Where does the term " trash TV" come from? Given the definition provided by the academicians of the Royal Academy of Language, one could draw the erroneous conclusion that, in Spain, the invocation of quality as the rudder that guides television seems to restrict itself to what is so considered by journalists, politicians and Catholic moralists. The different " Manifestos" , media debates, editorial declarations and legislative attempts which, since March 2001, have appeared in our country based on the debate against trash TV, have combined a certain definition of the term and an absolute vagueness with regard to the topic of quality, without, up to now, there having been any visible concern from the areas of academic thought or from the industry.

Television has created a territory of impunity at the margins 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 perceive them as habitual, as normal. Entertainment programs erode one of the fundamental concepts of democratic society: dignity, which is the illustrated translation of honour, of fame. Tele-indignity attacks people' s privacy which is the political conquest of liberal democracy. Television thus becomes an electronic scaffold, a medieval spike which returns us, at a blow, to pre-modernity.

McTele or McTV must be understood as the inevitable result of the postfordist logic which has been imposed on the television industry, a logic which was implanted with the end of the monopoly on public services, privatization and the subsequent need to reduce the cost of programming due to the greater competition among channels. As it is the audience who are being defrauded, it seems normal that the expression of reality television lends support to the complementary argument for trash- TV: it is a reflection of what there is, on and off screen, for those who make it and those who watch it. The defense of " neo-television of the viewers" or of teledemocracy is the new and exclusive armor of those with the power of assigning the label. This is expressed, better than in any other cultural feature, in the depauperation of public visibility and of the syndical-political rights which incarnate the " cathode servitude" to which the protagonists of McTele are condemned.

There are many who argue that the decline in curiosity for knowledge, the rejection of effort, and the difficulty of concentration for children and young people in school has a very close relationship with the consumption of trash TV. Whether this extreme statement is true or not, the truth is that the attempt to understand that strange pleasure that is produced in our society from watching trash TV must inevitably take into account all of those theories which, in one way or another, explain the fascination that almost all of us feel for the tacky, the cheap and the stupid.

The expression " trash TV" is commonly used in reference to a kind of TV program strongly characterized by sensationalism, manipulation of facts and bad taste. No matter how suitable that label is, it may conceal the existence of other programs with a better reputation, or at least considered acceptable, but sharing with trash TV the same interest in triviality while having better values. The author of this article thinks that, from the point of view of quality, this kind of stupid television program should be placed in a category not very far from trash TV and believes that the worship of Public Opinion is responsible for the low standards of today' s television.

For as long as television has been dreamed of, and already during its first steps -during the first third of the 20th century- parallel to the excitement caused by the new invention advanced the fear that certain images could enter the home and morally corrupt individuals and society. Thus, from the beginning of this new medium: pseudo-sciences; sex as a motor; the exploitation of the heart; the famous-for-nothing; the hereditary famous; Messianic fervour... These will later be the immortals that the trash TV of the future, and all of its subgenres, will cause to grown and to reproduce.

The eruption of television sets in North American homes represented a strong attack on the oily machinery of Hollywood. In play was not only the financial aspect (at a time that the cinema industry was also confronted with anti-monopoly laws), but also the question of the hierarchies within audiovisual language itself. This led to a radical strategy on the part of Hollywood to spectacularize the cinema format (for example, with Cinema- Scope), while at the same time launching a virulent attack on television as a medium incapable of generating any genuine type of message. This strategy generated a whole way of seeing television through the cinema, a vision that was as exaggerated as it was out-dated and which has gone on to promote the concept of trash TV.

Like it or not, we are witnessing a process of media socialization without precedent in the history of communication. Programming is now the filling necessary for the real proprietor of television, the advertiser, to achieve his objectives. As Debord pointed out, " The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification." It is no longer just the case of having a cerebral implant that turns us into cameras with legs, nor of being the involuntary protagonist in one's own television program, but rather of suffering the image as virus. The great global threat, that the cyberpunk fictions copy from our world, derives from the concentration of the mass media. The path towards Orwell' s dystopia necessarily passes through the existence of a Big Brother. Perhaps in the end the battle will reach beyond the terrain of content, from which point we must also be concerned with the technologies which permit its transmission.

From a critical point of view, today' s television has adopted the model of trash TV and has become trash TV television. Parallel to this, the Internet has turned into the field of expansion and cultivation of trash TV. In this regard, one of the most interesting phenomena is the amateur production of trash TV on the Internet. To resist its impact, taking advantage of this tendency, the only activist option is the fifth-columnist revision of " recycling as sabotage" of trash TV to use it in campaigns of civil rebellion.

Reality TV has exerted a noticeable influence on the fiction formats in the United States in the last decade, serving as inspiration for the thematic, narrative and stylistic renovation of traditional genres. While Jerry Bruckheimer' s popular crime dramas were inspired by scientific docudramas, the competitive reality show Survivor was part of the creation process of the sophisticated adventure drama Lost, and the reality series starring has-been celebrities opened the path followed by innovative comedies like Arrested Development and The Comeback. While this is still a popular trend in the American television industry, we can stress that the hibridity between reality shows and fiction programs is minimal in Spain, where the prejudices against Reality TV continue in full force.

This article proposes an approach to the phenomenon of trash culture from the perspective of aesthetics and cultural criticism. From a humoristic perspective, the author connects two trash genres that are apparently unrelated: television and poetry. The object of the study is the television personality and writer Carlos Navarro Merino, whose work is discussed as a case of a double link, both aesthetic and social in nature.

In 1976, TVE began broadcasting Más Allá (The Beyond), a pioneer program at that time for Spanish television. Thirty years later, channels of one stripe or another maintain a self-interested relationship with all of those matters which, as they are appealing to a certain sector of the audience, have to do with UFO' s, parapsychology and the occult, as well as the post- 9-11 " conspiranoias" and hard-core sensationalism. The current success of Cuarto Milenio on channel four does nothing but call into doubt the very essence of a certain type of journalism which, with ever greater frequency, does not hesitate to cross, whenever convenient, that dangerous line which separates news from pure entertainment.

Media consumption imposes models and norms on the individual, who is abandoned to his destiny but constrained to follow it in the same physical identity: his own body. The aesthetic identity can turn into the normalization of the body under the appearance of the search for personal happiness and success as a result of social imperatives, expressed in products like Cambio radical (Extreme Makeover).

What is the relationship between trash TV and advertising? What sort of audience does trash TV generate from the perspective of advertising analysis? Does trash TV threaten the classic model of the advertising-audience relationship? This article tries to establish points of convergence and divergence between this television format and the advertising formats that take place on and about trash TV. It also attempts to touch on the concept of trash advertising from its formal and conceptual aspects.

Toda definición supone en el fondo una cierta forma de restricción. Definir algo es, en esencia, dejar fuera de " lo definido" todo lo que " por defecto" no es (ejemplo: definir " perro" implica dejar claras las diferencias que hay entre ese animal y, pongamos por caso, un gato... o una silla, tanto da). En el tema de la bien o mal llamada " telebasura" , la mayor parte de los variados y vehementes intentos de dar(le) con una definición aceptable (e invariable) se han ido estrellando uno tras otro contra una realidad (teleinvasiva, en este caso) en constante mutación.