Read Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television Online
Authors: Jerry Mander
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (39 page)
Compared to football, baseball is an almost oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.
Baseball is virtually a process game. Not that baseball is a process the way oceans and coffeehouses and conversations and love are, but in the context of sports it is more process oriented than many.
Soccer has even fewer peaks than baseball. The action flows over an immense field. Moments of focused concentration are rare. There is very little resolution from minute to minute.
Boxing, on the other hand, is very focused, involving constant action, frequent resolution and peaks of personal catharsis. Basketball, although it is a flow sport like soccer, is played on a small field and involves highlighted events—baskets— every few seconds.
Naturally football has totally overpowered baseball on television, and so have boxing and basketball. Meanwhile, soccer is rarely presented, and when it is, it communicates almost nothing.
Television, which is better suited to football and boxing than to soccer, is also better suited to
any
sporting event than to probing of alternative consciousness or natural environments, or any delving into relationships, all of which require emphasis on process: the in-between spaces.
Within the range of all human experience, and all possible programming,
any
sport contains more clearly highlighted action than, say, 99 percent of human relationships, except for those with a sexual or violent orientation.
The dramatic programs, featuring jealousy, hatred, desire, fear, humiliation, ebullience, are not only the most visible on television, they are also the most emotionally loaded, with the larger cathartic payoffs, like home runs or touchdowns or wars. They pass the test of highlighted content, providing visibility in a dimmed-out medium.
Television presents relationships in crisis; those that stand out from the usual fare of everyday life, which is not so explosive and dramatic most of the time. In the television world, relationships involve the same huge cycles of feeling as sports shows: big joys, great losses, ups and downs, sudden shocks and surprises, explosive passions, frequent catharsis. We get soap opera, Mary Hartman,
Roots.
Without crises, television drama would not be able to deliver any feeling. Conversation or smaller feelings—love, friendship, camaraderie—do not deliver on television. Violence does. It delivers fear. Producers and sponsors are well advised to make choices in favor of such programs. Fear qualifies as a bona fide pseudoexperience. It can fool viewers into believing that when they are watching television, some actual living is going on, when it isn’t. In the long run, experiencing artificial fear over and over again when nothing dangerous is actually going on eventually dulls one’s responses. One becomes less subject to television fear while at the same time more paranoid about the real world one actually experiences less and less.
The bias toward the peaks of content is possibly most tragic when it comes to news. Since much of life is now removed from our direct experience, the news that we get from afar becomes our
total
information on the forces that shape and move our lives. That makes the distortions in it a very serious matter.
When Walter Cronkite says, “And that’s the way it is,” he is surely aware that that’s the way it is only within the very narrow range of world events that are communicable through television news, and within
those
events, only in those aspects that fit the standards of “good television.”
Edward Epstein, in
News from Nowhere,
says, “Presenting events exactly as they occur does not fit with the requisites of television news. . . . Given the requirement that a network news story have definite order, time and logic, it would be insufficient in most cases to record from beginning to end the natural sequence of events, with all the digressions, confusions and inconsistencies that more often than not constitute reality . . .
“Cameramen seek out the most action-packed moments; and editors then further concentrate the action. Even when an event is characterized by an unexpected low degree of activity, television can create the illusion of great activity. The relatively unenthusiastic reception General MacArthur received in Chicago during his homecoming welcome in 1951 thus appeared to be a massive and frenetic reception on television because all the moments of action were concentrated together. . . . In collapsing the time frame of events and concentrating the action into a continuous flow, television news tends to heighten the excitement of any group or other phenomena it pictures, to the neglect of the more vapid and humdrum elements.
“. . . ‘Our job is to cut out all the dead wood and dull moments,’ one NBC editor commented. The procedure involves routinely eliminating the intervals in which little of visual interest occurs, and compressing the remaining fragments into one continuous montage of unceasing visual action. For instance, an attempt by the SDS faction at Columbia University to block the registration of students in September of 1968, involved, according to my observations, a few speeches by SDS leaders, hours of milling about, in which the protest more or less dissipated for lack of interest, and about one minute of violence when five SDS leaders attempted to push their way past two campus patrolmen. The hours of film taken that day by an NBC camera crew recorded various views of the crowd from 9:00 A.M. until the violence at about 2:00 P.M., and the minute or so of violent confrontation.
