Can we turn off the TV? Maybe the box, yes. But its effect on society? In the U.S., the country in the world that has been responsible for the highest expression of television as a mass medium? Neil Postman claims that TV is best when it provides ‘junk entertainment,’ and most damaging when it pretends to offer serious discourse. Why?

How subject is TV/print news to manipulation, and in what ways? In the war in Iraq, the Pentagon required reporters to be ’embedded’ in troop units, go through a boot camp to receive training. How can a journalist ‘see’ the war from within a platoon? Is it possible, any more than it’s possible for the casual social observer to ‘see’ the effects of television on society over the last 40 years? Neil Postman does a pretty good job of trying to show us the difference between print and image-based media.

What’s the difference between print, TV news media?

Here are a few ways:

• Audience (TV is easier to follow, its language use almost always at the grade school level. The New York Times is written at 7th grade level, most others much lower. Dumb down, anyone?)
• Expense (cost of advertising, transmission, production, etc.)
• Depth of coverage (time has limitations. So do newspapers, but less pressing limitations)
• Quality of coverage (as Postman points out, can you really do philosophy or political discourse within the TV medium?)
• Advertising (TV is essentially 100% funded by advertising; newspapers 50-70%)
• The TV, much more so than print media or oral culture, embodies the idea of entertainment. Just add news, and you get the concept ‘infotainment.’
• Brain responses? Do we process visual information on TV the same way we do when we’re reading the front page of the paper?

Is TV merely an extension of other forms of media?? Marshall McLuhan, one of the early scholars to study television in depth, says those who think TV merely extends print media are engaged in ‘rear view mirror’ thinking. Was the automobile merely an extension of the horse buggy? Would we have global warming, suburbanization, fossil fuel depletion, tens of thousands killed in accidents, etc., if horse buggies were our main form of transportation? How about the typewriter and the computer? A newspaper and a website? Coal-fired and nuclear power plants? Is there a difference between muzzle-loaded and semiautomatic assault rifles? Conventional and nuclear warfare? A speech, a book a TV or a video game? These are qualitatively different innovations, that have had impacts far beyond their creators’ imaginations, I would guess. Their very inventions or innovations may embody certain values not shared by all cultures, and when the technologies spread, a certain amount of cultural baggage spreads with them.

Technology vs medium

TV technology is used around the world (though it varies–there are different systems). TV as a medium can be influenced by culture (free enterprise, the market, commercial broadcasting, etc.), politics (government regulation, type of government–democracy, dictatorship, etc.), economics (market system), etc. Technologies create sociocultural milieux. For instance, mass produced housing created suburbanization, urban decay, sprawl, car culture, need for more roads, more parking, greater gasoline consumption, congestion in the cities, traffic jams, possibly road rage, etc. Rail transportation created a need for standardization, increased exposure to other regions of the country or the world, created a need for standardized time zones, led to a private property rights regime that gave railroad companies access to huge chunks of valuable land and resources, etc.
In a village in West Africa, a TV powered by car batteries, owned by perhaps a local government elite, can change the quality of social interaction, what people do with their evenings, lead to the diffusion of Western pop and Hollywood culture, etc.

In other words, the TV can play a different role in different cultures. There is no universal understanding of how a technology should be used. In a dominant culture that celebrates free enterprise, TV is used to make lots of people lots of money by providing entertainment, mostly. Part of networks’ charge though, many years ago, was to inform the public through their news divisions.

Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral (Melvin Kranzberg)

What does this mean? A TV’s just a box, right? Well, no. First, technology brings baggage. Cultural baggage (often lots of garbage, too, comes with increased consumption, and advertising-based TV adds its share to this problem). In other words, if television is introduced to a culture, it isn’t just a box with a tube, or a flat panel, and some wires and circuitry. It changes the way people interact, how they receive information, how they process images, how they think about image versus text-based information, etc. Second, technology embodies the values of the cultures where it emerges. So when introduced to a subsistence farming culture still scraping out a meager living with a hand-held hoe, with no history of any of the other stuff that led up to the development of the TV, the impacts may be unpredictable. But there will be impacts. Even in the States, TV has had an enormous impact on culture and politics. How? In the rest of the world, entertainment is likely the number one American import. We don’t make the TVs anymore, but we export the programming, in many cases old, bad re-runs (while we get the recent movie remakes!). Imagine some other culture inferring about Americans after watching Gilligan’s Island. Or worse, imagine living in a culture where there existed a Gilligan’s Island Facebook page.

So, what makes TV different from text?

• It’s image-based, obviously
• Attention span (the average TV image lasts for 3 seconds)
• Commercial TV is geared toward revenue generation, advertising, entertainment, almost exclusively. Books and newspapers, magazines, while there is obviously the entertainment dimension, have other things to offer.
• Media and communications analyst Neil Postman wrote: ‘it’s not that television is entertaining, it’s that entertainment is the mode of expression-that is all subject matter is presented as entertaining.’ You should understand the difference here. Postman was suggesting that in a culture where TV is the dominant medium, consumers begin to develop expectations that all media, classroom situations, boardroom meetings, nightly news shows, etc., will entertain them.

What do we get with the News: good looking anchors (mostly), smiles, dramatic inflection, pleasantries exchanged, nice commercials, music and graphics, sensory overload (in case you’re bored with the talking head …). TV news is meant to be seen. Its focus is on images and imagery. This is what drives newscasts, ratings competitions-who can use the medium best to deliver news? How many times have you seen the local news broadcast begin with a live camera shot from a building that burned up several hours earlier? They need the images. Could that money be better spent in the interest of informing the public about things that actually affect them? No doubt. But would that make the station more money??

