Editorial I
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial I: Magic World,Reform Thyself! There is something about a television studio that makes us all, conversationally speaking, below par. Peregrine Worsthorne, Encounter Today's bitter...
...Popular culture - its idiotic music, movies, etc...
...Unfortunately, themes demand personification and dramatization at the expense of authenticity...
...When one watches the evening news one can gulp down dinner or hoot along with the bartender...
...The newsmen's claim to fairness does not preclude bias nor does it establish objectivity...
...Serious critics of television have suggested that that monoply could be broken if the government would loose its hold on television by auctioning the frequencies to private corporations and encouraging the growth of cable television...
...And, though the broadcasters did not exactly applaud the decision, they swallowed it...
...One imaginative newsman actually refers to sequences of his performance as "page one" and "page two...
...He has no special wisdom concerning American politics...
...But how wrong we were...
...Consider how changed historical circumstances have beset the industry's famed "Fairness Doctrine...
...In such quiescent times it was simple to define fairness in broadcasting...
...Divisions in American society are deep...
...This ambiguity in the television audience, combined with television's limited capacity to transmit information, forces news stories to focus on themes...
...Disagreement is more fundamental than in the early days of broadcasting...
...When one reads a newspaper, one concentrates to such a degree that one can really do little else...
...They must have a clear narrative line that is dramatic from beginning to end...
...Due to its limited command on a viewer's peripheral vision, television does not attract more than limited attention...
...Themes encourage not the dull delineation of facts, but the interpretation of events, and so television newsmen are given to telling their audiences not simply what happened, but what really happened and why it happened...
...A newspaper story focuses on an event...
...And as for his pretentious to statecraft, all that remain are hoo haws...
...Television has no claim on the First Amendment, and Justice White said as much in The Red Lion Case...
...indeed, it cannot...
...Besides, what troubles us is not bias, but the monoply of bias...
...Cronkite has not left his bar stool to cover a story in years...
...Recently the FCC actually forced the television stations of Georgia to carry the virulently racist campaign commercials of a mentally defective white supremist, despite the stations' protests...
...And most importantly, American politics was American, not deeply conservative, not punctiliously liberal, not radical, or homosexual or any of the other exotic specimens now strutting the land...
...It was tellingly demonstrated in the recent convention coverage that television newsmen are no competition for newspaper journalists...
...Yet television news is too typically American to resist America forever...
...Yet any revision of the Fairness Doctrine that still embraces the idea of "equal time" will only make television more boring and inane than it is...
...still enchanted the vast majority of Americans...
...Themes are easier to comprehend, and they are more likely to be entertaining...
...Most Americans adhered to the same hazy prejudices serried together as philosophy, the same general expectations, the same general life styles...
...They could be ghost written by Arnold Toynbee, and they would still sound silly...
...The yearning that nudges a person to flip on a television set is much vaguer than the compulsion that drives a person to buy a newspaper...
...Supposedly, the FCC is working furiously to revise its doctrine...
...When the networks claim the same freedom from government intervention, as, say, the New York Times...
...One of their most poignant confusions, however, issues from their confused identities...
...Unfortunately, the FCC still seems to have hopes for its balmy notions about equal time...
...Television just does not demand a great deal of concentration...
...In considering television it is perhaps helpful to think of it as a distinctly American phenomenon, for the values of television news are derived from American society and they in turn affect that society's values...
...The squawks of dissidence were ignored...
...Henceforth, newsmen simply ignored the odd fish...
...public opinion has shattered into many disparate views...
...Yet how can we make a medium informative when its competence to deal with complexity is so limited...
...Newsmen can find no refuge in the FCC's Fairness Doctrine because it is itself pitifully inadequate...
...Personally I hold no such aspirations...
...As the serious study of television news continues, the confusions underlying television will become apparent...
...He reports just what his handlers tell him to read...
...Indeed, he is often quite as ignorant about the American political system as is the president of Uganda...
...That television news has leaned adamantly against change reveals the force of inertia in deciding policy within a corporate giant...