“However, when the happening was reduced to a two-minute news story for the NBC Evening News, the editors routinely retained the violent scenes, building up to them with quick cuts of speeches and crowd scenes. . . . The process of distilling action from preponderantly inactive scenes was not perceived as any sort of distortion by any of the editors interviewed. On the contrary, most of them considered it to be the accepted function of editing; as one chief editor observed, it was ‘what we are really paid for.’“
The results of the bias toward highlighted news content were put even more succinctly by John Birt in
TV Guide
(August 9, 1975). He points out that some elements of news fit the needs of the medium more directly than others, and the result is a serious “bias in understanding . . . trying to come to grips with the often bewildering complexity of modern problems . . . is a formidable task, even without trying to put the result on television; and the failure rate is high. The realities one is seeking are abstract—macroeconomic mechanisms, political philosophies, international strategies—and cannot be directly televised like a battle zone or a demonstration.”
Even when an effort is made to cover subtle or complex material, Birt says, the decision is made to choose only the most televisable elements. So a specific case of, say, a starving family will be chosen, rather than an overall look at its cause, which is more complicated and less televisable. The latter, Birt says, “runs the risk of being boring. A well-made report on a famine, or even on one starving family in Appalachia, will be more watchable than a report on the world food problem. A program on living conditions in Watts or Harlem will be more diverting than a report on housing policy. . . .
“I believe that the various forms and techniques of TV journalism can all too easily conspire together to create a bias against the audience’s understanding of the society in which it lives.”
Birt suggests that the problem could be solved by lengthening the time devoted to the “main stories of the day,” so that a more comprehensive understanding of them might develop. Of course this would result in giving less time to the stories that are
not
the “main” ones, and so his recommendation seems to contradict his earlier remarks. In effect, it would leave
some
news highlighted to an even greater extent, while background stories or more minor events were dropped out. Would this build greater understanding of events in the world? Obviously not. It would leave people even more trans-fixed by the out-of-context information which is chosen.
I wonder why Birt reversed himself in the middle of an argument? Perhaps he couldn’t bear to face the implications of what he was saying. To face the inevitable drift of his own reasoning would lead straight to the observation that news, like all other information on television, is inevitably and irrevocably biased away from some forms of content and toward others. If this is true, then we really
don’t
know which end is up and which is down. We take things as they come.
XVI
THE PIECES THAT FALL THROUGH THE FILTER
A
S
a way of drawing together the technical limits and tendencies of television technology so that a pattern emerges, I would like to offer a list, a sort of potpourri. A number of the items in it have been touched on earlier. They are included here again so that we can gain a unified impression of the medium, what kind of world it must inevitably transmit.
Thirty-three Miscellaneous Inherent Biases
1) War is better television than peace. It is filled with highlighted moments, contains action and resolution, and delivers a powerful emotion: fear. Peace is amorphous and broad. The emotions connected with it are subtle, personal and internal. These are far more difficult to televise.
2) Violence is better TV than nonviolence.
3) When there is a choice between objective events (incidents, data) and subjective information (perspectives, thoughts, feelings), the objective event will be chosen. It is more likely to take visual form.
4) Cars (and most commodities) are more visible on television, and come across with less information loss, than any living thing, aside from human faces. The smaller a plant or creature, or the more complex an image it presents, the harder it is to convey and the less likely it is to be chosen. Cars, like most urban forms, offer a clean, straight, uncomplicated message. They communicate their essence more efficiently than plants do. We are bound to have more images of cars and urban forms on television than natural environments and creatures.
5) Religions with charismatic leaders such as Billy Graham, Jesus Christ, Reverend Moon, Maharishi or L. Ron Hubbard are far simpler to handle on television than leaderless or nature-based religions like Zen Buddhism, Christian Science, American Indians, or druidism, or, for that matter, atheism. Single, all-powerful gods, or individual godlike figures are simpler to describe because they have highly defined characteristics. Nature-based religions are dependent upon a gestalt of human feeling and perceptual exchanges with the planet. To be presented on television, they would need to be too simplified to retain meaning.
