A Symposium On Tv
Rosenberg, Bernard & Macdonald, Dwight & Hausknecht, Murray & IrvingHowe & Haag, ErnestVan den
All right, so TV stinks to heaven. But what are you going to do about it, just continue to criticize, like good dissenters, or make some concrete proposals for changes or improvements? Irving...
...they want to saturate themselves in it, as in a deep fry...
...And no political revolution would help...
...This is constructive work, something we can do...
...Art comes occasionally, neither by wish nor demand...
...Likewise mass culture...
...There are a number of commercially "interesting" audiences which can be appealed to with material that would not go down with One Big Audience...
...As Harold Rosenberg says, art is "a thing labelled FOR CERTAIN MOMENTS ONLY...
...However, what appears to be exaggerated here can also be outstripped by reality...
...7, 1959) And— The Chairman of the F.C.C...
...A CURIOUS EFFORT to straddle the gap between Culture and Commerce was the late Omnibus...
...Times, Dec...
...Handle those sleazy goods...
...To say this is not to express highbrow snobbery, for by now the issue greatly transcends questions of taste...
...Its function is to reveal, renew, upset, shake up, question...
...Cut the amount of time allowed for commercials...
...N.Y...
...I don't think it can be done...
...they don't see why the customer should have to pay for what he now gets free...
...N.Y...
...They do make a gesture even now, on Sunday when most of the One Big Audience is either going to church, playing golf, or snoozing off the Sunday dinner...
...Marshall McLuhan recently remarked that human history before Gutenberg could be viewed as one long preliterate age...
...Another solution would be to put on good programs without worrying about competition from the commercial shows...
...Let us be clear that we are not contemptuous of "the masses," and let us identify those who are...
...It bores the others...
...So we're back to that off-beat millionaire...
...It represents The Public Interest, which must include us, or anyway somebody...
...But such minor things apart, who cares...
...There is now also a non-State, independent, TV network which is doing quite well, commercially...
...In short, "improvement" of television above the level of keeping animated hemorrhoid advertisements off the air is a practical impossibility...
...The networks oppose this on philanthropic grounds...
...Perhaps, in one sense, they can...
...Of course, they represent different and perhaps incommensurable magnitudes...
...Also a 17,000,000 audience...
...Study the monster, surely...
...You may say: how absurd to suppose that the classics can be run through in three months, even under ideal conditions...
...Who really wants or needs TV, who can stand all that yak, all that noise pumped into one's house...
...Non-pay stations might be taxed in terms of their revenue from advertising...
...The tycoons became and remain tycoons because they put on what people wish to see...
...We must try to keep the rot from spreading...
...said today that the agency had a continuing concern for "the intellectual minority" of television viewers...
...Suppose TV had an ideal audience (like us) and an ideal sponsorship (again, us...
...K. will supply the Soviet citizen with more gadgets...
...I take it for granted that the larger and hence the less differentiated the audience, the less chance there is of something original and lively creeping in, since the principle of the lowest common denominator applies...
...TV needs too much and asks too much...
...Up to eight o'clock, Sunday is the highbrow ghetto on TV...
...But nothing would more pleasantly surprise me than to be wrong...
...The smaller the group sharing a program, the less anonymously average the program will have to be...
...would not personally have time to make broad critical appraisals of the output of more than 500 television stations...
...Although the Ford Foundation paid the bill, for some psycho-economic reason (which Veblen or Weber could have analyzed better than I can) the Foundation seemed to feel it would have been immoral if the show had not at least tried to break even...
...My hunch is that the people who want so much to "improve" TV are those who form an army of secret captives and would like to find public sanction for their vice...
...Government control could not change this significantly in our democracy...
...But would any man who cherishes his sanity withdraw from the battle against kitsch and Khrushchev for that reason...
...There now is in movie distribution a relatively small but still profitable nation-wide network of "art theaters" which show foreign films, often Bardot-type sexologies but also often serious work that would never go in the big houses...
...Such a change in structure and control could come about if those who presently own and control relinquish control, or if the system were "nationalized...
...I favor a Third Program over here but not one controlled by the State...
...Would it necessarily become a medium hospitable to art...
...They expect too much from it...
...Improvement" of television, then, is contingent upon a shift in control and structure so that other values can become operative...
...No one can say for certain...
...They want to be excited and diverted —but not seriously affected...
...Times, Dec...
...that for 500 years after Gutenberg, men lived through the literate age...
...A real scandal...
...The trouble with certain segments of the middle class today is that, in order to fill or cover up an emptiness in their lives partly created by sickening kinds of work, they turn desperately to "culture...
