Glib, Tawdry, Savvy & Standardized: Television and American Culture
Gitlin, Todd
Prognostications about media and society generally oscillate between two poles: to the north, one hears dithyrambs to a projected utopia offering fingertip access to all the information and...
...nor to presume that the consequences of television are going to turn out all of a piece, the same for the entire society at all times, the same for a five-year-old in the Bronx as for a sixty-five-year-old in Tucson, the same for a keyboard operator or an apple picker as for an Apple executive, the same in the year 2000 as in 2010, 2100, or, God knows, 3000 or 30,000...
...However, what is frequently missed in the enthusiasm for "diversity" is that the newly programmed niches share, in many respects, common styles...
...and their censors—more permissive about the gouging of flesh than the exposure of it—aren't the potentates they used to be...
...Information is packaged to dovetail with the entertainment function—to keep people watching...
...In the spirit of continuity, Thoreau's question about the telegraph deserves to haunt us...
...and that just because mobs are not knocking on corporate doors "demanding" serious work—any more than 352 • DISSENT mid-nineteenth-century hordes beat on Herman Melville's door "demanding" a fat novel about a white whale—does not mean that our culture can thrive without the difficult, the demanding, the true, and the beautiful...
...In the margins, competition, true enough, brings us Discovery, Nickelodeon, and Bravo...
...CNN's endless coverage of the Gulf War, much of it—especially from Peter Arnett—admirable, still did very little to go behind the technological whiz-bang of Air Force markmanship claims to discharge one obligation of the media in a democratic society: to expedite a debate about the origins, the stakes, the rights and wrongs of the war, and where such a debate ought to go...
...The stories remain, for the most part, focused on the private travails, foibles, and triumphs of individuals...
...C-SPAN, for those with the cable and the time, affords the chance to follow unscripted stories, as, less reliably, does CNN...
...Won't that make a difference...
...Highly touted virtual reality may be this decade's bubble, to be featured in some future museum of great-inventions-that-didn'tcatchon...
...SUMMER • 1993 • 355...
...In the hue and cry over George Bush's, or, rather, Peggy Noonan's famous slogan, far more critical attention was paid to the legibility of the president's lips than the appalling nastiness and simplemindedness (or is this redundant...
...Television thrived on comedy and violence, and on hybrid combinations...
...C-SPAN, Discovery, and, Home Box Office go into some 60 percent of the households, but that is scarcely "everyone...
...the news managers became impresarios for flag-waving parades...
...I don't know what President Clinton's habits are, but George Bush, Saddam Hussein, and Max Frankel, the editor of the New York Times, have all been simultaneously wired to CNN...
...As the elevation of David Letterman makes clear, mainstream television has learned to cultivate a knowing attitude in which the audience is brought in on the contrivances of performance...
...To those awash in electromagnetic waves, more shall be sent, and more savvy shall be the recipients...
...I have returned, then, willy-nilly, to my apprehensions...
...The great bulk of the fifty or more channels available through major metropolitan cable systems consist largely of segments of the old network broadcasting day stretched out for round-the-clock availability: Hollywood movies, sports, ancient sitcom episodes, conventional forms of news, children's cartoons...
...The remotecontrol device is an excellent means of overcoming tedium—or at least speeding it up...
...When everything is "theatricalized," to use Neal Gabler's apt if ungainly term, then what is noble...
...The "Golden Age" of television, let us not forget, was essentially white and mediocre...
...The supermarket is far gaudier on the better side of the tracks...
...After all, the entire history of radio and television takes up no more than a century...
...I realize that I have not taken into account the technological marvels that are present and forthcoming: high-density, improved sound, split screens, "virtual reality...
...q This article is based on comments originally prepared for a conference on the future of television held at Harvard University, February 8, 1993...
...from the south, one hears low moans about a dystopia of absolute surveillance and stupefaction...
...When images can trigger wars, invasions, humanitarian missions and presidential agendas alike, this uncommon carrier has an amazing responsibility...
...Nor will serious writers need to feel redundant...
...And the search to maximize viewership across the broadcast band and the cable box is no automatic guarantee of "diversity" except in a shallow sense...
...of his form of address...
...Gresham's Law is also the inexorable ally of television's other contribution to nihilism: pure violence...