6) Political movements with single charismatic leaders are also more suitable and efficient for television. When a movement has no leader or focus, television needs to create one. Mao is simpler to transmit than Chinese communism. Chavez is better television than farm workers. Steinem is better than women. Graham is better than Christianity. Erhard is better than the “human potential movement.” Hitler is easier to convey than fascism. Nader is easier than consumerism. Nixon is better than corruption.
7) The one is easier than the many. The personality or the symbol is easier than the philosophy. The philosophy requires depth, time, development, and in some cases, sensory information. This remains true unless the many are made into copies of each other. Then, the one is the same as the many.
8) For the same reasons, hierarchy is easier to report upon than democracy or collectivity. The former is focused and has a specific form: leaders and followers. Only the leaders need to be interviewed. Democratic or collective forms involve flow processes with power constantly shifting. Television reporters don’t have time to interview everyone.
9) Superficiality is easier than depth.
10) Short subjects with beginnings and ends are simpler to transmit than extended and multifaceted information. The conclusion is simpler than the process.
11) Verbal information is easier to convey than sensory information since television can deliver words with little information loss. Sensory information is easier to convey than intuitive information, if the former is confined to the two operative senses of television. Intuitive information, which has no form at all, can barely be sent or received.
12) Feelings of conflict, and their embodiment in actions, work better on television than feelings of agreement and their embodiment in calm and unity. Conflict is outward, agreement is inward, and so the former is more visible than the latter.
13) Lust is better television than satisfaction. Ebullience and anxiety are better than tranquility. On the other hand, anger is better than anxiety. Jealousy is better television than acceptance. All of these work more easily than love. Passionate love is more communicable than brotherly and sisterly love.
14) Competition is inherently more televisable than co-operation as it involves drama, winning, wanting and loss. Cooperation offers no conflict and becomes boring.
15) Materialism, acquisitiveness and ambition, all highly focused attitudes, work better than spirituality, nonseeking, openness and yielding. The medium cannot deal with ambiguity, subtlety and diversity.
16) Doing is easier to convey than being. Activity will always be chosen over inactivity.
17) When dealing with primitive peoples, objective events such as hunting, building, fighting or dancing are easier to convey through television than subjective details of qualities of experience, ways of mind, alternative perceptions. The latter qualities, which form the heart of life for primitive people, are dropped out in favor of the former.
18) Loud is easier to televise than soft. Close is easier than distant. Large is easier than small. Too large is harder than medium. The narrow is easier than the wide.
19) Linear information works better on television than information that comes as a matrix or has dimension. The singular is more understandable than the eclectic. The speculative is easier than the ambiguous.
20) The fixed is better than the evolutionary; the static is better than the fluid.
21) The bizarre always get more attention on television than the usual.
22) Facts concerning the moon are better television than poetry concerning the moon.
Any
facts work better than
any
poetry.
23) The tree is easier to convey than the landscape. The bus is easier than the street. The street is easier than the forest path. The river is easier than the mountain. The flower is easier than the field. The road is easier than the river.
24) The specific is always easier than the general.
25) The expression is easier than the feeling, and so crying is better television than sadness. Verbal is always better than nonverbal.
26) The desires of black people for jobs, housing, integration makes for better television, because they are objective desires, than the conveyance of black culture itself, which is subjective, multifaceted and sensory.
27) The business relationship to natural landscapes as resources is easier to present than the Indian relationship to nature as the source of being.
28) The advertising relationship to life as consumption is easier to get across on television than the spiritualist relationship to life as expression.
29) A rocket scientist’s understanding of the space and cosmos can be filtered through the medium; a mystic’s understanding of space and cosmos as creature, or power, cannot be.
30) Quantity is easier than quality.
31) Calisthenics are easier than yoga since they can be visually copied in movement; yoga needs to be felt.
32) The finite is easier than the infinite.
33) Death is easier than life. It is specific, focused, highlighted, fixed, resolved and has meaning aside from context. Life, on the hand, is fluid, ambiguous, process oriented, complex, multileveled, sensory, intuitive. Cutting down redwood trees is better television than trying to convey their aura and power. Body counts of dead Vietnamese work better on television than appreciations of Vietnamese life or the complexities of the Vietnamese political struggle.