!! spellx done
154   Those Who Fear Mind Control in Future
      Should Look Hard Now -- at Television
      The Washington Post,  June 7, 1969

     Mind control is one of the sharpest ethical challenges of
biological research.  Certain kinds of experiments are guaranteed to
make headlines, for example, when an animal's behavior is controlled
by an electronic device connected to his brain.

     In fact, we are all born with such devices, even more wonderful 
in their complexity than the products of engineering design.  These
are our eyes and ears, and we ought to be focusing our concerns more
sharply on the mind control that is constantly exercised through them,
especially by the electronic marvel of television.

     The current turmoil over this issue centers, in part, on the
relationship between television programing and violence.  There is
certainly very little scientific evidence to prove whether or not
the violence of the theater (of which TV is a part) has any net
effect either way on the behavior of its audience.

     Exactly the same must be said for various kinds of obscenity,
like pornography.  And in both areas we must be very careful that any
remedy not be far worse than the disease by stifling artistic
expression.  We face the same dilemma in thinking about any controls
over the reporting of factual news, which may be far more instrumental
in the contagion of violence.

     This contagion certainly not the intention of TV programing, which
complicates both the analysis of and judgment about its effects.
There is no such ambiguity in the purposes of TV advertising, and if
this does not work in selling cigarettes, many shrewd people must be
called either frauds or fools, because they make their living on that
proposition.

     It is not quite fair to lay the health burden of 50,000 deaths
per year from lung cancer on the television industry.  A more rational
approach would be to license the sale (and use ) of cigarettes so
that they were available only to those already severely addicted to
them, and then under careful controls designed to help the
conscientious citizen to kick the habit.

     The principal moral burden should rest on Congress, whose past
position on this subject merely proves its vulnerability to special
interests.  TV executives who continue to deal with this kind of
advertising are beginning to appreciate the strain on their own
consciences.

     These mind control practices do illustrate how far the present
system strays from the public interest.  The disease is, however,
largely an institutional one, inherent in the way that the technology
is organized.  We might be much better off if the broadcasting
franchises, and the allotment of precious radio spectrum space, were
completely severed from the production of programs.

     This would establish the stations as publicly regulated
utilities, like the telephone or airlines industries.  They would
then serve an open market of producers and audiences.  The present
system of licenses to integrated companies was predicated on a level
of responsibility and responsiveness to the public interest that has
plainly failed to meet the need.  I have heard many lawyers bewail
the potential hazards of more technology, and I challenge them in
return to work out how to manage this one, which is so central to
the life of democracy.

     These proposals may be futile in the face of the established
status quo.  They also face the intrinsic biases of a broadcasting
system.  The present technology favors the utmost centralization of
program emission, of the smallest variety, broadcast to the largest
possible mass audience.

     We need to favor those technological developments that can
restore the widest range of choice to the consumers.  Many
psychiatrists believe that the format, of passive listening with
zero participation, may be more harmful to personality development
than the actual content of TV programs.

     Some approaches to these advances have already been announced,
for example, the video records developed by Peter C. Goldmark of
CBS Laboratories.  The Rostow committee's report on the communications
industry, prepared for President Johnson, dismissed these innovations
because of their probable cost.  However, conventional broadcasting
receives a tremendously valuable, but hidden, subsidy through the
allocation of spectrum space.

     Intelligent citizenship urgently needs the building of free and
critical individual choice of the content of sophisticated
communications.  The design of future systems, and public support
for the necessary research must take account of these needs if
democratic freedom is not to become hopelessly enfouled as a
by-product of the deceptive cheapness of electronic communication.
----------------------------------------------------------------------