The Criticism / Column The Other Side, by Omar Rincón

Watching TV is a wonderful pleasure because we're all experts and can critique it. Even those who don't watch it criticize it.

Television criticism has many layers: the first analyzes from a taste perspective, where each person expresses what moves them and what doesn't; the second reflects on the content based on each person's moral, ethical, and educational desires; the third examines the actors in their roles, the journalists, and the presenters; the fourth seeks to make sense of the narrative, which tells us whether the story or report is well told; the fifth speculates on the aesthetics of the images, sounds, and editing; the sixth examines ratings, what is successful, and attempts to explain it; the seventh relates everything to the cultural implications of each program. And more layers of meaning and the possibility of criticism follow.

Colombian women are very good critics of telenovelas, and this is because they know their stuff; they've watched them for a long time and understand when a story is entertaining, plays well with the characters, reflects love well, and is well acted and narrated.

Colombians are notoriously bad critics of news programs because they say they don't like all the sensationalism and morbidity, but when it comes to ratings, it's clear that that's what they watch most. It's strange that the program they denounce as trashy, scandal-mongering, and sensationalist is the one they watch most.

Where there's a huge problem is in the content. National television keeps running an advertisement saying that the following program contains scenes of sex and violence of zero, moderate, or high intensity, and that the program is for the whole family, children, or those over 12 or 18. This seems like a joke because sex is about showing tits, not about everything being sexual and flesh-sex in bulk; and violence is about killing or wounding, but it says nothing about psychological, racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, or xenophobic violence.

Let's take a highly rated, very family-friendly example: Happy Saturdays, which is for the whole family and doesn't contain images of sex or violence. But there are many jokes about sex and sexualization, and they feature extreme violence, such as mocking ugly people, physical defects, women, gays, black people, indigenous people, and migrants. In other words, the jokes are completely violent because they express very strong forms of discrimination that affect people's dignity.

Therefore, the criticism and evaluation standards should change. Programs should post a sign before airing stating the following program contains a specific percentage of gender-based violence, racial violence, class violence, hate violence, violence against other sexualities, beliefs, and migrants.

And viewers who claim to be highly critical should reflect on these issues and not praise such violence. Criticism should serve to make us look at ourselves in that mirror-screen and reflect on our ways of discriminating. And that's how television becomes educational.