Television/I'd Rather Not
Teachout, Terry
Terry Teachout/Television I'D RATHER NOT p redicting the future when young is a good way to squirrel away a stiff dose of embarrassment for your old age. One safe prediction about televiTerry...
...Boomers who move in lock step with Teachout's Law: When you get o14 you like to listen to the kind of music that was playing on the radio the first time you went parking...
...The "talent," as they say in the business, costs too much...
...The networks, for instance, have been pushing the affiliates for years to let them run hour-long evening newscasts...
...THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 competing with PBS for new shows from England and elsewhere...
...An important study in Great Power diplomacy and military statesmanship that traces the creation and evolution of the post of Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and the tenures of the seven American generals who have filled it, from Eisenhower through Haig...
...As if to rub salt into this very wound, ABC's New York affiliate recently moved "World News Tonight" back a half-hour and put "Jeopardy" head to head against Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw...
...Which, despite the grumbling over People Meters, is exactly what the executives want...
...ABC has already tested a dummy evening news program resembling "Night-line," and it seems likely that one of the networks will switch over for keeps within a year or two...
...Boomers with gray hair...
...304 pages $26.00 Maverick Marine General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History HANS SCHMIDT...
...Try this one out for size...
...We're letting television slip away from us in exactly the same way we let mainstream print journalism slip away long ago...
...On the other hand, who are all of those old people going to be anyway...
...And Bruce Springsteen starring in "Father Knows Best: The Saga Continues...
...Assuming that sixteen is the median age for this particular experience, the Lawrence Welk of the year 2007 will be Paul McCartney...
...In any case, the entire network news system as we know it is doomed to extinction by the year 2007...
...242 pages $24.00 Foreign Aid Its Defense & Reform PAUL MOSLEY...
...It's easier and more profitable to feed affiliates news footage via satellite and let the local glamour boys do all the talking...
...What will change, however, is the larger culture...
...On the other Vi hand, the bigger the cable audience, the more cost-effective it becomes for medium- and small-sized outfits to put together shows targeted at a tiny but affluent group of viewers...
...An excellent general account of UK-British policies with Communist China following the collapse of the Chinese Nationalist government"—Choice...
...A splendid work of scholarship...
...One safe prediction about televiTerry Teachout, a contributor since 1981, is a member of the editorial board of the New York Daily News...
...To your mother, it's a show with a sexy hero who wears bifocals...
...To you, "The Equalizer" may be a hip, crypto-rightwing adventure series full of slick surfaces and great music...
...In any contest between the affiliates- and the network news divisions, the affiliates automatically win...
...This might just be the most delicious side effect of the cable revolution...
...More old people...
...Gray is one of the best of our defense intellectuals in dealing with the significance of the nuclear weapon, and his treatment of that dimension of the problem is outstanding"—Eugene V. Rostow, Institute for National Strategic Studies...
...You can already see this trend at work in shows like "The Golden Girls...
...The future of television news, in other words, is not Dan Rather...
...Network news is also making less and less sense to the networks themselves, which are now run by accounting majors and computer nerds who can't see any particular reason for paying anchormen a million bucks a year when the total number of people who watch their shows, as opposed to CNN or local newscasts, is slowly sinking into the sunset...
...This book is desperately needed, soundly based and persuasively presented...
...Boomers who stay home and watch television...
...They thought it would spread faster than it did...
...Look for much, much more of the same in twenty years...
...sion, of course, is that it'll always be pretty dopey...
...Send mail orders to University Press of Kentucky, P.O...
...He writes about television for National Review...
...But that spread is finally beginning to suck viewers away from the Mighty Three...
...Cable television will help speed up this inexorable trend...
...320 pages $28.00 Divided Counsel The Anglo-American Response to Communist Victory in China EDWIN W. MARTIN...
...More rock 'n' roll...
...The overall quality of television varies with the national intelligence quotient, a digit of dismaying constancy...
...These old geezers will be all over TV twenty years from now...
...Television, after all, exists to give as many people as much of what most of them want as possible...
...The trouble is that television won't come and getyou...
...In your ear, Allan Bloom...
...A skilled tracing of the difficulties encountered by West Germany's energy policy, as an increasing number of people became concerned about nuclear power"—Foreign Affairs...
