TV'S REAL SICKNESS-AND A POSSIBLE CURE
Asbell, Bernard
writers and editors of our best newspapers and magazines. Recently I asked an editorial veteran if he could define in a word the chief personality ingredient of a good journalist. The editor...
...The demand gaining most momentum, however, is that TV programmers acquire the same independence from advertisers that one finds among BERNARD ASBELL writes on broadcast* ing and music for Billboard and teaches at the University of Chicago Adult Education Center...
...Let the advertisers stay, but it's time to do away with the sponsors...
...And if such a miracle can be accomplished, how can we expect that advertisers will continue to pay the bills...
...it never really had any...
...Millions were shocked to learn that Charles Van Doren, the underpaid schoolteacher-son of a distinguished father, was financially seduced by a quiz producer who argued, "What's the difference if we slip you the an swers...
...The editor laughed and said, "He's suspicious...
...When we think of British TV, many of us think only of the BBC, which carries no advertising...
...The editor negotiates from strength...
...Proposals for reforming television are sprouting all over the landscape like late summer ragweed...
...And he has to juggle time...
...NBC's Robert Kintner proposes with a fundamental bang on the table that a law be passed to outlaw dishonest quiz shows...
...Finally, it gives sponsors the power of life and death over programs...
...In 1956, the makers of Philip Morris cigarettes rocked Madison Avenue with the news that they had decided to drop their sponsorship of "I Love Lucy...
...The embarrassed station promptly fired him, too...
...It means the program director must acquire the moral strength to gaze haughtily at an advertising agency man who so much as strolls into a studio and demand of him, "What are you doing here...
...It corrodes and corrupts every individual engaged in broadcasting from the network board chairman down to the prop man (who must make sure, if a program is sponsored by a beer, that no actor is sipping ginger ale...
...According to that simple TV's real sickness-and a possible cure by BERNARD ASBELL A ND NOW WE PRESENT as a public service a one-minute history of television...
...But the time is ripe for doing something else...
...one success was copied by another...
...at another price for early evening or late night ("Class B") time...
...In fact, they are never created...
...It is the most elaborate form of "payola" ever devised...
...In 1950, with a co-axial cable connecting leading cities, Milton Berle emerged as "Mr...
...Over public air waves and through our private picture tubes, she sings praises to the Chevy, rides it around the studio floor, and packages an hour of diversion all calculated to make us look kindly upon a single brand of automobile...
...He buys the whole shebang—the drama, the music, the quizmaster, the quiz questions, the quiz answers, and even the bank guard who is supposed to protect the answers from cheaters...
...But the really shocking thing is that the quiz producer, confronted by his own words, still couldn't get through his head that he had done anything wrong...
...Then I asked a network station program director similarly to type the television man...
...According to our unique system of broadcasting, the advertiser buys more than the right to a 60second blurb...
...This is the direction in which some of the most creative energies in TV are spent...
...eggheads replaced gun-toters as national heroes, Geritol for tired blood was selling by the tank car, and Revlon stock spurted dizzily on Wall Street...
...But the evidence should surprise no one...
...Surely no responsible official of the sponsoring company would have stooped to so ludicrous a request...
...He's got to satisfy the network, the agency, the sponsor, and the sponsor's wife without destroying too much of what he started with, his creative idea...
...The rea soning of the quiz producer and the disk jockeys was in line with the es tablished morality of American broad casting...
...arranges that its Chevrolet shall be the sole commercial beneficiary of Miss Shore's charms...
...It would protect the public by eliminating the economic dependence of any program on the approval of an advertiser...
...And in 1959, the roof fell in...
...How can we supplant TV's timid juggler with the kind of tough-minded fellow who seeks truth and artfulness for their own sakes and not for the sake of selling something else...
...Such spots could be sold at one price for prime evening (known as "Class A") time, when average ratings are high...
...He has, say, 26 minutes, not a second more, not a second less, and he has to insert the commercials where they'll do the most good without damaging the show too much...
...To what kind of action does such a philosophy, which pervades all of television, lead...
...This is what the advertiser now seeks in the better newspapers and magazines...
...To answer these questions, we must look again into the difference between the editorial and broadcasting minds...
...Our sales department is down the hall...
...The source of television's sickness, which it inherited from radio, is the sale to advertisers of blocks of time— not just advertising time, but the entertainment time as well, which ought by right to belong to the public...
...The advertising department is down the hall...
...It is financed by collecting a license fee...
...the broadcaster from weakness...
...In 1941, a New York experimental station transmitted an image of the Louis-Conn fight...
...CBS wants to help eliminate corruption by banning canned laughter...
...They crept in back in 1924 without being invited (no law specifically permits the sale of advertising on the air), and the FCC passively presided as they took over...
...In 1958, Westerns were topped by an even more stunning creation, the big money quiz...
...true, it was the most popular program in all of television but it was a failure—it was not selling cigarettes...
...This is show business...