...Having covered my flank with cautions, I want to double back and propose that in the remotely foreseeable future we can anticipate more of Aldous Huxley's soma than George Orwell's You-Know-Who...
...Donald Wildmon and his fundamentalist minions...
...nor to use the words "horizon," "limitless," or "technological revolution...
...It overrides most ethnic and regional differences...
...Profuse is the learning as well as the deadening and degradation that are possible when an abundance of outlooks and information reaches into the limited world of the home...
...Prognostications about media and society generally oscillate between two poles: to the north, one hears dithyrambs to a projected utopia offering fingertip access to all the information and images a citizen might need to enrich democracy and multiply freedom beyond recognition...
...I resolve to violate certain hitherto sacrosanct rules of prognostication: I pledge not to invoke the bogeyman Big Brother...
...The New Yorker recently carried a Charles Barsotti cartoon in which a man with the head of a television set and a troubled face is saying, "But Marge, five hundred channels...
...The networks' military experts were as dazzled as their viewers by Patriot missiles...
...The culture of mythmaking is a culture in which the genuinely heroic has been downgraded...
...But I don't mean to draw hard-and-fast distinctions: for example, I would be hard pressed to know exactly how to categorize "The McLaughlin Group...
...Comparable to the fast-and-loose, sensationalist, action-adventure, once-over-lightly stage uniformity that Tocqueville observed, today's video uniformity is manifest in the phenomenon that social critic Bruce Springsteen has aptly called "FiftySeven Channels and Nothing On...
...Television's allergy to high culture, to complex speech, to the difficult and demanding, the sacred and the lasting remains a given...
...I have read that Daniel Boone was in the habit of taking Gulliver's Travels with him to read at his evening fire...
...Marge, suitcases in hand, is striding away from him, toward the door...
...Now, no one can doubt the decline of common media—from Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post to the network news...
...True, on the positive side, those who are interested have access to many more hours of breaking news...
...Speaking of Amy Fisher, it is worth underscoring the obvious fact that the proliferation of choices costs money...
...Without doubt, the proliferation of choices— the possibility of "video publishing" — amounts to a net improvement over the days when most people were limited to three networks...
...At the same time, the deep cleavage between class cultures will persist, the wonders of channel-glut being affordable by what might be called a two-thirds society...
...The thin culture that television, for the most part, purveys and re-purveys, with reruns of oldies substituting for any rich sense of history, does indeed gesture toward a certain sophistication...
...SUMMER • 1993 351 It is deservedly a commonplace of current talk about media that broadcasting is being eaten away by narrowcasting...
...One should not be automatically scandalized by this crossover— the telling of stories, fictional or nonfictional, has always partaken of the arts of mythmaking...
...Sitcoms, inspired—if that is the SUMMER • 1993 • 353 word—by advertising, purvey a never-ending stream of one-liner put-downs, both mirroring and inspiring comparable conversational styles among young people who grow up bombarded by more of the same...
...Violent criminality remains common currency...
...While television distinguished itself, relatively speaking, during the pre-war period of legitimate debate (from November 6, 1990, when President Bush doubled the troop level, to January 1, 1991, when the UN coalition attacked), no sooner was the congressional debate over and the fighter-bombers set loose than television debate ended...
...We need not be High Anglicans to worry lest, given fifty or five hundred channels, most Americans most of the time shall for the most part remain, in T.S...
...But pace George Lucas and Akio Morita, culture is never saved by technological improvement...
...The dominant entertainment forms remain the action-adventure, the family-centered sitcom, the cop show, the soap opera, and the "magazine" (which shares aspects of the other four...
...True, the uniformity that overrides class bifurcation is nothing new—Tocqueville observed many of its features one-hundred and fifty years ago, before the birth of electronics or the modern corporation...
...Are today's cultural entrepreneurs proud of their present-day substitutes, the Schwarzenegger-Van Damme "product" that flatters today's rugged pseudoindividualists...
...And it is also because the movies available during most of the broadcast day on pay channels are, mostly, standard Hollywood stuff, purveying the shriveled imaginations of directors and writers who have, in turn, been reared on TV-style, speaking TV-speak, seeing through banal camera frames...
...I don't want to settle into a warm bath of nostalgia for the days of the common hearth...
