TELEVISION, LIKE POLITICS, is something we all think we could do better than how it’s being done. Lewis Lapham, the patrician editor of Harper’s magazine, dared to try. Lapham once arranged a meeting with the then president of CBS, Larry Tisch, to propose a new public affairs program that took a big-picture, historical look at current events. As Lapham relates in an interview that appeared in Wild Duck Review:
He [Tisch] listened politely to the pitch and then waved it off by asking whether I ever watched television, or whether anyone I knew ever watched television. Not often, I said, not when I could avoid it. Neither do I, said Tisch; neither does anybody else with anything better to do. Television, he said, was for people who were too poor, lazy or depressed to do anything else.
It’s refreshing to finally hear a TV kahuna put the depth of his admiration for his audience into words. Tisch obviously meant to impress on Lapham the hard facts of life about television: It is what it is. The interesting thing is that in doing so he appears to have missed the rich irony of his logic: In the most economically secure, culturally influential, politically powerful country on the planet, how is it that the best means of mass communication ever invented can only be an outlet for the crude, stupid, mindless and meaningless? The barbarians aren’t at our gates, they’re dining with us. Their names are J.Lo, Ja Rule and Paris Hilton. Through the magic of network television, the scientific prediction of multiple universes and multiple realities has been made to materialize on our home entertainment systems. Which reality will you tune in to? Temptation Island? Extreme Makeover? Fear Factor? Ah, too many realities, too little time.
But trashing the trash culture churned out by television is too easy. Not only has it been done, but the standard lathering rant is ineffectual. Ranting lets us quickly wash our hands of the whole sordid spectacle modern television has become. It short-circuits any critical examination of both the limitations and the possibilities of television. Why is television the way it is? How did it get this way? Why is television seemingly tracking backward on the evolutionary time scale? Why is it confounding any hope that it might, in part, be used as a medium for enlightened democratic debate or a probe for citizens to extend their worlds, and thereby their critical- and creative thinking capabilities? Has television created trash culture or has trash culture created television? What came first, the idiot or the idiot box?
This is a classic chicken-or-egg puzzle. A TV executive such as Tisch would say the audience is getting the type of programming it wants. Television watchdog groups and critics say the television programming, in striving for ever new lows of sleaze, violence, sex and da-da, is dragging its audience down with it.
The truth is probably grayer. Television is moronic, but television alone is not turning people into morons – at least not directly. Neither are we getting moronic programming because we are demanding it. As Tisch in his unmitigated honesty implies, in the commercial, hermetically sealed world in which television exists, what TV is, or is not, is essentially beyond debate. It is what it is: a product created to flow into and swim around a mind put in neutral. It’s not that resistance is futile – we accept the rules before flop into the La-Z-Boy and reach for the remote. Here, the remote takes on new meaning: the remote chance we’ll find anything that stimulates impulses in the brain’s neurons. (Discovery and History channels, not received by everyone, are still mutant orphans in TV land.)
Every time we turn on the TV, we mentally sign off on the following waiver: I hereby understand that I am about to spend the next x amount of hours in a near-fungal state, and I personally accept responsibility for any and all risks to my mental and physical well-being posed by such activity. Is it a coincidence that television predisposes a listless psychic condition "pretuned" to be receptive to the buying messages advertisers are about to send into it? Could the Tisches of the world be sandbagging us? It’s not that we want shows and programs created for stupid, lazy, depressed people; it’s that advertisers want such shows.
This is one, old favorite saw pulled out now and then to dissect television – it’s the unseen, insidious hand of advertisers that is making TV shows increasingly moronic.
In a way this sounds right. If TV is an affront to our intelligence, it’s because it is run by corrupt people for corrupt reasons. There is something big and conspiratorial and emotionally appealing to the idea that advertisers and big corporations are pulling all the strings in TV land. Unarguably, television strives to create programs that reach the "mass audience" desired by advertisers. But to claim TV is solely out to meet or exceed advertisers standards for dumbness is antiempirical. Many successful shows on TV – The West Wing, The Simpsons, Seinfeld – are clever and intelligent, even if they still meet the criterion of serving a mass audience. In the case of really horrifically stupid shows that lots of people watch, the public has to accept some responsibility for the product they’re consuming. No one is forcing people to watch these programs.