...What is appalling, however, is television news' dazed response...
...Eventually it will acquiesce to the times, though what form it will take when it does acquiesce remains a mystery...
...Chet Huntley, late of the Huntley-Brinkley Report...
...Finally, and most importantly, news stories must be entertaining...
...They were born of government decree, and their very growth is controlled by government...
...Television has yet to replace time and space...
...Only a bureaucrat could find them satisfying...
...Such are the wonders of television land...
...Nader to the Amish...
...In this century government has been able to consistently do only two things well: inflate the currency and wage war...
...the fate of Boston's WHDH and its erstwhile owner the Herald Traveller Corporation...
...They really believe themselves to be fair, objective and unbiased...
...They are second-rate actors and first-rate gossips...
...It has replaced the presses with the electronic wizardry of microphones, television cameras and all the latest gad-getry...
...Such aspirations are noble but obviously preposterous...
...Though some newsmen will consider it the crudest calumny of all, American television news has a lot in common with apple pie...
...They always have such magnificent hopes for the strong medicine of devine contraptions like the FCC...
...McCluhan's bossy declarations about the New Age have besotted us...
...All they consistently do is talk and pose...
...To begin with there has been all of this semantic confusion over fairness and bias and objectivity...
...Of course, this is as phony as the Senator's toupee...
...And the differences repose deep within the two crafts...
...And an increasing amount of scholarly study has nailed this point down...
...How can television be reformed...
...One would have thought that an industry, always so eager to indulge the critics of other establishments, would have been grateful to those who had discovered its improprieties...
...Only the most oblivious moss back would find the controversy surprising...
...But they are not always reliable or even informative...
...The evolution of this doctrine reveals as much about what has been happening to American society as it reveals about what has been happening to (or not happening to) television...
...It has a powerful headline and a first paragraph which starkly outlines the facts of the event...
...Television men are as dependent on the government as farmers are on the weather, and both hold these fearsome masters in the same moronic awe...
...At no time is society more chillingly imperiled than when government dedicates itself to achieving the impossible...
...R.Emmet Tyrrell, Jr...
...Perhaps the most auspicious step toward reforming television will be to recognize television for what it is: a manmade machine that inauthentically recreates man and his fantasies...
...What he has become is a noxious real estate tycoon, condemned for his environmental depredations and mayhem...
...Television newsmen do not read seriously and they rarely write...
...Their utterances are shielded by the Bill of Rights...
...Until television is constituted differently even CBS will have to bow before Congressional investigations and the other less obvious coercions in government's arsenal...
...After that the story expends itself in an unexciting, if informative, recapitulation or elaboration...
...the cigarette crusade) to ownership (e.g...
...They even have "desks" and "editors...
...No newspaper would ever submit to such intrusions by government...
...On the other hand, the networks, their affiliates, and for that matter, all independent television stations are government sanctioned oligopolies...
...Obviously, this is madness, but then confusion is often a prelude to madness, and it seems television has always been a most confused creature...
...The television news industry sees itself as the lastest word in journalism...
...There are many more suggestions that can be made, I am sure, but all will be for naught so long as the television industry refuses to acknowledge the need for change...
...Their products take on different forms, stemming from different imperatives...
...Television news will have to provide special editions for every subculture, and on it will go...
...The rancorous barrage that has been leveled against every established American institution eventually had to splatter even into the sanctums of so prosperous and celebrated an establishment as that of the television industry...
...Ideological barricades are being thrown up all across the country...
...This is nothing like television news...
...I imagine television's reluctance to reform itself comes as a jolt to New Populists and other such woolly advocates of government commissions...
...Under heavy weather he had the Fairness Doctrine to support him, and, of course, he had that mysterious formula for objectivity that only a genuine newsman seems to understand...
...Peregrine Worsthorne, Encounter Today's bitter pother over television news was inescapable...
...It is a sincere confusion...
...Television news stories must be interesting throughout...
...When the FCC first handed down its doctrine about equal time, it assumed a broad commonality amongst Americans...
