Of Newton Minow & Matthew Arnold

...Yet how can anyone tell them such a thing without violating the principles of democracy...

...People have always amused and distracted themselves with trivialities of one kind or another...

...In a major policy statement, the Government also said it intended to exercise greater control over the existing commercial network, and take a greater share of its profits...

...Now this intellectual revolution had many consequences, most of them bad...

...Also obviously, such men would be put into office, and tolerated there, only by a people who themselves recognized, no matter how obscurely, an obligation to "things that are elevated...

...And what is no one's political responsibility cannot be attempted without it seeming to be a presumptuous transgression on other people's rights...

...No democracy can be better than the majority who elect...

...But few would have the boldness to affirm its robustness without qualification...

...He must do these and similarly foolish things because he cannot envision and enunciate an idea of democracy that sanctions the predominance of the people's enlightened needs over the people's instinctive desires...

...What it ought not be left to determine is the significance for society as a whole of this as against other fare...

...One would want to work by indirection, never by brute, intermittent intervention...

...The precedent is dangerous, and under some other administration it can lead to very nasty results...

...It goes without saying there are grave risks here...

...college professors taught it...

...Critics stated that if this was true it applied equally to the non-commercial stations...

...The recommendations came in response to a report issued this summer by a committee on broadcasting headed by Sir Harry Pilkington...

...It would "approve and supervise the arrangements for the buying and selling of programs" and "be responsible for the shape, content, balance and quality of the service as a whole...

...Today's Government proposals were generally less drastic, however, than those put forward by the Pilkington Committee, which virtually called on the Government to run commercial television...

...At least one pretty much knows beforehand what will engage the Committee's attention and incite its hostility...

...The Pilkington Committee has chastised the commercial network for presenting "vapid, puerile, repetitive, cheaply sensational, sordid and unsavory" shows...

...The public hearings which the Federal Communications Commission is now conducting in various communities, to determine whether various local stations merit having their licenses renewed, are procedurally not superior to those of the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...The plain fact is that the American democracy today is full of self-questioning and self-doubt...

...and it comprehends, too, the really paramount forces of moral suasion in our society, which are the mass media: television, the cinema, newspapers and (to a lesser degree) books...

...If anything, they are even more arbitrary...

...The economic arrangements of American television are such that, even with the best will in the world, it is hard for a station or a network to do other than pander to the needs of the advertisers...

...But one force almost certainly at work was the general and ever more powerful tendency of political thinking to establish a divorce between the person and his polity...

...In some cases, the Government report took a course opposite to that recommended by the Pilkington Committee...

...in which case democracy itself is the least of that society's problems...

...But Mr...

...Obviously, any democratic state that shouldered such a responsibility would have to be one administered by men who represented more than any specific interest or coalition of interests, men who cared about "things that are elevated" and were determined to "represent" them too...

...The all-important question, of course, is: Whose business and responsibility could it be...

...Minow, ordinarily at no loss for words, has remained determinedly mute on this whole subject...

...However wrongly, in some respects, he is going about things, he is at least directing his energies toward a real and serious problem, the very existence of which the Fee and Washington in general have hitherto ignored...

...All thought of refining or elevating these interests and passions, so as to achieve a stability that was something more than a quasi-mechanical equilibrium, was dismissed as fanciful...

...That is to say, not merely in words, but in a continuous series of actions, both symbolic and emphatically material...

...This is not a new question, though one may be permitted to feel it has a new urgency for America in the year 1963...

...Television is a frightfully expensive medium...

...Even within the Socialist movement, so suffused with personal idealism, it became the new habit to think of Socialism as a system for which the existence of Socialists was no necessary precondition: What counted was an "objective" economic reorganization rather than "subjective" efforts at collective self-reform...

...And one significant ground for this unease is the culture that it sponsors and is subjected to...

...He is currently senior editor of Basic Books...

...Yet within two generations of Matthew Arnold's discourse, it had simply ceased being a thesis that Americans found credible and was relegated to the status of an archaic moralism...

...And what is no one's democratic business is no one's political responsibility...

...Indeed, I do not think them despicable at all...

...James Feron, New York Times their place...

...I should like to emphasize that I do not by any means believe that our mass media are despicable because they are not "highbrow...

...Not that the state was in any sense ideally qualified—Arnold was as aware as the next man of the dangers of censorship, imposed orthodoxy and official lethargy...

...I certainly do not like the calculated campaign of bureaucratic intimidation and harassment he is carrying on against individual television stations whose programming displeases him (and me...

...Like Newton Minow, he must pretend that, if only people were exposed to the nobler things, they would enjoy them, though the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming...

...Like too many selfrighteous liberals, Mr...

...The problem is important enough to be stated in a rather extreme way: How may a democracy control its own self-destructive impulses...

...It has already authorized a second channel for the Government-supported British Broadcasting Corporation...

...The Fee is more enigmatic, never having set down its criteria for determining whether or not a TV station is fulfilling its public responsibilities—and never having defined these responsibilities, either...

...Minow as it will surprise those who think of Arnold as a completely 19th-century figure...

...The Puritan tradition asserted it...

...For what it implied, and frequently openly averred, was that it was no one's democratic business to see to it that the democratic polity minded whatsoever things are elevated, or amiable, or pure, or just...

