THE MEASURE OF CULTURE IN CULTURAL SECTIONS

Text topic: (Lack Of) Culture

Text author: Сања Домазет

We live in a time when our lives are saturated with information. We daily receive numerous messages through various media outlets. For example, in the US, during one year, about 200 000 books are published, approximately 70 million hours of programs are broadcast by radio stations and about 58 million hours of television programs are produced. “From the day of your birth until today more information was produced than during all recorded history before you, while half the total number of all scientists in history lives and produces information today.” Every year we publish more books. If you decided to read everything that has been published in one year, you would have to read one book every three minutes, which is about five hundred books a day. This, of course, only refers to the latest world production, and not the classics. Question is how many of the newly published books are read, how and how much the books and culture in general are covered in commentaries, how well the journalists are trained and if they are at all capable of selecting, clarifying and structuring such a horrific amount of information for us at a time of world crisis which has devastated Serbia as well in material, cultural and also media-related sense. A year ago results were published in Serbia of a study conducted by master student of the Faculty of political sciences in Belgrade who investigated the treatment of the book in Serbian media. These results were far from encouraging – apart from Radio Belgrade 2 and special weekend newspaper additions dedicated to book reviews, the book is generally neglected in the Serbian printed media, while the book reports themselves lack the necessary serious approach and deeper pondering. Focus of this paper is monitoring and analysis of cultural contributions in three daily newspapers, the Politika, the Večernje novosti and the Danas over a period 29.09.2012 – 2.10.2012. Its purpose was to show the content of these cultural sections, to make a comparative analysis of their content and quality of content, as well as to pinpoint the basic topics covered and pursue the question if the printed media create contents that raise public attention. The analysis had an empirical and conceptual approach, and covered quantity and quality baselines.