Compreender e ultrapassar as dificuldades de avaliação académica da qualidade da televisão

The difficulties of evaluating TV quality are undeniable: TV is a cultural industry with a gigantic output, strong national character, different institutional formats (public service, broadcast, cable, satellite, internet) and an omniparous vocation in creating all kind of contents. Academic studies dealing with the evaluation of the media have accepted the more or less loose standards that TV professionals, companies and audiences have used or produced to that end or concentrated the efforts of evaluation in analyzing quantitatively programming slots and genres and in the adequacy of programming to the political normative adapted in each country. Academic attention has partially shifted to the “American quality series”, but shared standards of evaluation have not been created. Most academic output has eluded or even refused the evaluation of TV quality by those who have been capacitated by society in the last two millennia to evaluated cultural products and the creations of other areas of knowledge: the academicians themselves. In this paper, I discuss several reasons for the difficulties and the refusal of evaluation by academics: the conceptual instability of “TV quality”; the areas that are either dealt (programming, audiences choices) or avoided (textual analysis); the “impossibility” of dealing theoretically the issue of TV quality; conservative and neopopulist attitudes towards TV contents; ways out of the black hole of academic evaluation of TV quality, with the purpose of helping the development of international work in this area.