...Recently Rod Serling, a highly talented TV writer, told of a playwright who was directed to change the word "lucky" to "fortunate" and to change "American" to "United States...
...If you have something to say, please go see them...
...This practice produces a whole syndrome of ills...
...The reason is simple...
...In 1957, the "adult Western" came of age as a new art form...
...She wins people emotionally as a piece of merchandise cannot be expected to do...
...Nor is it government-subsidized...
...TV has not abandoned its integrity...
...The editor says to the advertiser (if he talks to him at all): "My job is to produce a high circulation...
...This also means that the concept of "sponsor identification" with any program must be wiped as clean from television practice as the fixed quiz show...
...owners of the city's several hundred television receivers invited their neighbors into strangely darkened living rooms to behold, awe-struck, the most breath-taking instrument for art, learning, and amusement ever devised...
...After the traumatic shock of the quiz scandals came the widespread revelations of disk jockeys taking "payola"—bribes to influence their supposedly aesthetic choices in music...
...Thoughtfully, and with some pride, he said, "He's a juggler...
...The FCC, like everybody else, is appalled at the apparent abandonment of integrity in broadcasting...
...The public is in no posi tion to squawk, since programs are gift horses, and beggars can't be choosers...
...This means a studied lack of concern for who is advertising, what he is advertising, and how much he is paying...
...Our system of broadcasting, by ranking the sponsor highest in the cultural chain of command, inevitably invites the behavior we now call scandalous...
...How, then, does that morality get changed...
...This plan would be quite a departure for American TV, but is it impractical...
...Television programmers will begin to come of age—and begin to come clean—when they narrow their aims down to a single one: playing to the public for its own sake...
...Without knowing it, he was echoing Ernest Hemingway who recently said, less delicately, that the fundamental need of a creative artist is "a built-in crap detector...
...His articles have appeared in Harper's, The Saturday Evening Post, Horizon, The Reporter, Coronet, and other publications...
...This practice has become so ordinary that we have lost sight of how preposterous it is...
...This, no matter how you slice it, is payola...
...morality, whoever pays the piper calls the tune...
...He needs the talent of a great compromiser...
...Any creative ideas conflicting with this aim are stricken out...
...It invites censorship, since the sponsor feels—and is—answerable for everything that goes on the air...
...and still another for daytime...
...This would protect the advertiser as well as the public...
...Television," so powerful a cultural force that during his hour of comedy every Tuesday night the water pressure built up because almost nobody would go to the bathroom...
...Skeptical...
...Then the Federal Trade Commission, somewhat to the embarrassment of a milquetoast Federal Communications Commission that should have done it first, threatened to investigate lies told by TV advertisers...
...The broadcaster, while he could rely on the same source of strength, chooses not to speak so boldly...
...His play was to be sponsored by a cigarette—not Luckies and not a product of the American Tobacco Company...
...The placement of one advertiser's spots should be shifted from week to week...
...A network or station must seek its revenue from the sale of advertising announcements, or "spots," with no reference to program content...
...It is too late to reconsider the presence of advertisers in television...
...It is ultimately just as corrupt, and its implications are more profound...
...In Detroit, Tom Clay, a disk jockey, was fired by WJBK after he blithely admitted he had taken money for playing certain records in stead of others...
...Another WJBK disk jockey, Jack LeGoff, incensed over the raw deal handed his good friend, Clay, editorialized on the air that payola is "a part of American business...
...In 1954, the widespread loving of Lucy threatened to murder Monday as America's shopping night...
...What entices an advertiser into buying a program is that he hitches his selling wagon to the popularity of a star, an advantage known lovingly in the trade as "sponsor identification...
...It would protect the advertiser by giving him the chance to cash in on a high-rating program if at another time his spot got caught in a low-rating program...
...For example, General Motors perceives that Americans have taken Dinah Shore into their hearts...
...It is working in England, to the benefit of both the advertisers and the public...
...It invites corruption because it emphasizes television as a moneymaking instrument over its more important functions...
...Compromise' sounds like a negative word...
...But some of that emotional appeal, the sponsor hopes, might be made to rub off...
...Such a principle readily suggests its own method...
...It invites timidity on the part of all its creative people since their work is judged ultimately for its value to the sponsor...
...So for a large sum of money, G.M...
...Further, this system would give each advertiser a stake in the improvement of the whole of television as a public instrument...
...Outside critics have come up with more serious proposals...
...But that's just the point...
...He would not be stuck with the onus of controversial programs, nor with letters from cranks, so he, too, would have an interest in satisfied audiences, as well as large ones...
...After I produce that circulation, we sell you the right to address our readers...
...Not at all...
...No, better say he has to be flexible...
...One is to legalize pay-TV, not as a basic cure but as a step towards freeing TV for unfettered service to the public...
...Network decision-makers are so obsequious before the whims of the sponsor that they anticipate those whims to the point of absurdity...
Vol. 24 • January 1960 • No. 1
