China Cuts 'Excessive Entertainment' From TV

An anonymous reader writes "Chinese broadcasters have axed two-thirds of popular TV shows in line with a government directive to curb 'excessive entertainment.' From the article: 'The rule, first announced in October, is targeted at what Chinese regulators have called "excessive entertainment and a trend toward low taste," to address the rise of talent shows, dating shows and other such programming aired by China's tightly regulated, but increasingly competitive, regional satellite broadcasters. Authorities also encouraged broadcasters to air more news and educational programming.' according to local media reports."

Comments

Its hard for me to critisize this move.

[Narcocide]

If I had my own country, I would make reality TV illegal too.

Re:Its hard for me to critisize this move.

[msobkow]

You have the right to hate any show you don't like and refuse to watch it. You don't have the right to tell other people what they like.

Re:Its hard for me to critisize this move.

[aztektum]

Are people actually choosing to like reality TV?

Or are they choosing to simply watch what the media companies offer?

Irony

[Ltap]

So Big Brother shut down Big Brother?

Re:FCC Should take note

[kelarius]

TV doesn't make people stupid, it just keeps stupid people entertained and out of the public eye, so why is excessively entertaining media a bad thing?

Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things...

Vice Taxes

[Hadlock]

We tax the snot out of cigarettes and booze because they aren't healthy for society... we've had a TV in every home for 50+ years now, and parents are exposing their children to TV from birth... if you can't restrict people's use of TV, you might as well remove the incentive to watch it by making it more informational/educational, rather than an "opiate of the masses".
 
We ended up with the evening news in a response to a federal mandate that X% be used for reporting the news, how much better off would we have been if we'd restricted entertainment to Y% of the total broadcast time? How would society be if we limited mass entertainment? Would local entertainment like playhouses still be much more successful?

You would think so, but not so much

[pablo_max]

There are several online services which offer loads of pirated TV shows and even movies. For example, my wife uses a streaming program called funsion to watch HIMYM, Big Bang and other popular American TV shows.
As of yesterday, those show are no longer available. This was also the case on the two other alternative services.
Granted, one can use a VPN tunnel, but most people will not be willing to pay money for a VPN which is fast enough to stream.
I do happen to pay for premium VPN services, but as I was last in China, it was impressively slow. Enough for real google results and such, but not enough for netflix.

Re:All power to China

[MattBecker82]

No wonder over 500% of Slashdot users post hyperbole without anything to back it up.

Seriously, I don't know if you're joking or not, but your post is just false premises, non-sequiturs and made-up "facts". Analysis:

Excessive entertainment over the tube is one of the lead causes of the downfall of the Western nations.

You need to establish the premise of "the downfall of the Western nations" (whatever that means), then establish a cause-and-effect relationship between "excessive entertainment over the tube" and the former.

Turn on the tube if you don't believe me, flip some channels, see how many of the programs are of any value in the first place?

How are you establishing the "value" of TV programs exactly? By your own judgement as whether it's something you'd like to watch?

No wonder over 90% of the American high school graduates can't even pinpoint their own country - the United States of America - on the world map.

Citation needed. Or an admission that you just made this up.

They have been dumbed down by the entertainment industry.

Non-sequitur. Even if you establish two concurrent trends, it doesn't mean there is a connection or cause-and-effect relationship between them.

Re:Practical arguments against?

[tsotha]

When the people are active in a society they question things, get involved in things, and yes challenge things they feel aren't right.

That's pretty condescending. What makes you think they can't watch a few hours of television and still be informed? When people refer to large groups of people as "sheeple" and wail they won't "wake up" it implies if only people were paying attention they'd think like I think. Well, and stay with me here, maybe they already question things, they're already involved, and they already "challenge things they feel aren't right." Maybe their vision of how things ought to be isn't the same as yours.

I'm guessing from the way your post is written you're not from the US. I'm at a little bit of a loss to understand why you think we in the US would make our country just like yours if only we didn't watch so much television.

Re:That's true

[wisty]

Funny story - the spread of technology in China is almost guaranteed to topple the idiots running North Korea. Firstly, it's made most Chinese despise the North Korean government, which makes the Chinese - North Korean alliance a bit of a farce. Everyone except North Korea (who think China is still their friend) knows that China's only concern now is whether or not it suffer any collateral damage (i.e. bombs, shells, or fallout falling on Chinese soil), and how to deal with the refugees.

More importantly, North Koreans buy black-market goods from China. This includes iPod clones, many of which will come sold pre-loaded with the best Korean entertainment videos, all of which come from South Korea. It's getting harder and harder to explain that they are so superior, when all the South Korean shows are about families which are 10X richer than the families shown in pro-North propaganda.

And Yet

[d3ac0n]

We still see video of people falling over themselves weeping when Kim-Jong "mentally" ill dies. Not to say that those videos aren't at least partially staged, but some "undercover" video has leaked out of NK showing that at least some of the weeping, wailing and carrying on was genuine. (I apologize for not having a link ATM. Search on YouTube. It's there.)

Not to say that the new regime isn't weak, it certainly is. But not so weak that ipod clones are going to topple them anytime soon. We see how well "westernization" has "toppled" the communist Chinese government. (IE: Not at all) If Kim-Jong Un decides to modernize and westernize following the Chinese model, Korea isn't likely to see unification anytime in the next century.

Sadly, there really is only ONE way to absolutely topple a government of any stripe. That's with violent revolution. The only way that Korea will unify is if SK invades and defeats NK. With NK's recent round of sabre-rattling, that's looking more and more likely every day.

Re:And Yet

[AnonyMouseCowWard]

This is false. My parents were there.

They cried, because in a tightly controlled country with government media, the loss of your leader is like losing a family member. It's like losing the person the entire country, and you yourself, relied on. They cried because they were at a loss as to what to do. It's losing the person running the country, the only person capable of doing so (or so they believed), and having certainty replaced by uncertainty. If you're a believer, it's like losing your prophet.

That might not have been the situation for everyone, but for a big percentage of the population, it was entirely genuine.

Re:All power to China

[LordKronos]

Flynn Effect

(Link didn't work the first time)

Errm, IQ Scores are always centered at 100 by definition. Ergo average IQ score can't go up or down, only the raw survey scores can. Who would have thought that the very channel you praise for not dumbing down the populace would dumb down that fact.

Erm, no, sorry. IQ Scores are NOT always centered at 100 by definition. As raw scores shift higher, IQ scores will likewise shift higher until the the raw-score-to-IQ-score conversion process is renormalized. How often are they normalized? It wasn't an easy question to answer, but I found one website that claims they are only normalized "every 10 or so years".
http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/intell/culture_iq_notes_5.html

Also, it seems that before the Flynn effect was discovered, there was no such periodic renormalizaion (which makes sense...why would you renormalize before anybody has even discovered that they've become unnormalized). Therefore at the time the Flynn effect was defined, scores were not normalized, and the Flynn effect was indeed described as IQ scores increasing over time. Look around the web. Every single reference to the Flynn effect I can find, even those from reputable sources, describe it as an increase in IQ scores over time. For instance, here's a page on it from a Psychology Professor at Indiana University:
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/flynneffect.shtml

But congratulations on getting a +5 Informative for posting incorrect information. Maybe you should watch more Discovery Channel.