...the Founding Fathers assumed it...

...But there is still much that can be done —through prudent legislation, discreet regulation, generous tax exemptions, negotiated dispensations (from trade unions, for instance), and—yes, occasional downright special privileges...

...To implicate the state in cultural and spiritual matters is to bring in a powerful force whose activity is as likely to be mindless as mindful...

...and if it is not to be operated as an extension of the advertising industry, at least some of its revenue will have to come from other sources...

...But if, on the other hand, we feel with Matthew Arnold that a democracy cannot survive unless it receive its orientation, its basic outlook, from the best minds and spirits that inhabit it, we are free to insist that the mass media respect this truth, and that the democratic state sustain it in a candid and orderly fashion...

...Minow has dodged the vulgar question of money...

...What in previous, hierarchical-deferential social orders had been the burden of an elite (e.g., the clergy, the aristocracy, the learned professions) would have to be, in a modem democratic society, assumed by the state...

...As a matter of fact, he has not even faced the more proximate issue, itself widely discussed within the industry, of whether an advertiser should be legally permitted to exercise control over the contents of "its" program...

...Minow is on the side of the angels...

...At the time, Arnold's American audiences gave this admonition an exceedingly chilly reception...

...Nearly a century ago Matthew Arnold, in one of his Discourses in America, said: "And the philosophers and the prophets, whom I at any rate am disposed to believe, and who say that moral causes govern the standing and the falling of states, will tell us that the failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated must impair with an inexorable fatality the life of a nation, just as the failure to mind whatsoever things are just, or whatsoever things are amiable, or whatsoever things are pure, will impair it...

...But only the state was competent, faute de mieux...

...McGuffey's Readers insisted on it...

...There is nothing wrong with diverting entertainment, or even with cheap sentimentality, or glossy sensationalism, or prurient titillation—so long as they know AND IN ENGLAND London, December 18—The Government rejected today a second commercial television network for Britain...

...It agreed, for example, to permit pay-television companies to conduct two- and threeyear experiments in several areas to learn whether such a service would "justify itself...

...By "culture" I mean all the influences that form the moral and intellectual character of adult and child alike—but of children above all...

...Matthew Arnold, oddly enough, had a very relevant answer to this question, and one which will be as agreeable to Mr...

...The ita, a 10man body appointed by the Postmaster General, owns and operates the stations...

...Always assuming, of course, that we really believe there are such moral causes...

...and that if the failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated should be real in your American democracy, and should grow into a disease and take firm hold on you, then the life of even these great United States must inevitably suffer and be impaired more and more, until it perish...

...and so long as they know these are trivialities, there is little harm in it...

...Nevertheless, having said all this, I must also say that I think Mr...

...The report was severely critical of independent television...

...they have never been fully explained and it is conceivable they never will be...

...But one of its most striking and ironic results, which is very much with us today, was—not to create the problem of "mass culture"—but to render it insoluble within the "democratic" framework as now conceived...

...The Government's move toward tighter control of commercial television's programming came in the form of a recommendation that a committee be set up headed by the Independent Television Authority and representing the television companies...

...But in order for them to know, someone must inform them, and in authoritative terms...

...Irving Kristol, a regular contributor to this department, is a former editor at Commentary and the Reporter and the first American editor of Encounter...

...One can imagine democracies so depraved that the work of self-improvement can never be begun...

...both serious and popular literature reaffirmed it...

...They were not aware of any "failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated" and much resented the implication, especially when made by a visiting Englishman whom they were quick to suspect of patronizing them...

...No one would claim that the American democracy is in so extreme an unhealthy condition...

...and none need be worse than the minority who govern...

...The reasons for this change of heart and mind were complex and profound...

...That a good government, and most particularly a good democratic government, had some dependent relation upon the quality of moral and spiritual life in the nation, was taken for granted...

...A policy of this kind could help repair the life of this nation, and bring it into harmony with those moral causes that govern the standing and the falling of states...

...He must deny vehemently that he wants his tastes and values given preference over the majority's, when this is precisely what he wants, neither less nor more...

...Majority taste most certainly ought to determine—will in any case determine—the bulk of the cultural fare that is offered to it for consumption...

...Which is to say: so long as they do not occupy the center, which is the privileged sanctuary of "things that are elevated...

...Every huckster these days is a raving democrat, defending the majority will against interference by "busybodies" and "would-be cultural commissars...

...Minow seems more interested in the immediate use of power for what he regards as a good purpose than in sustaining or refining the rule of law...

...His answer was: It is the state's business and responsibility...

...It comprehends our schools and churches...

...I also deplore the cowardly way—there is no other term for it—in which Mr...

...What is often despicable is the political, social and economic arrangements within which these media operate...

...In the same way, democracy came to be regarded merely as a socio-political arrangement in which the free conflict of interests and passions would lead to an equilibrium tolerable to the majority of its citizens...

...But it is interesting to note that they neither felt nor expressed any disagreement with his thesis, or with his manner of stating it...

...And because of the distorted notion of democracy that now reigns, anyone who would like to see our society give the place of honor to "things that are elevated"—a small place, maybe, but incontestably central—is constrained to dissimulate and resort to sophistry...