And speaking of media reinforcing oppression, I also hate these talent shows. It would be fine if they only showed the contestants, let you watch then, and afterwards come the judges with their opinions. The artist has their opinion, you have yours, the judges have theirs.
But that’s not what talent shows do. They switch back and forth between the contestants and the judges during the performance so you can see the reaction of the people in charge in real time, and sometimes to some “behind the scenes” court jesters. Which trains you to start seeing the contestants through what you imagine the judges’ eyes to be. You’re constantly getting input on what you should be thinking about the performance. The focus isn’t on what the artist is doing and whether you like it, the focus is on what the judges are thinking about it. This way, the audience is unlikely to disagree with the judges in the end - they’ve already been primed to agree. You’d never get a dynamic there like on Eurovision where the audience might whole-heartedly disagree with the “experts”, gleefully rip their “verdict” to shreds and laugh at them.
The emotional objective of talent shows is to feel like you’re in agreement with powerful “expert” figures who judge other people the way you wish you could. It’s inherently reactionary and authoritarian.
btw, reaction YouTubers experience the opposite dynamic. They had better feel, or pretend to feel, the emotions the audience wants them to have during the performance, or else their Patreon goes belly up. The reason for this is that their main audience consists of people who know the performance in question already and thus already have an opinion which they want to see mirrored.
“Expert” reaction videos (”Vocal coach reacts”, etc.) are an exception, those have aspects of both the regular reaction format and the talent show format.
