Media / The Electronic Giant / Sign Off / Media and the American Mind from Morse to McLuhan / The TV Ritual / Media Unbound / Broadcast Journalism
Neal, Marie Augusta
Books: TV, CONSCIOUSNESS, & CONTROL MEDIA THE SECOND GOD Tony Schwartz Random House, $13.50, 206 pp. THE ELECTRONIC GIANT A CRITIQUE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS FROM A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE Stewart...
...He is a spirit, not a body, and He exists both outside us and within us...
...the last two are THE TV RITUAL WORSHIP AT THE VIDEO ALTAR Gregor T. Goethals Beacon Press, $7.25, 164 pp...
...MEDIA AND THE AMERICAN MIND FROM MORSE TO McLUHAN Daniel J. Czitrom Univ...
...Attending to the turn of the prime time preachers in 1979 into the politically powerful Moral Majority, he notes the effectiveness of fundamentalism focused on the character flaws of opposed political candidates...
...Hoover worries that control of media will revert to fewer and fewer corporations, ultimately excluding Third World countries from presenting their point of view...
...If you can afford only one book, begin with Goethals...
...Goethals's book, best read in meditative perspective on the problems the others have singled out and tried to answer, ponders the influence and limits of TV as a popular culture-carrier with the power to reinforce uncritical religion that has grown out of our already formed popular culture...
...It can replace the family doctor...
...It has now, through the influence of the Moral Majority's use of paid TV time, turned religion into one of the largest buyers of viewing time...
...He further observes that 60 Minutes, which is really not news but rather semi-drama, is far more popular than the unadorned news...
...fostered ecumenism...
...Further, current TV showings fail to reflect positive social values...
...Religious expression therefore took the form of word and music...
...and Czitrom, an historian...
...Her book is an attempt to retest theses about the binding elements of religion: ritual, icon and iconoclasm, and sacrament...
...turned the priest to face the people...
...Lesher, Barrett, and Diamond, social scientists...
...The only way in which primitive societies differ from ours in shaping the folk religion of today is that the medium is new - TV - and the public is larger - the nation rather than the tribe or family...
...though an excellent documentary, it did not change the bias of race discrimination much either...
...Goethals locates the secularity of American rituals and icons in the historical fact that our founding groups were Protestant...
...After a brilliant ABC report of the Iranian hostage story, he exposes government and journalist deficiencies, noting: "Such a barrage of criticism took on added weight when one considers that Iran was only one among dozens of countries in both hemispheres that Americans were seeing dimly and partially, countries large and small, remote and close by, and any one of which could like Iran become overnight the gateway to global disaster...
...Hoover points out that although a concerned public could pressure the Federal Communications Commission to regulate in the public interest, the advertisers are more effectively organized to get regulations in their interests...
...In striking contrast, Hoover's Electronic Giant is a quietly didactic book that broods over the limitations of TV news in comparison to the printed word...
...It has already moved the church to put the liturgy into English...
...Hence art took on the quality of the secular in the American experience and our icons - the family, nature, and technology - became visually secular...
...Schwartz claims that more important than political party support is a televised session of Congress...
...His book has the compelling qualities of his ads...
...We can never fully understand Him because He works in mysterious ways...
...Schwartz invites us not to try to resist the media - TV, radio, and telephone - but to recognize its disembodied spirit and fashion its uses to our interests and needs...
...Diamond sees TV turning news into a spectacular which entertains...
...The first two were dominant in pre-industrial societies...
...Who controls what we perceive through TV...
...TV can teach a child about societies cross-culturally, increase vocabulary, encourage reading...
...of North Carolina, $19.95, 285 pp...
...She notes that we are all "sacramental creatures...
...He presents the striking thesis that Walter Cronkite's judgment that the Vietnam war was wrong, announced on TV in 1968, had more influence on the public than the decisions made in the White House...
...It allows no public act to go unexamined...
...If you are building a library, then choose them all and experience a rich reflection on the transcendent power of the media...
...He is fascinated by the technology itself and tries to communicate to the reader what it is and how it works...
...Lesher's Media Unbound focuses on the very nature of journalism itself and tries to demonstrate that "it leads to error or at least to inaccurate information with a bias toward the unusual and sensational...
...He speaks boldly: "God is all-knowing and all-powerful...
...Goethals ends with this challenge: "until institutional religion can excite the serious play of the soul and evoke the fullness of human passion, television will nurture our illusions of heroism and self-transcendence...
...These frames, chosen with an artist's eye, are incorporated into her text...
...Claiming that we all have a need to belong and to wonder, Goethals uses some of the best standard cultural analysis source...
...Barrett soberly reflects on his findings from the polls and, after reviewing the video records, concludes that being told the story does not determine the response...
...This reflection follows his recounting that, at the time of the fall of the Shah, we were ignorant of the Iranian people, their customs, their religion, and their feelings...
