Is the public indifferent to reality or "reality"?

In reading Solanas and Getino’s “Towards a Third Cinema” and Keenan’s “Publicity and Indifference,” I was interested in the two articles’ differing accounts of the role an audience plays.

“Towards a Third Cinema” describes Hollywood cinema is making man a “passive and consuming object” (64). The way in which Keenan describes the public in his article somewhat implies a consuming entity; the way in which a camera “[waits] patiently for things to happen [at] particularly dangerous crossroads” (107) made me think of journalists as using elements of reality to create a product. Keenan admits that “the camera” effectively “[mutates]” what it normally “means for [an] event to occur” (107).

When I think of the broadcast news that Keenan describes as having a cinematic counterpart, documentary cinema is what first comes to mind. Solanas and Getino view documentary cinema as the “main basis of revolutionary filmmaking,” which is of course itself the antithesis of the consumerist world of Hollywood cinema. There is a blatant distinction between the depiction of real events which Solanas and Getino describe and that which Keenan describes.

Additionally, a certain quote from “Towards a Third Cinema” seemed to have much resonance in light of Keenan’s article.
“There is no knowledge of a reality as long as that reality is not acted upon, as long as its transformation is not begun on all fronts of struggle” (69). How does this quote affect Keenan’s arguments? If the news audience failed to act upon events in Sarajevo, does this mean they are interpreting the events as a not-quite reality? Is the audience’s response – or lack thereof – indicative of an understanding of their own consumerism, an understanding of the fact that things are happening in dangerous locations where cameras “coincidentally” and patiently lurk?