One of the ironic and damning things about the Paris Opera Ballet’s visit was that, if you rely on TV for reality depiction, you would never have known that it happened. The company was returning to New York after an absence of 16 years–one of the world’s great cultural institutions. And every preformance was sold out or nearly so, so it certainly was something for which there was an audience. And yet as far as the “mainstrem” electronic media was concerned, it simply never happened.
TV’s refusal to report on any culture that isn’t pop and enormously revenue-producing is not criminal negligence the way it’s refusal to ackowledge global warming is, but it’s an impoverishment of our culture. It’s an alarming example of market censorship