...BROADCAST JOURNALISM THE EIGHTH ALFRED I. DUPONT/ COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SURVEY Edited by Marvin Barrett Everest House, $15.95, 266 pp...
...Marie Augusta Neal BARRINGTON MOORE, lecturing in the mid-fifties, pointed out that there are five bases of power in modern industrial society: control over land, labor, industry and trade, the unknown, and over violence...
...Books about media recognize the validity of this claim to power in media of communication...
...It notes that the whole of the CBS evening news, including the ads, would fit on the front page of the New York Times...
...His evidence leads him to conclude that TV does not have the influence claimed by some to replace personal initiative or genuine leadership...
...A ten-minute replay of a decade of statements made by a public figure can make or break his career in its revelation of contradiction or continuity...
...The splendid documentary, Harvest of Shame, presented in 1960, made little difference in the condition of the farm workers in 1980...
...Barrett concludes then that media, though a significant source of information feelingly presented, do not singly lead to transforming action for good...
...Business and politics have learned to use the ritual and sacramental potential of secular American art through television in advertisements, documentaries, and entertainment...
...Czitrom's book is a careful history of wireless, telephone, and radio...
...It becomes essential reading - after one becomes familiar with the whole story of broadcasting, cable videotape, and satellite which the previous books recount.To demystify the process, the historical perspective of this volume fills in the background...
...The nations with satellite control, he observes, will ultimately decide what is said and seen...
...In broad terms this describes the God of our fathers, but it also describes electronic media, the second god, which man has created...
...God is always with us because He is everywhere...
...Diamond, Barrett, Czitrom, and Goethals consider the evidence that the coming of cable TV marks the end of an era of broadcasting and the beginning of something new, the move from mass audience to specialty publics with more control over selection on the part of the viewer...
...Schwartz knows TV behavior-changing potential because his ads sell products...
...The tapes reviewed include presidential debates, political commercials, religious broadcasts, news and documentaries, children's programs, the media coverage of major special events including election nights, Mideast wars, and major disasters like Three Mile Island...
...The books of these authors review the previous era, assessing it in preparation for a hidden future...
...SIGN OFF THE LAST DAYS OF TELEVISION Edwin Diamond MIT Press, $17.50, 273 pp...
...Only if a network decides to pour an enormous amount of money and personnel into the coverage of an event, and that usually at the risk of the withdrawal of advertisers, does a TV journalist team manage to cut through the cultural bias that distorts our vision of other nations and other subcultures within our own...
...His book abounds with similar claims expressed in such language...
...He analyzes the skill of such presenters who use TV's potential for creating solidarity by taking advantage of people's "spiritual hunger," and desire for entertainment...
...Institutional religion, however, has not yet accepted this challenge, though the people are gathered around the video altar...
...dominant today...
...It has deeply influenced American thinking on such main issues as the morality of the Vietnam war...
...So too All Deliberate Speed...
...Night Line, the Today Show, Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, and 20/20 become shows...
...From Barrett's perspective, we see through a glass darkly when we hear and view the TV news...
...Hoover, an ethicist...
...He provides an index of every TV preacher: audience, receipts, and show...
...THE ELECTRONIC GIANT A CRITIQUE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS FROM A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE Stewart M. Hoover Brethen Press, $6.95, 171 pp...
...He locates this power in the fact that TV travels so fast, can be shared by millions at the same time, and requires accountability because of its video tape capacity for instant replay, "one of the most important developments of human history...
...Schwartz a TV and radio commercials designer...
...Each tests claims to power and speaks from the perspective of different experiences: Goethals is an artist...
...Diamond examines the last ten years with his MIT seminar students, who analyze the content of video cassette recordings of a decade of broadcasting to determine the influence of TV and other media on the making of important decisions...
...Ourkheim, Geertz, Bellah, Berger, anci Ernest Becker to analyze her data, frai s from live TV of news reports, ap opera, documentaries, and popular shows...
...He'nce its inviation: "Theologies and faiths that confine their expression to the word, written or spoken, and to music have issued an invitation to secular culture to minister to the sacramental needs of people, Secular culture is popular not because it is secular but because it is sacramental...
...MEDIA UNBOUND THE IMPACT OF TELEVISION JOURNALISM ON THE PUBLIC Stephen Lesher Houghton Mifflin, $13.95, 285 pp...
...Today, perceptually, science shares that field with religion and the new power is in the technology of electronic media...
...Tony Schwartz is by far the most optimistic...
...He too sees the aspirations to transcendence embodied in the media expressions as early as the beginning of the telegraph story in the nineteenth century, when one of his sources proclaims: "The divine boon of the telegraph allowed man [sic] to become more godlike...
...They demonstrate, through visuals, how folk religion comes to be and why the public responds to this visual pressure...
...Prior to the taking of the hostages, the Shah was, for most of us, Iran...
...All of these books pose the question of power...
...Before the development of modern science and technology, religion prevailed in control over the unknown...
...the visual was repudiated as idolatrous...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 3