Does using TV as a medium to deliver news compromise that news? How? Neil Postman recollects about the movie The Day After. It was a big media event, when it appeared during the Reagan era that perhaps the nuclear arms race was heating up and nuclear warfare was a possibility (although the movie wasn’t exactly Oscar-grade). Several notable white men were asked to discuss the movie, which aired on ABC, live, after it aired on TV. These included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Sec. of Defense and World Bank President Robert McNamara, Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, physicist and author Carl Sagan, conservative author William F. Buckley, and former cabinet secretary Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft. Journalist Ted Koppel was chosen as the moderator. The whole format was somewhat unusual because:

1. This was a serious subject (decimation of human population, end of the world n’all)
2. There were heavyweight guests
3. There was no music soundtrack
4. The topic and movie were controversial (and received Jerry Falwell’s seal of disapproval)
5. There were no commercials

Each speaker received five minutes to state his case. There was no rebuttal, everything was semi-scripted, Koppel pretends to act like a moderator (as if it were a debate and he had the intellectual firepower to intervene), no one wanted to use his precious time to discuss others’ issues, and there were no women, no minorities, no other countries represented (that might be on the receiving end of U.S. nukes, for instance).

Postman said that this is about the best TV can do with a serious subject. The act of thinking does not make for good TV. Sound bites make for good TV, according to polls and focus groups. But soundbites simplify and distort complex subjects–they do not make for good debate, but rather good argumentation. In essence, Postman says this was not a debate, and the speakers were forced to turn their efforts toward pulling off TV performances instead. They were looking more for applause than reflection (and ABC was looking for good ratings that could possibly translate into more advertiser revenue at some point).

Why was this a flop as a meaningful debate on a serious topic? TV encourages a culture of show business-everything must be entertaining. Is this limited to TV programming? Let’s look at the classroom and students’ expectations about how learning should take place. More and more professors are turning to multimedia presentations, often using powerpoint, as well as classroom antics, visuals, etc. There are various views on the value of powerpoint as a learning tool. Scholar Edward Tufte has an interesting take. Musician and artist David Byrne (formerly of the Talking Heads) has another view. Do more entertaining media lead to more learning? If this is the case, why are American TV news viewers so ill-informed about events in their own society?

Loss of newspaper circulation

(from Ben Bagdikian, Media Monopoly)

So is the rise of TV as the prevailing medium connected to decline of newspapers? There is less competition (always decreases sales) in the paper business. Morning/afternoon editions have been consolidated (most of you are probably too young to even remember this era). The size of newspapers has increased–doube the pages from 50 years ago. What would you guess, knowing now what you know about commercial media, might account for this??

In addition, advertising and layout involve lots of expenses, more complication in printing. More complicated printing means earlier deadlines. So the death of afternoon editions isn’t so surprising. Also, there the issue of immediacy. There are no more ‘extra’ editions with fast-breaking stories (you know, ‘extra extra, read all about it!’?). Radio killed this to a large extent, because there were other sources of news.

According to Bagdikian, the biggest drop in newspaper circulation came after radio and TV were in most homes–from 1965-80, during which readership dropped 25%. This despite higher incomes and higher literacy rates.

So who buys newspapers these days? Or advertisers’ products? Do reader demographics determine content? Are these low income groups? The elderly? The typical demographic is 18 – 49 years. How might this affect the news? Why is there a ‘business’ section but not a ‘labor’ section in the paper, considering that most people work for someone else? Versus other industrialized societies, the U.S. is very low in newspaper readership. President George W. Bush claimed he didn’t read newspapers. As he actually said, ‘I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves.’ (Washington, D.C., Sept. 21, 2003).

Why don’t Americans use newspapers to inform themselves? Other cultures may be more interested in the meaning of the news (not just its reporting). In the U.S., there has been a move to the political center, which likely suits advertisers just fine (remember the ‘buying mood’ of the public …). But also keep in mind there has been a shift of the center to the right of the political spectrum. Views on the Iraq war that would have been considered extreme 25 years ago are now common sense. Rationale for invasion that changed daily or weekly was largely ignored, at the least underscrutinized, by the press.

Back to entertainment in the TV age

Think about Postman’s thesis–that everything has become entertainment-based. Do we get that from the newspapers?? Has TV changed everything?? Think about religion, sports, education, and TV. And of course, the presidency. We’ve had an actor who served 8 years (Reagan), another serving two terms as Governator of California–the fifth largest economy in the world–with no political experience. We had a Vice President, Dan Quayle (Bush Sr.’s running mate), who actually said things like “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.” He also said “The future will be better tomorrow.” And “For NASA, space is still a high priority.” But he looked good on camera (and he made the President look like a rocket scientist).

As republican pollster and propagandist Frank Luntz said (referring to the 2004 election), “Part of what they want to see in a president is someone who they would invite into their living rooms at night, someone who is likable,” he said. “If you are not likable, you will not pass the living-room test.” So what skills must be mastered? The sound bite. The camera angle. Photo opportunity. Reading the speech on the teleprompter. And crafting effective TV commercials. This covered both the paid and ‘free’ coverage from the major media outlets. But . . . who’s writing the text?

Foreign policy expertise a plus, but not required . . .

• Ben Bagdikian. 2000. The Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Neil Postman. 1985. Amusing Ourselves to Death. NY: Penguin.