Television has created a territory of impunity at the mar-
gins of society, of any society. Television admits and
transmits behaviours that we would not tolerate except
on screen. As an electronic socializing agent, it creates,
as Aristotle would tell us, habit: through the systematic
and interminable repetition of certain types of behaviour
and of certain human profiles, the audience tends to per-
ceive them as habitual, as normal. Entertainment pro-
grams erode one of the fundamental concepts of demo-
cratic society: dignity, which is the illustrated translation
of honour, of fame. Tele-indignity attacks people’s pri-
vacy which is the political conquest of liberal democracy.
Television thus becomes an electronic scaffold, a medie-
val spike which returns us, at a blow, to pre-modernity
