Negotiating Distances: The Cultural Economy of Television Programs

This article considers the moral and ethical implications of television representation in a global age. It focuses on the role of the television industry in challenging and changing the distance between the remote and proximate, the foreign and familiar. The emphasis is on the institutional processes that enable as well as circumscribe these sorts of presentations. At the core are economic collaborations for the making of television documentaries made by television practitioners of different nations and cultures. In this space of social and political communication, the collaborating parties who are geographically, materially, and culturally distant from each other negotiate these distances as well as the distances between the subjects being presented (the alien viewed) and their audience (the distant viewers). The method applied is “participant observation.” The focal point of this approach is an annual event— the Israeli Forum of CoProductions—at which producers from different countries hammer out collaborations. Findings show that the interlocutors are designing the distance between the strange and familiar, the distant and near—challenging and changing it while simultaneously preserving and perpetuating it.