The seminal 1985 book on TV's social impact
The defamation lawsuits against Fox News have put a huge "told you so" on a trend in American society accelerating since at least the 1930s when that era's radio became a major outlet for religious hate-preachers. This trend first was mapped out in a prescient 1985 book: "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," by educator Neil Postman. I highly recommend reading the whole of its 200 or so pages, but if you don’t have time, please consult the summary below of key points in this seminal work. But first, a few personal comments.
The way I put it when I visited the issue myself, writing as the TV critic for the Milwaukee Sentinel nearly 50 years ago: Too many Americans are weak-minded, under-educated, or too war-weary from their tough, everyday lives to pay attention to real news, much of it piling on reports of even more trouble. As media scholar Marshall McLuhan wrote in the 1960s, no matter how professionally TV news is reported and produced, the medium itself, by its very nature, overshadows its content. Truth and meaning recede to the background, lost in an endless parade of disassociated images.
Even in the 1970s, filtered through TV’s growing power as the primary source of information, truth and meaning were becoming indistinguishable from fictional drama, through no fault of TV journalism itself. The advent of TV "docudramas" that escalated in the '80s blurred the distinctions between reality and fiction yet some more. Studies indicated that some people were beginning to have trouble separating what on TV was supposed to be real from what was wholly or mostly fictional. To them it was all stories, some told better than others, but stories all the same.
It isn't that one cannot tell or observe a factual, detailed story via the TV medium. PBS "Frontline" has done an admirable job of that week after week, year after year. But the highest bar for quality TV journalism is a program form almost non-existent today. That bar was set when Edward R. Murrow was still around in the 1960s at CBS News, where he oversaw a series of widely viewed, hard-hitting, hour-long documentaries badged as the network’s recurring "CBS Reports" specials.
The “CBS Reports” titles alone exemplified the high aim of those news documentaries: 1960's "Harvest of Shame," which examined the lives of migrant workers in the United States and won a Peabody Award; "Storm Over the Supreme Court," "KKK - The Invisible Empire," "The Poisoned Air," "Hunger in America," and "The Vanishing Family - Crisis in Black America." Those are issues all still covered on TV today (because, well what do you know, all those problems still exist in America today), but in news segments that usually last five minutes or less, or shared in long form only via streaming services.
Through their full embrace of the seductive “boob tube,” as it was dubbed in the ‘50s, Americans increasingly have, as Neil Postman foresaw, turned to fantasyland amusements: programming of skimming depth, unnuanced, and barely factual. A fast-revolving “and now this” carousel of blurred, out-of-context stories. One stop short of the subliminal “blipverts” that were banned in short order.
Result: After a typical news broadcast, you think you know more than you do. And a precise memory of those news images fades quickly, as if you were a high school kid forever cramming for exams because you never read the text books when they were assigned for class lessons. The “If it bleeds it leads” standard in much TV news is short hand for: if it’s visually spectacular it is made for TV. And thus there’s way too much of it, distorting reality.
TV’s power to subvert a true understanding of our world while endeavoring or purporting to show just that now also includes video-oriented web sites and TV outfits like Fox News, (which started up 16 years after my columns on the subject). No one in Postman’s days or my own could have imagined just how badly TV news, already filtered through the “gee whiz” impact of the medium itself, could further be eroded by propaganda and disinformation dressed up as actual, factual news.
It turns out that sensationalistic, disinformative Fox programming and its ilk are the easiest and cheapest way, next to alcohol and drugs, for a person to desensitize oneself from the overpowering travails of modern life while feeling good doing it. They’re also the easiest way for propagandists to get mass audiences to confirm their pre-existing and often imprecise or just plain wrong notions of what the world truly is like.
But -- and this is Postman's main point from 1985 -- even "real" TV news, although of high quality, and produced by highly professional, dedicated journalists without ideological mission is insufficient in delivering a deep understanding of what truly is going on.
My first newspaper job circa the mid-1970s was in Binghamton, New York, where a candid, honest, and popular anchor on one local TV newscast used to sign off every night by saying, "For more information, consult your local newspaper." A TV newsman saying that today would be fired in short order.
We print journalists would go cover stories that required hours of digging to get to the real “who, what, when, where, and why” of an event, and while we were slogging in the streets, we’d see local and national TV news reporters literally helicoptering in to grab a few minutes of video and do a couple of interviews. Mission accomplished! Well, yes, but not often bringing along a thorough understanding. But even those TV reporters given license to really spend time on a story still weren’t delivering, because the medium of TV was itself incapable. TV itself *was* the story.
Over time you could even detect that effect watching citizens being interviewed. Citizens on the street interviewed by movie newsreel crews before TV came along were stiff; they often stared into the camera like they were having their portraits taken and their tone was flat. But TV audiences came to realize from their endless viewing that in order to be on TV, which increasingly was a measure of social status, they needed to play by new rules: Be animated, keep their comments brief, speak in a highly visual style, and give the TV reporters what they wanted — a few seconds of compelling video.
Postman foresaw this tele-news house of cards, suggesting in his book that TV is the prime mover in the dumbing down of America. Moreover, that very idea is not obvious nor readily explainable to someone who thusly has been dumbed down. Postman referenced the overtly tyrannical society in Orwell's "1984" but suggested we're living in the more benign-seeming, soft autocracy of Huxley's "Brave New World."
From the Wikipedia entry on "Amusing Ourselves to Death":
> The essential premise of the book... is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the quality of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.
> Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and "talking hairdos" bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously.
> Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate's ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television…
> Postman refers to the inability to act upon much of the so-called information from televised sources as the information-action ratio. He contends that "television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".
> Drawing on the ideas of media scholar Marshall McLuhan – altering McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message" to "the medium is the metaphor" – he describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and prioritization of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a different kind of knowledge. The faculties requisite for rational inquiry are simply weakened by televised viewing. Accordingly, reading, a prime example cited by Postman, exacts intense intellectual involvement, at once interactive and dialectical; whereas television only requires passive involvement.
Sadly for us, the active word in that analysis is: "Passive." Also sad: If you have read this far, you're more and more in a shrinking cohort of American citizens who 1.) can read 2.) think critically, and 3.) really care about issues, wherever the facts may lead you.