...The newsstand that offers a profusion of skiing, running, dressing, and model-railroad magazines alongside a thin display of magazines of ideas and opinions is not a tribute to the universal cornucopia of the marketplace—it has accepted easy marketability as the prime criterion for display...
...more to fear from a glut of images and stories than from ideological bias...
...America's comic taste for the quick and the broad has served us in many ways, greasing us past the frictions of a polyglot, transnational society...
...The story was suddenly strictly military...
...at all times?—and yet recognize that there are other works, not yet known, that some people, or many people, want, or might want...
...but another need, the hunger for a deep response to the world and to life, is not well assuaged by the endless detritus that pours through the screen...
...The counselors of the form of despair that masquerades as relentless cheerfulness will sigh and say that easy distraction is "what people want"—all people...
...what is valuable...
...The loss of a common culture of "Father Knows Best," the "Camel News Caravan" and "Gilligan's Island" is not to be deplored...
...Seventy-five years ago, no one, not even Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover or the entrepreneur-to-be David Sarnoff, could have anticipated that radio, then television, would become the virtual property of commercial interests...
...Routinely, with "Saturday Night Live" and Ted Koppel, in the self-referential Spike Lee-Michael Jordan commercials and the likes of "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV," the audience is flattered that it has been brought behind the scenes, become savvy to spin doctors, joke writers, and hucksters, while our savvy becomes the format for yet another round of media formula...
...Entertainment Tonight" makes us privy to box-office success just as pollsters make us privy to electoral projections—and we delight in having been brought behind the scenes...
...It is taken for granted across the channels that shallow entertainment shall remain the major thrust of programming and the major use people make of television...
...Eliot's words, "distracted from distraction by distraction...
...What is peculiar, though, is American culture's relentless hunger for celebrities, along with a fascination with the process by which celebrity is manufactured...
...It is high time there was a code of modesty for prophets...
...Talk radio, for all its bombast, has been a more fruitful zone for informed dispute than television...
...Alongside, or beneath, whatever "diversity" is emerging, there is also something of a common style that carries across television in general—from the sitcom to the news, the commercial to the late-night chat, from Arsenio Hall to David Letterman...
...We can expect growing smarminess, despite the efforts of the Rev...
...Marge will, should, must walk out that door...
...and to those who cannot or will not bear the freight, the industry slogan seems to be, "Let them eat game shows and Amy Fisher stories...
...Put it another way: television critics will not need to fold their tents...
...As for impact, CNN weighs on political and media elites more than on the public at large—but this is no small impact...
...it also brings the three rival versions of the Amy Fisher Story...
...The incessant bang-bang of entertainment has juiced up the "Cops" and "Hard Copies" and "America's Most Wanteds," which, in turn, have affected the styles of so-called hard news—as evident in, for example, last year's Gennifer Flowers media stampede, the rise of ambush interviews on local and network news, the NBC–General Motors truck scandal, and the routine spillover of television movies into the 11 o'clock news...
...Given the immensity of America and its experiences, it is startling to see how limited are our shared cultural forms—as if we were so afraid of centrifugal tendencies that we stripped down our common core...
...Even the most sophisticated spectators become voyeurs of the processes by which they are managed...
...There are two dimensions to this commonality: glibness and nihilism...
...One need not go so far as Mark Crispin Miller, who calls this prevailing attitude "the hipness unto death," to wonder whether what television undermines is not any particular belief but the possibility of belief at all...
...Still, with the (sometimes important) exceptions of press conferences, hearings, and wars, CNN broadcasts are crammed into the formats to which the networks have accustomed us—the reporter who has just parachuted into a place he or she barely knows, the superficial questions, the reportorial stand-up, the posture 354 • DISSENT of balance, the truncated debate, the presentation of the world in snippets, the clutter of sound bites...
...But even much of the latter— say, Black Entertainment Television and Soulbeat, Televisa, Christian Broadcasting—thrive on the same empty slickness, the same undiminished enthusiasm for breathless entertainment...
...But then, this is a culture that exports the grunts of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger with aplomb in its contribution to cultural universality...
...Much so-called information programming crosses, or blurs, the boundary—thus the "infotainment" of scandalmongering syndication shows, talk shows, "magazines," and the like...
...We" are no longer being addressed so much in the ensemble as by the zip code, the clan, the tribe...