Conspiracy theory and the TV/media seem to go hand-in-hand. A cadre of social critics and academics have professed to seeing signs of various unholy alliances between the media and corporate and governmental power for over a century. The key element to all these conspiracy yarns is some sort of media-corporate alliance (which includes advertisers) that is controlling information, and thus the way we think, or if we even think at all.
MIT professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky, along with Edward Herman, professor of Finance, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, proposed the granddaddy of all media-political-corporate conspiracy theories in their book, Manufacturing Consent. The title is taken from a phrase coined by the American journalist Walter Lippmann. Lippmann felt the same propaganda techniques used by the British and American governments to rally a reluctant population around the cause of war could be used by educated, responsible people to "manufacture consent" on issues in the common interest of the public. Lippmann thought a bit of propaganda was a small pill that would spur individuals in democratic societies to put aside their differences and act for the common good. Lippmann’s notion would eventually give us a new species of professional, the flak – the public-relations-field Dostoyevsky-equivalent of a lawyer, a conscience for hire. Yet Chomsky and Herman leap from the observation that types of promotion, persuasion, and propaganda exist in society to the conclusion that everything we read and hear is a bald-faced lie. The media is a mere lapdog of those in power, according to this grand unified theory of paranoia:
We have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that… suggests that the ‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and state.
In another book, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, Robert McChesney sketches a similar take on the media industry:
The preponderance of U.S. mass communication is controlled by less than two dozen enormous, profit-maximizing corporations, which receive much of their income from advertising placed largely by other huge corporations. But the extent of this media ownership and control goes generally unremarked in the media and intellectual culture, and there appears to be little sense of concern about its dimensions among the citizenry as a whole.
If, in reading these excerpts, you have a vague feeling of being in college again, it is because this type of breathless, "penetrating" analysis is one of the favorite indulgences of undergraduates everywhere who have discovered there is power in the world and that relationships of power strongly influence what can and cannot be accomplished. Power is one aspect of the objective world. But to propose, for example, that uncritical coverage (whatever that means) of the war in Iraq is a proof that the media are in the keep of the U.S. government, is to malign the integrity of tens of thousands of broadcasters, journalists and editors.
Another problem with the view that the media are beholden to corporate and political interests, a problem general to all conspiracy theories, is that it rests on the assumption of intricate, improbably collusion between parties with greatly diverse vested interests. If the purpose of the media is to "defend the economic, social and political agenda of privileged groups," that’s a lot of groups, and a lot of agendas. And even if the media in its entirety were coerced to do just this, it is impossible to imagine a way in which they could carry out their mission while hoodwinking an entire country. As the letters-to-the-editor section of any newspaper reveals, the American public is acutely sensitive to the slightest hint of bias, in any political or social respect, and prone to protest bitterly about it. Sure, biases find their way into the media, but they are almost always the result of the idiosyncrasies of owners, ignorance (of many types) of journalists and producers, or the desire to capture attention and audience, not institutionalized conspiracy.
While it may disappoint antibranding purists, the most conspiratorial thing you can say about the influence of advertising in television is that is subsidizes shows with good ratings and lets shows with poor ratings die. Advertising isn’t creating trash culture per se; it’s the commercial mission of television/media to win audiences for advertisers that’s sparked the race between the dumb and dumber. If Masterpiece Theater had a 40 percent audience share in prime time with the 18 to 35 year old segment, Budweiser would advertise on it.
The above is an excerpt from the book Th!nk (Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster, 2006) by Michael R. Legault, an American citizen based in Toronto, and an award-winning editor and writer. A former columnist with the Washington Times and former National Post editor, Legault’s reviews, opinion pieces and features have appeared in publications across North America. Reprinted with permission from the author.