...Hee, hee, hee...
...I once described commercial television as the only convincing argument against the free market...
...Nielsen is putting a sophisticated new viewer-measuring system into the field this year...
...You have to go and get it, to learn how to make it sit up and do stupid electronic tricks...
...Commercial cable services devoted to cultural programming are already K Generals in International Politics NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe ROBERT S. JORDAN, Editor...
...Martin's excellent study of differences over China policy is temperate and illuminating"—Foreign Affairs...
...It's Ted Baxter...
...In this important study Mosley makes a challenging reassessment of the role of economic aid for nations on both sides of the equation...
...Which suggests a good reason to watch PBS...
...In the absence of any sudden influx of right-thinking young Americans into the world of TV, don't hang by your thumbs waiting for a successor to "Firing Line...
...No PBS...
...The number of senior citizens in this country is on the rise...
...Probably CBS, since the public appears to have gotten tired of Dan Rather...
...256 pages $24.00 The Life of the Parties Activists in Presidential Politics RONALD B. RAPOPORT, ALAN I. ABRAMOWITZ, and JOHN McGLENNON, Editors...
...And it's entirely possible that NBC, the network that brought you "Hill Street Blues" and "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd" and Paul Shaffer and the band, will give up on the mass market and pitch as much of its programming as possible towards yuppies, who are showing an increased propensity to stay home and make like couch potatoes when not out shopping...
...The first baby boomers will turn 62 one year after The American Spectator turns 40...
...These people have time ontheir hands and disposable income to burn, both of which make them prime targets for sponsors...
...Box 1660, Hagerstown, MD 21741...
...Provides an interesting and informative examination of a relatively neglected set of political actors—state party convention delegates--and makes an important contribution to the growing debate over the general decline of the U.S...
...More dumb shows...
...Unlike PBS, these operations have to make money, which provides them with an incentive to do a good job...
...What does make sense, at least in the short run, is "Nightline," which devotes its entire half-hour to what network news laughingly calls "in-depth" coverage of a single subject...
...Most of our smart guys would rather become investment bankers or policy analysts than work their way up the small-screen ladder...
...288 pages $27.00 Politics and Nuclear Power Energy Policy in Western Europe MICHAEL T. HATCH...
...With Billy Joel serving as his Myron Floren...
...George Will was a fluke...
...Since television is little more than an epiphenomenon of American mass culture, it will respond to changes of that kind like water to wind...
...280 pages $25.00 The Geopolitics of Super Power COLIN S. GRAY...
...political parties"—American Political Science Review...
...His writing is clear and readable"—Intelligence and National Security...
...Oseth has performed an excellent service for those of us interested in the subject of intelligence as an academic discipline...
...As usual, the futurologists miscalculated about cable...
...Schmidt's book is particularly valuable for the insights it provides into Yankee imperialism and its racist undertones"—Publishers Weekly...
...Here, then, are some speculations about the wave forms .of 2007: No anchormen...
...The affiliates have never agreed...
...No conservatives...
...But Nielsen's People Meters will look like greasy kid stuff in 2007...
...It makes you appreciate CBS...
...By 2007 it will have gone through the roof...
...Network news already makes less and less sense to local stations, which pull in more money and get more attention from local newscasts...
...A colorful story about a swashbuckling establishment-shaker...
...Commercial television is bound to get worse as the numbers become cleaner, more precise...
...The major networks will continue to exist, even to thrive, but only by becoming ever more sedulous in their attempts to pull in the maximum number of morons...
...232 pages $22.00 Inquiries and major credit card orders, phone toll free 1-800-638-3030 (in Maryland and Canada call 301-824-7300...
...The more first-rate shows they steal from PBS, the harder it will become to justify subsidizing a network which already spends most of its air time broadcasting fund appeals and documentaries about lesbian motherhood...
...The way they do it on "Max Headroom" is the way the networks will be doing it in twenty years: continuous, real-time ratings figures that tell television executives exactly how their shows are doing from minute to minute...
...256 pages $24.00 Regulating United States Intelligence Operations A Study in Definition of the National Interest JOHN M. OSETH...
...More smart shows...
...The calculus of hedonism combines with the natural efficiency of markets to produce sharply rising common denominators of stupidity...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
