The Trouble With Television
by Robert MacNeil
It is difficult
to escape the influence of television. If you fit the statistical averages, by
the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20,000 hours of television.
You can add 10,000 hours for each decade you have lived after the age of 20. The
only things Americans do more than watch television are work and sleep.
Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours. Five
thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical college undergraduate spends
working on a bachelor's degree. In 10,000 hours you could have learned enough to
become an astronomer or engineer. You could have learned several languages
fluently. If it appealed to you, you could be reading Homer in the original
Greek or Dostoevski in Russian. If it didn't, you could have walked around the
world and written a book about it.
The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. Almost
anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive,
consistently applied effort. The dullest, the least gifted of us can achieve
things that seem miraculous to those who never concentrate on anything. But
television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant gratification.
It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain.
Television's variety becomes a narcotic, not a stimulus. Its serial,
kaleidoscopic exposures force us to follow its lead. The viewer is on a
perpetual guided tour: thirty minutes at the museum, thirty at the cathedral,
then back on the bus to the next attraction--except on television, typically,
the spans allotted are on the order of minutes or seconds, and the chosen
delights are more often car crashes and people killing one another. In short, a
lot of television usurps one of the most precious of all human gifts, the
ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively surrender
it.
Capturing your attention--and holding it--is the prime motive of most television
programming and enhances its role as a profitable advertising vehicle.
Programmers live in constant fear of losing anyone's attention --anyone's. The
surest way to avoid doing so is to keep everything brief, not to strain the
attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety,
novelty, action and movement. Quite simply, television operates on the appeal to
the short attention span.
It is simply the easiest way out. But it has come to be regarded as a given, as
inherent in the medium itself: as an imperative, as though General Sanoff, or
one of the other august pioneers of video, had bequeathed to us tablets of stone
commanding that nothing in television shall ever require more than a few
moments' concentration. In its place that is fine. Who can quarrel with a medium
that so brilliantly packages escapist entertainment as a mass-marketing tool?
But I see its values now pervading this nation and its life. It has become
fashionable to think that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a
fast-moving, impatient public.
In the case of news, this practice, in my view, results in inefficient
communication. I question how much of televisions' nightly news effort is really
absorbable and understandable. Much of it is what has been aptly described as
"machine gunning with scraps." I think its technique fights coherence. I think
it tends to make things ultimately boring and dismissable (unless they are
accompanied by horrifying pictures) because almost anything is boring and
dismissable if you know almost nothing about it.
I believe that TV's appeal to the short attention span is not only inefficient
communication but decivilizing as well. Consider the casual assumptions that
television tends to cultivate: that complexity must be avoided, that visual
stimulation is a substitute for thought, that verbal precision is an
anachronism. It may be old-fashioned, but I was taught that thought is words,
arranged in grammatically precise ways.
There is a crisis of illiteracy in this country. One study estimates that some
30 million adult Americans are "functionally illiterate" and cannot read or
write well enough to answer a want ad or understand the instructions on a
medicine bottle.
Literacy may not be an inalienable human right, but it is one that the highly
literate Founding Fathers might not have found unreasonable or even
unattainable. We are not only not attaining it as a nation, statistically
speaking, but we are falling further and further short of attaining it. And,
while I would not be so simplistic as to suggest that television is the cause, I
believe that it contributes and is an influence.
Everything about this nation--the structure of the society, its forms of family
organization, its economy, its place in the world--has become more complex, not
less. Yet its dominating communications instrument, its principal form of
national linkage, is one that sells neat resolutions to human problems that
usually have no neat resolutions. It is all symbolized in my mind by the hugely
successful art form that television has made central to the culture: the
thirty-second commercial: the tiny drama of the earnest housewife who finds
happiness in choosing the right toothpaste.
When before in human history has so much humanity collectively surrendered so
much of its leisure to one toy, one mass diversion? When before has virtually an
entire nation surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for selling?
Some years ago Yale University law professor Charles L. Black, Jr. wrote:
"...forced feeding on trivial fare is not itself a trivial matter." I think this
society is being force fed with trivial fare, and I fear the effects on our
habits of mind, our language, our tolerance for effort, and our appetite for
complexity are only dimly perceived. If I am wrong, we will have done no harm to
look at the issue skeptically and critically, to consider how we should be
resisting it.
I hope you will join with me in doing so.