...The more hope, therefore...
...made to 299 cater to my taste rather than to an average of tastes—which is what must be meant by improvement...
...Not "we" with our alternative, which is betterment of the species, but "they" with their insistence that most men are constitutionally unable to rise above an idiot level, hold "the masses" in hopeless and unwarranted contempt...
...This is not at the moment historically viable, as we used to say, and even if it were, I've somehow lost my taste for revolutions...
...Some modest proposals: If each TV program were addressed to as small and homogeneous (by self selection) a public as economically feasible, more tastes could be satisfied rather than averaged...
...Why do people have the tastes for which TV is produced...
...People say TV is a neutral mechanism, to be used for good or ill, depending on who controls it...
...Yet, whoever enlists himself on the side of human dignity and political survival, will struggle with all his resources against further contamination of the atmosphere by radioactive poison and by cultural fallout...
...If there is no experience, there is TV...
...Art does not replace, it deepens experience...
...Henceforth it will be much easier not just to exploit but to totalitarianize a "backward people...
...The fact that TV reaches its enormous audience at one time rather than through a progression in time, creates greater difficulties than anyone has yet admitted...
...XV of The Fabric of Society (Harcourt Brace...
...And there are no prizes...
...HeraldTribune...
...This would reduce the station's temptation to cater to additional taste levels...
...Can TV be improved, i.e...
...What can we do about totalitarianism...
...We should expect in the next few years a proliferation of the solemn and the pompous, a growth of programs featuring adaptations of the classics, prose poems about moral values, and drippy conversations with intellectuals...
...To be sure, serious art might lead to serenity, too, sometimes—but serenity is achieved, if at all, through a travail that people wish to avoid...
...One is to have a revolution led by people like us...
...Such a mass monitoring job, he said, would have to be assigned to the staff of the F.C.C...
...16 girls 16, • I've tried to suggest some ingredients in Ch...
...The British Broadcasting Company's famous Third Program has an audience of between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000, something less than a tenth of the audiences of its own Light (lowbrow) and Home (middlebrow) programs...
...However, reason and experience suggest that the only possible attitude to both phenomena is intransigent opposition...
...How many captive listeners do you need before those who praise mass culture will admit that people can now become addled to an unparalleled extent by mass communications...
...Occasional new gimmicks are possible, even the discovery of hitherto unexploited aspects of accepted styles...
...But you already know "TV stinks to high heaven...
...And so Omnibus ruptured itself by attempting to be both serious and popular...
...A TV network controlled by Congress is not likely to please people like us...
...Certainly the likes of Nasser, Mao and Castro should rejoice to learn, as if they did not already know, that literacy will not be a precondition to the fulfillment of their ghastly designs on the human spirit...
...Dwight Macdonald There are two ways the level of TV might be raised...
...there is no point in helping to prettify it...
...Its feature on the Renaissance, for instance, starred Charlton Heston dressed up like a cinquecento Davy Crockett...
...But since the BBC is owned and run by the State, it can make this frank cultural division without worrying about relative audiencesizes...
...Art cannot be adjusted to such a ruthlessly consuming and mechanical rhythm...
...preternaturally tall, may attempt to take the place of an unsatisfactory actuality—as may synthetic glamor, or maudlinness...
...Their peace of mind has been achieved by avoiding experience, glossing over questions, by sedatives, including sedative beliefs...
...we would still get, if more clumsily presented, what people like to see—probably with some vulgarity and all liveliness removed...
...But that's exactly the point: TV is the kind of medium which drives people to absurdities...
...The result was some good things, more trivialities (a visit to a retired race horse, C the world's champion figure iceskater), and, for the most part, such hopelessly mixed-up efforts as the Renaissance program...
...Another logical alternative is the construction of another network of television stations based upon values more likely to lead to "worthwhile" television...
...Our society is just too damned democratic —as against England where nobody thinks it reprehensible if the highbrows have their culture and the lowbrows have their kitsch...
...A Westinghouse report informed us that Americans were averaging a greater number of hours before the TV screen per week than they put in on their jobs...
...Else they wouldn't sell much soap...
...Doerfer asked: "Who's going to be the third man in the argument between Mr...
...Gould and Mr...
...Those who are "concerned" about television must learn to look upon it as a physician does a virus: Something which makes people sick and contributes to the general debility of organisms, but about which one can do nothing except prescribe placebos to maintain the patient's morale...
