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156   TV Can Be So Magnificent;
      Why Must It Be So Bad?
      The Washington Post,  Saturday, June 21, 1969

     The psychological effect of television is an area of behavioral
science where everyman is his own expert.  President Nixon has
encouraged more explicit studies, however, in common with "very many
Americans who were concerned with the ethical as well as the artistic
level of many TV programs and commercials".  Sen. John O. Pastore (D-
R.I.) has pointedly demanded that the Public Health Service study the
possible pathology in children exposed to scenes of sex and violence
on TV, and the Surgeon General, Dr. William H. Stewart, has just
announced a scientific advisory committee on television and social
behavior.

     The committee is supposed to confine its studies to scientific
findings from work already published, and to make no policy
recommendations.  If that limitation is taken seriously, the committee
is a waste of effort.  The scientific literature on the subject can
be read in one afternoon.  For such an immense and difficult subject,
it is inevitably shaky and inconclusive.  The effects of advertising
on consumer behavior make a far more impressive demonstration than
any conceivable experiment.

     Policy recommendations are precisely what we should hope to get,
not impossible scientific rigor.  This commission can furnish the
additional perspective of expertise in behavioral science, which can
support tentative generalizations from scientifically more
approachable aspects of human behavior.

     One principle that must not be overlooked is that a television
audience is made up of an enormous variety of individuals with highly
varied responses to all kinds of stimuli and especially to those with
an emotional load: Whatever behavior might be taught or triggered by
some particularly violent obscenity could always have been provoked
by different intrusions from the world we inhabit.

     But is this what we have to prove?  Or should the committee not
investigate whether the regulated monopolies of spectrum space are
fulfilling their positive potentialities for social benefit?  Can
the networks prove that a diet of sex and violence is the best
achievable use of a magnificent technology and a legitimate discharge
of the public trust?

     Pointing out that the Federal Communications Commission vests
such a trust in the holder of a license against the random wishes
of other citizens, the Supreme Court has finally disposed of the idea
that the broadcaster owns the channel for his personal whim and
profit under the cloak of "free speech".

     TV can be so magnificent that I have to wonder what forces it to
be so bad so often.  The main reason may be that there just is not
enough creative talent to meet the sudden demand, and we are then
afflicted by the insults of sullen, insecure mediocrity.  Some
psychologists also believe that a good program may distract from the
effectiveness of the advertising that pays the bill and calls the
tune.

     We admire the elegance of today's ads, but we should not then
be surprised if even the best programs are chopped up by constant
interruptions.  This not only keeps the watcher from focusing his
brain on the program; it also raises his adrenalin level, which helps
to imprint the associated message.  Violent programs are expected to
do the same.

     The mass media are not all that successful; consumers often
enough will follow a perverse psychology to frustrate "The Hidden
Persuaders".  (Vance Packard's main evidence of their sinister powers
was that some of his targets had read Freud).  The worst aspect of
TV is not the broadcasters, successes but their failures and the side
effects that they do not understand themselves.

     Marshall McLuhan perhaps had the most incisive comment, that
"the medium is the message".  TV is alluring and emotionally powerful.
It crowds out rational thinking, dialogue and reflective analysis.  
How can school, or real life, compete with such seductions?

     Bold new experiments with pay TV and cable TV are long overdue.
Wider competition and freer access to the medium could check some
of its disastrous excesses.  In the long run, however, our greatest
hope lies in the evolution of quite new technologies to compete with
broadcast TV for rational communication.
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