Television and conservative politics
Scheuer, Jeffrey
It is by now a truism that television has usurped many of the traditional roles of political parties; more than that, it sometimes seems to have all but devoured the political process. Power...
...There are related institutional and ideological barriers...
...The best programming isn't necessarily the most subversive...
...But if television is also, as right-wing media bashers have long insisted, a hotbed of liberalism, why have Republicans far outpaced Democrats in seizing the airwaves, with propaganda such as National Empowerment Television, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and the Republican Exchange Satellite Network...
...Rightly or wrongly, it has been identified with several policies and postures—welfare, affirmative action, political correctness—that, merit aside, have given the right a polemical field day...
...Power flows to politicians and journalists who exploit the medium...
...A Kennedy might exploit it (although as a prism for personal charisma, not as a conduit for ideas...
...what the camera sees is the status quo, not projected alternatives...
...In its rapid pace and narrative logic, its thirst for action, emotion, and conflict, its resistance to units of meaning larger than the sound bite, television systematically "keeps it simple, stupid...
...Television is widely reported to encourage violent and antisocial behavior and obsessions with self-gratification, beauty, vicarious sex and athletics, and manic consumerism...
...It must explore (through rigorous analyses like those of Shanto Iyengar and Kiku Adatto) the social, psychological, moral, and ideological impact of television, especially on the young...
...it's in the nature of the medium...
...In a roughly similar way, the TV-money nexus has corrupted professional sports...
...Rather, I suspect that for all the conservative whining about the liberal media, something quite different is going on...
...Simplicity has its place—and so does a dignified conservatism...
...For every Michael Kinsley on the left, in what passes for partisan televised debate, there's a crowd on the right—Buckley, Buchanan, Limbaugh, Novak, Sununu, McLaughlin...
...And it must counterbalance television with reading, thinking, and discussion...
...This is all the more true for ideas that depart from the status quo...
...Television disdains as "talking heads" the very sort of intelligent discourse on which democracy has been predicated since the Greeks...
...Why do right-wing voices predominate on so many talk shows...
...The values and messages of the right—small government, laissez-faire, rugged individualism, its views on defense, crime, the family—are essentially simple and visceral...
...Even among left-leaning media critics, too little attention has been paid to the purely structural effects of television on the political mind...
...and the symbiosis between television and money in the electoral sphere, which has vastly escalated the cost of political action and communication, and hence the corrupting power of cash...
...how it stereotypes, trivializes, and fabricates...
...the high cost of entry...
...The new "bosses" are the arbiters of visibility: Ted Koppel, Larry King, Phil Donahue...
...I'm referring not to who gets on the tube, or who SUMMER • 1995 • 299 Comments and Opinions pays for it, but to filters intrinsic to the medium that make up its technological "persona": its peculiar epistemic powers and limitations as a kinetic, audiovisual experience, and the impact of these traits on the kinds of messages we receive and the ways we interpret them...
...The core differentiating feature of the political spectrum—underlying ideological differences about justice, equality, economics, and the like—is the moral and intellectual commitment to a more-or-less complex view, not just of government but, inferentially, of society and of causality itself...
...But there will be no great victories for the left until the battle of television is joined, and the argument for complexity begun...
...It has an almost limitless capacity to manipulate: to disjoin and disintegrate, to wrench from context, to ignore, and to change the subject...
...And precisely the same is true of television, with its adherence to the visual and the immediate, and its aversion to anything abstract, unseen, ambiguous, or analytical...
...It should create a framework for critical viewing based, like critical thinking in general, on informal logic, rational selfawareness, and common sense...
...The democratic left postulates a more complex view than the right, and a more comprehensive and ambitious agenda, with multiple spheres and layers affecting the lives of societies and individuals: a more panoramic view of the moral-political enterprise that looks not only at the visible, but at patterns, contexts, and interconnections...
...As a result, simple messages get through...
...Reagan and Gingrich, with essentially simple, self-regarding messages, are products of it...
...Far from being the left's handmaiden, TV is in fact a bonanza for the right, and a powerful brake on liberalism...
...A warning label should come with any such effort: critical thinking about media is inherently subversive, anticommercial, and egalitarian, and so it will be vigorously opposed by the right...
...A critical ethic is needed, and should extend to all electronic media: let's not forget the fever swamp of talk radio, or the imminent powers of video, hypertext, and interactive CD-ROM to put brains to bed...
...Several grounds for this claim are obvious and economic...
...The left's only remedy, as Roderick Hart argues in his excellent study Seducing America, is to develop a cogent, educative (but nonacademic) critique of television...
...Even when the voices for change are simplistic or sloganeering, demanding peace, jobs, equality, or a greener planet, the underlying values are more inclusive and far-reaching...
...Others have noted television's connection to various social pathologies: how it isolates us, not only from neighbors and fellow citizens but from our own families...
...So here is a contrarian claim: television is the ideal vehicle not just for divisive, polemical sound bites and attack ads, but for conservatism...
...It is an essentially positivist vision, more dissociative than connective, more bound to the visible and the obvious, and hostile to collectivities and abstract forces...
...At the same time, ostensibly nonpartisan mainstream television journalism— especially reporting—is ideologically wedded to the center...
...those of the left are implicitly more intricate and cerebral...
...But what television also does is to atomize and compartmentalize information...
...complicated ones do not...
...This isn't the fault of journalists, programmers, or sponsors...
...The world within the tube is in fact an entire realm of consciousness—a parallel universe that is logically distinct from, yet blurs with, displaces, and falsifies, the external world (for example, Dan Quayle's debate with Murphy Brown...
...There is no right-wing conspiracy in all of this, and exceptions exist, though they don't abound...
...300 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions Such a critique must reckon with the intrinsically conservative character of television...
...But such issues alone haven't kept progressive views off the air or garbled their message...
...q SUMMER • 1995 • 301...
...But, the fact remains that by manufacturing mass simplification, television is dispositionally (if inadvertently) hospitable to the core themes of the right—dignified and otherwise...
...And television, in all its forms and aspects, is an essentially simplifying and sensationalizing medium, perfectly suited to visceral, uncomplicated messages...
...The left has certainly made its share of strategic mistakes...
...American society is rapidly becoming more complex, and so are the tools of discourse—reasons, perhaps, for people to seek political refuge in simple, divisive slogans and homilies...
...More serious analyses, and more abstract ideas, are less telegenic both structurally and commercially...
...viewer demographics that favor upscale consumers...
...This is not a polemical claim, but an observation about the nature of ideology and the logic of political discourse...
...And why, in a televisiondominated culture, is liberalism in such sorry retreat, and a snarling, philistine conservatism rampant...
...Intellectual conservatives project a simpler and more divisive vision: a Hobbesian world of existential agents (buzz word: responsibility) with fewer rights and fewer duties...
...Likewise, complexity has its limits and tactical liabilities...
...These include: commercial sponsorship and network ownership by large corporations without progressive social agendas...
...Simple slogans and visual symbols, with far more emotional punch than cognitive impact, thrive on TV, proverbial chewing gum for the mind...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