...So it is that the information imparted in a television news story must be rudimentary, and if the events contributing to a news story are complicated, they must be simplified...
...Cronkite's memoirs will be an embarrassment...
...A changing American society presaged changes in television news...
...From this confusion they proceed to claim the same immunities from government as those possessed by newspapers...
...There was no youth culture or ethnic culture - at least not one that preempted mob culture...
...And how can television as presently constituted ever overcome the charges of bias and unfairness...
...So it seems to me that the kinship between the newspaperman and the television newsman is about like the kinship between the American Indian and his cousin from the cigar store era...
...All of Dr...
...And after Vietnam I cannot really say mat it still performs the latter with its prowess of old...
...Ideally, broadcasters were to give equai time to all popular views on popular issues...
...Asking Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley about the possibility of a little telltale bias in their art is like asking the Pope if he frequents the massage parlors of Times Square - responses vary from gaping disbelief to dudgeon and reveal the depth of the problem for critics authentically concerned about television...
...People not only question a newsman's bias, they question his very conception of what is newsworthy...
...Walter Cronkite is no more a journalist than was Basil Rathbone a private detective...
...They do not possess the same freedoms as newspapers, and as long as they depend on government licensing, they cannot be free from government...
...Unlike the newspaper story, the television story relegates facts and events to a secondary role in deference to themes...
...Movies were not yet specifically tailored for the hightoned tastes of Afro-Americans or women or youth...
...Or let us reflect on Mr...
...That acknowledgment seems to be a long way off...
...He now appears on television endorsing air travel much the same way pug athletes endorse men's toiletries...
...American society encourages eccentricity and even extremism, while its middle ground washes away, and the poor news industry remains forlornly clutching its outdated Fairness Doctrine...
...Such revelations have brought protests and tantrums from the telegenic muggs of network news, but as the polls indicate, an increasing number of Americans are not taking the newsmen so seriously these days...
...In fact, a man cannot even sell a television station without the FCC's permission-a permission which can actuaiiy De witnneid...
...they are sweeping aside several scowling truths - not the least of which is then-shady ancestry...
...If the code itself contains a prejudice - as indeed the FCC code does - the news will be biased...
...By multiplying the opportunities for individual expression, government would neutralize much of the sting of bias while clearing away some of the rubbish about fairness...
...America still had its sense of commonality, and everyone still tried to melt into the same pot...
...As for bias and fairness, I cannot see how our present situation will be improved until television is fundamentally reorganized...
...When television executives go about waving the Bill of Rights, they are either deceiving the public or suffering from the confusions that haunt their industry...
...When some poor fellow squalled about bias, the aggrieved newsman magisterially reminded viewers of his "professionalism...
...Newspapers are private businesses...
...Fairness means treating all men equally according to the same code, while the lack of bias implies a lack of prejudice...
...And in 1949, fairness had evolved to the point that stations were expected to give equal time to those who disagreed with their editorials...
...Cronkite may be confused about himself, but no intelligent newspaperman is confused about him...
...And consider television's working press...
...They are little else...
...Obviously, under such pressures, the newsman's assertion of superior "professionalism" or "objectivity" is empty...
...If the FCC continues on this track, automobile ads will be accompanied by ads from every automobile critic from Mr...
...Every aspect of television creeps about under grovernment stewardship, from advertising (e.g...
...We cannot eliminate bias, and it is foolish to try...
...Contrary to television news' superficial understanding, a fair story can still abound with bias...
...It is the newsmen's confusion over this that has made their flabbergasted response to critics like Mr., Ag-new and Miss Edith Efron so heart-rending...
...The odd fish that newsmen could once so cavalierly ignore carry on nowadays in vastly greater abundance...
...This of course often does violence to objectivity, but it is dramatic and entertaining and these are the primary values of television news - values exactly opposite those of the serious journalist...
...And they further flummox things by "reporting the news," producing "documentaries," "editorials," "commentaries" and "diaries...
...He retired at an early age, anticipating a palmy future in high finance and statecraft...
Vol. 6 • November 1972 • No. 2
