286 Mediated Publics
is also highly valued, especially since television is for all practical pur-
poses the only cultural space available. The civil war is not the only cause
of this void. It began with the implementation of policies that favored the
profit motive to the detriment of social and cultural wealth. But is enter-
tainment to be considered solely as an outlet for the multiple frustrations
induced by daily life? Recent studies question the under-theorized dichot-
omy between information and entertainment, especially if the dichotomy
is considered from the perspective of the construction of meaning by
viewers and the fusion of traditional genres into what is now referred to
as “infotainment.”^44 Genres that were once considered minor, such as the
talk show, are now at the center of lively discussion. Several authors con-
sider the talk show a particular form of counter-discourse that is part of
public life.^45 Morley writes:
One can argue that the rise of the talk show, with its car-
navalesque and dialogic qualities, in which a range of voices
clamours for expression... , has rather to be seen as part of
the long-term process in which the voices of those who were
historically drowned out by the patriarchal and imperialist
meta-narratives of modernism are finally allowed to speak in
public.^46Identity
Identity is without doubt one of the clearest lenses through which to view
the complexity of shifting alliances introduced by satellite television, since
it reveals the status of the public space in question. What does satellite
television bring to the issue of identity? Certainly it is not in and of itself a
totalizing apparatus that automatically acquires people’s allegiance. As we
saw, satellite television is instrumentalized and repositioned by various
individual players and political factions. It is difficult in the case of Algeria
to circumvent the issue of how its history has become colonized by a sin-
gle dominant memory—the historic role of the FLN [National Liberation
Front]—through a process of mythologizing verging on fossilization. This
process has largely depended on national television. It is because of that