On Television

...In any event, the whole venture certainly doesn't seem like very responsible scholarship on the Vanderbilt fellow's part...

...No newspaper runs the transcript of every speech a politician makes at every Rotary or Chamber of Commerce meeting...

...The next commercial happened to be a message about Crest toothpaste...

...It isn't easy to keep our minds on a Mylai massacre when a moment later we see the good news that we can drive a 1971 car on a secluded beach with that beautiful model in the front seat...

...Millions who hadn't watched the show were disturbed...

...It completely ignores the context of the biased reporting...

...Impressions count more than facts in this era of the unchallenged statement...

...The good news is the commercials...

...A news program, the scholar should have known, is put together like a show-business package...

...As Professor Neil Postman of New York University has pointed out, what the television people consider news is actually bad news...

...They must have come away from that experience feeling really upset about the war for the first time...

...Reporters never simply follow a speaker's pattern in writing their stories...

...The only standing order, explained an executive at the local station that ran the fire story and Crest commercial side-by-side, is to kill airline commercials on days when an airplane crashes...

...Then the reports of what he said about it will give them the impression that the show was un-American...

...But that's not anything a biased commercial would go into...

...I don't want to defend quoting out of context too warmly, but it has been going on in print for years...

...Before the White House would let William Ma-gruder, project manager of the controversial airplane, debate Senator William Proxmire (D.-Wisc...

...They favor one team over the other, usually the winning side, and make some players look better than others, the fellows who score the touchdowns...

...To meet the Vice President's high standards, every news report about a speech would have to start at the top, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be here tonight because...

...With TV, you can turn your head and miss an earthquake...

...The package is held together by the commercials, which are also a form of news, perhaps the most biased news of all...

...Millions of people, however, have read newspaper stories reporting that the Republican senators are alarmed about biased TV war coverage...

...It may not be the best way to cover a speech, but I haven't heard of a better one...

...That is good news...

...such as running two pictures at once--the split-frame technique...

...And no matter how much time he spent putting his reel together, I don't think it's fair to analyze television news in such an old-fashioned linear way...

...The networks are against the Laos incursion...

...Agnew never would have committed that kind of blunder...

...No matter what has happened in the world on any given day, there is always a little international news, a little national news, a little crime, a little weather, a little financial news, and a little human interest story as a kicker...

...That's politics...

...They took out of context all the Vice President's denunciatory adjectives...

...It sounds to me like Vice President Agnew has finally taught somebody else in Washington how to use the medium...

...A newspaper story about terrible news is fixed solidly on the page...

...The gimmick it used was the equal-time rule...

...On Television LESSONS FROM CRITIC SPIRO BY MARVIN KITMAN An enterprising academic fellow at Vanderbilt University has spliced together all the network news coverage of the Laos incursion--at least all the footage that (1) the television news editors considered fit to print and put on the air, and that (2) the network film librarians could dig out of their vast vaults in time for the study...

...The Vice President has also denounced other procedures that are normal in the use of film on TV...

...He even had proof of that practice in the 15-minute rebuttal to the documentary that CBS tacked on the night of the rerun...

...It may cause apathy and indifference...

...Most recently, Agnew denounced CBS for taking out of context the remarks of those opposed to "The Selling of the Pentagon...

...Three thousand people died in Peru...

...The Administration looked silly in its attempt to discredit Dick Cavett on the SST issue several weeks back...

...They give factual information about the culture...

...What disturbs me about Agnew's attacks is that they cast doubt on the integrity of televised football games...

...The impact that results from juxtaposing the bad news of the news with the good news of the commercials has never been studied thoroughly at Vanderbilt, or any other center of television learning...

...Hey, what right do they have to do that...

...The evil here, presumably, is that the camera does things with film the human head can't do...

...I don't care what the Republicans say about that Vanderbilt University reel...

...Tricks like the stop-frame, slow-motion, and instant-replay, all of which falsify reality in reportage, are in the same category...

...For some reason, the scholar showed the rough-cut reel to a group of Republican senators, and it alarmed the hell out of them...

...The basic principle of the Vice President's strategy is to attack a program that most people haven't seen...

...Of course, it was just one of those ironies of the juxtaposition of bad news and good news that go unreported every day...

...It's true that these tricks distort the game...

...If commercials ran five or ten seconds longer, we might see that wonderful machine stuck in the sand and the beautiful girl walking forlornly off into the sunset in search of a phone booth to call the aaa for a tow truck...

...Anyway, the nation's leading television critic is into a more sophisticated form of criticism...

...So what's on The late Show...

...The network news show is the best defense the human mind has yet invented to keep the masses from getting angry about anything...

...The other night, for example, viewers in the New York area saw a news report about three kids being burned to death in a ghetto fire...

...The senators saw two hours of biased reporting on the Vanderbilt reel...

...Look at what those nasty networks did," a reader of the New York Daily News might have concluded...

...But they don't have to worry about the American people...

...That probably never would have happened if he hadn't given it too much free publicity...

...So what...

...denouncing a perfectly normal procedure...

...The commercials also contribute to a moral obliqueness that may be one of our strengths as a people...

...And Fee Commissioner Nicholas Johnson could not speak without a rebuttal from John M. Couric, vice president-for-public-relations of the National Association of Broadcasters...

...The decisions behind the editing, moreover, are based on criteria that have nothing to do with football...

...Something must happen, I am convinced, when a television viewer hears about a woman being raped in the East Village, a fire in the South Bronx, and then the newscaster says, "We'll be back with the earthquake in Peru after this brief word from our sponsor...

...For example, when a voice-over says you can go to Hawaii with United for only $10 down, he is actually saying you can go on vacation with no money...

...But they're going to make the American people angry if they mess with football on television...

...There is an old Yiddish saying that you should never show fools unfinished work...

...To be fair, whenever the Reverend Billy Graham appears on a talk show, spreading God's word, the producers would have to give equal time to an atheist of Graham's stature, perhaps the Devil himself...

...The Vice President's tactic was working beautifully on CBS'documentary, "The Selling of the Pentagon...

...Was this a sick joke, an innocent senator might have asked...

...it is still there to be read after a distraction...

...Well, I don't know about that...

...The Magruder-Cavett fiasco eventually was traced to the office of Herbert G. Klein, director of communications for the Executive Branch...

...David Brinkley, one of the friends of Hanoi on the Vanderbilt reel, has observed, "A biased opinion is one you don't agree with...

...How bad can anything be if it will go away in a minute...

...The two hours or so of uninterrupted Indochina coverage, the senators said, showed "obvious manifestations and clear evidences of unfairness and distortions...

...Perhaps they even felt manipulated by the media and filled with resolve to do something about this insidious threat undermining the American, or South Vietnamese, position...

...It was a case of overkill...

...the editors are motivated by what they think the viewers might be interested in seeing again and again...

...The kid who rushed up to his father had--thank God!--no cavities, but his father was a fireman...

...The Dick Cavett Show is too widely seen and discussed to be an effective tool for undermining the people's faith in television as a source of information...

...Senator Robert Dole of Kansas added, "Perhaps we should have listened a little closer when Vice President Agnew tried to warn us about the dangers inherent in biased news reporting...

...they use their judgment and single out what they consider the most important points, the second-most important points, etc...

...This gives the impression that there is something wrong with the procedure itself, as in the case of quoting out of context...

...For years now equal time has been something of a national joke...

...As many as 400 television viewers across the nation may have seen all two hours, or part of some of it...

...But CBS' crossed him up by rerunning the special...

...it insisted that Magruder be allowed to appear separately because opponents had been given more time to state their views on past Cavett shows than proponents...