...Recently, the flacks, and Ross Perot, are at it again about the wonders of instant pseudodemocracy, as if our common life were a game show in which pushbuttons substitute for deliberation...
...When told that Maine could now communicate directly with Texas, he replied with what we would now call an inquiry into software: "What if Maine has nothing to say to Texas...
...Many are the pleasures that technology can, and likely will, afford...
...Unregulated cable, in turn, has made itself beholden to the so-called achievements of Hollywood's technological whizzes, make-up artists, and directors trained, in turn, in the shallowness and routine violence of television...
...The post-network novelties are music, C-SPAN, home shopping, evangelical Christianity, minority culture specialties (African American, Spanish language, and so on) and public access, which, all told, account for a small fraction of the audience...
...As the more sophisticated audience seeps away to cable, and the networks' more prosperous audience correspondingly erodes, the cost pressure mounts...
...It is partly because talent aspires to make it big, partly because there is little space on the band for deviant artistry, and partly because of the self-sequestering of much of the putative avant-garde...
...This is partly because public financing remains scanty and the choices ethnocentric (less than 1 percent of all network and public television prime-time programs combined are imported, and most of that sliver is English...
...The networks, however diminished their reach, continue to compete with unregulated cable...
...We have more to fear from the endless production of triviality and a deep popular addiction to it than from propaganda...
...I also include the obsession with the joky comeback, which dominates sitcoms, as well as news "chat," talk shows, even sports coverage...
...To those who have options shall more options be given...
...Alongside some excellent work, we will see a thin, soulless, nihilist standardization of culture overriding nominal "diversity...
...Television, the vehicle of formula, has also become, and will continue to be, the vehicle of banal deconstruction...
...The Pentagon learned from Vietnam that controlled access is the most successful control...
...We segue from sentimentality to harshness and back again...
...Amid the bombardment of images, people continue to collect the images of their choice as markers for identity, surrogates for public opinion, windows into a constricted world...
...Whatever the political differences, we will also be awash in bicoastal WashingtonHollywood co-productions in the tradition furthered by the teams of Reagan & Deaver, Bush & (Ted) Turner, and Clinton & the Bloodworth-Thomasons...
...yet at the same time, suspicious and preternaturally savvy...
...The long-running continuities in American culture are at least as impressive as the latest developments...
...Heavily (but far from exclusively) because of the televisualization of everyday life, we will continue to be flooded by glibness in speech and style...
...dazzled by a convergence of information and entertainment...
...One result is more public affairs—but not necessarily better, deeper, more thoughtful public affairs—and, meanwhile, more coarseness for the masses...
...The quantity and reach of coverage is not quality...
...The bifurcation of culture between a glutted middle road and a rutted low road holds true, by the way, not only for programmed television but for computer networks, portable phones, mobile faxes, beepers, and the rest of the panoply of devices that enable grouplets to maintain their dense communications mesh...
...For all the abundance of delivery systems, under foreseeable circumstances the small screen is unlikely to transform the possibilities of culture for the better...
...The styles of English- and Spanish-language soap operas resemble each other more than they differ...
...When I speak of glibness, I include the relentless pace, the slick visuals (known in Hollywood as "high production values"), the byplay of least resistance, and the attentionshifting discontinuity that can only be called violent...
...Ten years ago, it was all the rage among media pundits to welcome, or warn against, the age of interactive television...
...Television will remain a white noise, a bane, a cheapening as well as an instrument for occasional far-seeing...
...It will come as no news that the search to maximize audience, even in the narrower bands to which cable aspires, still dominates decision making...
...that the future belongs not to the common hearth but to the niche...
...The era of "Read my lips" is an era prepared by television, and while encouragement may be found in the election of a man who speaks in whole sentences and likes to conduct audiovisual seminars, it is unlikely that a single election will serve to overcome our contemporary slickness unto death...
...We are immersed in show business while we are simultaneously taught that it is, after all, business...
...Television should not be expected to answer the question, but a mature culture might be expected to pose it...
...Militaryjournalistic co-productions [to use Tom Engelhardt's phrase] are to journalism as military music is to music...
...The ominous model of mediamilitary co-production has more recently been renewed during the Marine landing in Somalia and the renewed bombings in Iraq—whatever one's opinion of these interventions...
...what matters...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