...We are not faced with politics on the one hand and mass culture on the other, any more than we are faced with politics on the one hand and H bombs on the other...
...TV transforms quantity into a shattering imperative and like all mass culture, aspires toward filling every minute, every silence...
...An important discovery since 1945 is that it is not necessary to think in terms of One Big Audience...
...One may also contemplate a progressive tax, to make it less and less profitable to increase the number of subscribers after the economically necessary number has been reached...
...no one can genuinely respond to art for a fraction of the time that TV watchers spend with their 296 dope...
...The serious question is: How can we provide TV on a high level for those who want it...
...otherwise all of us will be overcome by their fumes...
...In TV, how can the present One Big Audience be split into smaller units where quality would have a chance...
...Most people don't want to be disturbed...
...That is, the individual subscriber could at least "vote" by giving or withholding his money, and the advertisers would not directly control the content...
...and it will spread itself across TV, a pall of "improvement," with suffocating effects...
...In three months our ideal sponsors—I assume them to have virtually unlimited money, talent and energy—would probably exhaust the great classics of the theatre, to say nothing of themselves...
...You can change or improve them no more easily that you could do busi297 ness with Hitler...
...Which is not to say that TV couldn't be improved in certain small and definite ways...
...Gould of the N.Y...
...There is some merit in mass culture...
...There is no way of bringing that about—which makes it unnecessary to wonder how desirable it might be...
...In a dictatorship this might be different...
...After all, Mao does have radios blaring away in the public square of every Chinese village...
...Indeed, in an unrecapturable moment of truth, Gilbert Seldes said that next to the H bomb no force on earth is as dangerous as television...
...The addition of a creditable performance here and there on TV will not change its basically unalterable character...
...302...
...It is better to create art than to analyze sub-art, and it is better to build the good society than to denounce tyranny...
...I can't blame them—not everyone wishes to examine life and often for good reason...
...But should we not face the possibility that the very structure of TV, like that of some other mass media, may be incompatible with serious art...
...What other task do we have than to resist all engines of dehumanization...
...TV must cater to an average of established tastes...
...We must give this up and think in more modest and sensible terms...
...John C. Doerfer, chairman of the F.C.C., inquired wryly how the Government could lay down one rule for the violence in "Hamlet" and another for the miscellaneous homicides in the likes of "Peter Gunn...
...I do not exclude myself...
...and the mass of spectators, less inhibited, will simply decide that if that is art, then to hell with it...
...Castro has inaugurated government by television...
...it eats up everything in sight...
...In today's world mass media have to be fought from outside their precincts...
...Noting that it was hard to find two reviewers who could agree on a given program, Mr...
...Some of us made love before the cathode tube...
...What next...
...Unfortunately, even things that, without being serious art, are genuinely interesting, amusing, witty and esthetically pleasing, are liked mostly by people who also care for serious art and experience...
...My concrete proposal is: just continue to criticize, like good dissenters...
...Of course, there's always the Federal Communications Commission...
...play the summer's baseball games over again in the winter...
...But the samples in the recent past didn't look too good...
...all Chinese trains are equipped with radios that no passenger can turn off...
...I do not confound the totalitarian system, creeping or fullblown, with its chief non-military instrumentality...
...This is not a practical possibility...
...But— Witnesses representing religious, civic and parent-teacher groups charged that there was a disproportionate volume of dramatic mayhem on video...
...That our sick society makes TV worse than it need be, I grant...
...So it's either pay TV or that eccentric millionaire...
...Little is known about what forms taste, yet too much to discuss it here.* One thing seems certain: serious art disturbs the peace of mind of those who actually experience it...
...The staff, however, would have to have some general criteria as to what constituted satisfactory programming in the public interest...
...298 Murray Hausknecht Given the structure of American television, anything produced today must be defined as a commodity and evaluated in terms of its effectiveness for selling other commodities...
...Culture" becomes the new opium of the people...
...8, 1959) Leaving aside the fact that Mr...
...Or that maverick foundation...
...Johnny Loves Suzie will reappear as Antigone or Moby Dick...
...Bernard Rosenberg What can we do about mass culture...
...Some one would have to pick up the check—an eccentric millionaire, a foundation, perhaps even the networks (which, after all, are given their channels from the Government on the theory that they'll do something for "the public interest...
...Crosby rarely disagree—the level of TV being such that it needs no Blackmur or Tate to discriminate —one somehow gets the impression that Mr...
...But some of us would rather pay for bread than get stones for nothing...
...In short, to change TV and leave it popular, our whole civilization would have to be changed...
