphasis added),” according to More to Love's official website.  “The average American woman,” a More to Love commercial declares, “is a size 14-16.  The average American reality contestant is a size 2.  How real is that (emphasis added)?”

More to Love may reflect a major change in American society.  More than two-thirds of American adults are now overweight, according to an annual report released by health advocacy group Trust for America's Health.  As obesity rates continue to rise, the conventional standard of attractiveness appears more unattainable for the general population than ever.  The producers of More to Love are gambling on the idea that American consumers will respond to a program that reflects their reality.

Early interest appears to justify this gamble.  As blogger “Ms. LMC” writes on the blog Luvin' My Curves, “It's about time that folks realize that people over a certain size do date, want to date and are looking for love.”  More to Love's producers did realize that.  They stand to profit as a result, and, if they do, to inspire a slew of similarly themed programs, just as The Bachelor spawned dozens of imitations.  More to Love's success could start a new movement in entertainment media, a movement that depicts plus-sized people as being fully human and attractive to others, like their thinner counterparts.

Even if More to Love fails to capture a large audience, however, its existence still demonstrates the influence of the consumer on the media.  In 2001, Susan Renes claimed that the media influenced women to damage their own health to conform to the media's standard of attractiveness.  In 2009, the changing size of the consumer has caused a shift in media portrayals.  Corporations cannot rely solely on giving consumers “what [the corporations] want them to have,” as media critic, NYU professor, and author Mark Crispin-Miller says in The Merchants of Cool, in which he laments the enormous and negative impact of corporate media on presumably passive teenage consumers.  With More to Love, Fox gives consumers a reflection of what they already are.  More to Love makes clear the fact that however much influence the media may possess over the consumer, the consumer also possesses an enormous amount of influence over the media.  Ultimately, although the media does depict and promote the standards to which consumers aspire, those standards arise from consumers and society themselves, and change with consumers and society.  Neither the media nor consumers wield absolute power over the other, but instead exist in a symbiotic relationship, constantly feeding off of and changing each other in, as Douglas Rushkoff described it, the endless feedback loop.

Works Cited

“About the Show.”  Fox Broadcasting Company:  MORE TO LOVE.  2009.  23 July 2009.  

“F as in Fat 2009:  How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America.”  Trust for America's Health.  July 2009.  23 July 2009.  

Merchants of Cool, The.  Frontline.  Douglas Rushkoff.  PBS.  27 February 2001.

More to Love.  Advertisement.  Fox Broadcasting Company.  23 July 2009.

“More to Love:  Reality Dating Show for REAL Women.”  Luvin' My Curves.  10 April 2009.  22 July 2009.  

Perez-Pena, Richard.  “Newspaper Ad Revenue Could Fall as Much as 30%.”  New York Times Online.  14 April 2009.  23 July 2009.  

Renes, Susan. "Anorexics Are Victims of Society's Obsession with Thinness." At Issue: Anorexia. Ed. Daniel A. Leone. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. San Diego City College. 21 July 2009 .