...and from now on we shall enjoy the postliterate or electronic age...
...Hold your nose, take a bath later on, but handle them now...
...Perhaps the eccentric millionaire— or, if such can be imagined, the eccentric foundation—is our best bet...
...Pumped up with significance, the average program will undergo a transmutation...
...As for the rest, let 'em eat Westerns...
...Ernest van den Haag TV bores me...
...No prospect could be more chilling...
...This sounds very judicious and sensible, but it might turn out to be nonsense...
...He explained, however, that at the moment he was not sure of the practical steps that could be taken by the Government to satisfy more of the cultural wants of that group, and observed that the seven members of the F.C.C...
...On the contrary, I see the threat as one that poses itself directly to me and my children—who are endangered by strontium ninety in their milk and, less so but disturbingly, by noxious fare from the mass media...
...One possibility is pay TV (only those who subscribe could get the program, like a magazine...
...Here is payola in reverse—the devoted conversationalists here don't get paid even for their performance...
...Alistair Cooke, Omnibus's suavely condescending compere, opened the ball with "Now, 'renaissance' is a French word meaning 'rebirth' "; it didn't hurt a bit, really...
...It's not as if anyone has ever run out of books to read or pictures to see, as if anyone no longer has people with whom to talk or silences to enjoy...
...All that and "moonlighting," or working for the sake of your widow, tool) Well, this is caricature...
...All this, assuredly, makes one "negative...
...The effect would be similar...
...Those who spend their lives avoiding it, like zany spectacles and grandiose pseudo-art...
...Crosby of the N.Y...
...They are not susceptible to reform, and should be damned out of hand as an assault on our humanity...
...Pay TV would be one way of doing that...
...Then have no part of itl By last year there were more TV sets than bathtubs in this country...
...But everything either is or immediately becomes a cliche, something which excites or tranquillizes, but doesn't actually communicate: a pseudo-communication produced for and consumed by a pseudo-community...
...Discussions of TV bore me almost as much...
...One may as well ask: what can we do about the Hell bomb...
...I COUNT MYSELF among those who are both frightened and revolted by mass culture...
...Pay TV would achieve the level of our magazines, a modest enough gain...
...Yes, and the trains ran on time in Mussolini's Italy, Hitler solved the unemployment problem and Mr...
...provide more tolerable amusements of an unpretentious kind...
...then Ed Sullivan takes over—except for that curious threehour marathon, David Susskind's Open End...
...And even if it were to bring better TV, this hardly is enough to favor dictatorship, which might also produce worse TV (things can always be worse)—and we couldn't even discuss it in DISSENT...
...Altogether, TV should be taxed no less than liquor, and for the same reasons: it takes too much out of people's lives and contributes too little...
...Times and Mr...
...Even if the latter were a realistic probability—the first is of course merely a logical alternative—the fact that art and education are fundamentally subversive of the social order when viewed from the perspective of presidents, congressmen and bureaucrats means that government control would lead to no noticeable improvement and perhaps an even greater sterilization of content...
...He was not unduly upset by that prospect...
...We are all in danger of losing our manhood as modern technological communication turns us into processed cheese...
...let others gild the rubbish, while critics keep saying: it is rubbish, As David Riesman noted recently, the American intellectuals were of more use to their country when they had less use for it...
...Irving Howe Anything as bad a TV must be susceptible to some improvement, but the one sure way of not getting it is to make the programs more "cultural...
...The other begins with giving up that seductive "democratic" hope that the masses can be improved-educated-refinedstimulated-awakened en masse so to speak, a hope common to both KIII] the Marxist and the liberal-bourgeois traditions and a hope that has been consistently disappointed by the events of the last two centuries, from popular education to Life magazine...
...Examples are the success of the quality paperbacks and of classical recordings (which actually sell as much as rock 'n roll—one-quarter of total sales), and the amazing proliferation of art museums, symphony orchestras, theater groups, and opera companies throughout the provinces...
...Doerfer is not the man to solve the problem...
...What...
...Fine...
...Others played cards...
...but I suspect the results might disappoint...
...a sad minority of culture-seekers will make appreciative sounds because they equate art with boredom...
...It is silly to argue that malevolent tycoons perversely make TV as bad as it is, to corrupt the masses—those noble savages just emerging from Rousseau's primeval forests...
...Obviously, we didn't just watch...
...The TV chains and the FCC are momentarily nervous, and so they chatter about public responsibility and raising the cultural level, as if these things could be done the way barren fields are sprayed with fertilizer...
Vol. 7 • July 1960 • No. 3
