On Television

...That skills and talents, training and experience, might be involved in reporting, in writing, in makingpictures, is of no concern to those who keep balance sheets...

...The people responsible for filling those hours, however, must cope without enough writers to go around, enough directors, actors, stars, or comedians, in short, enough "creative" people...

...American commercial television's half-century as we have known it will have ended...

...The ruling classes believed this acted as a deterrent upon the criminally inclined—that it "concentrated their minds," as Samuel Johnson said...

...opinionators, like Bill O'Reilly...

...It will enable the consumer (formerly the viewer) in his home to pretty much decide what he sees and when he sees it...

...Something more is necessary, albeit something that also doesn't entail recruiting artisans accomplished in projecting two dimensional images on a sheet of glass, images that can draw viewers into accepting their artifice...

...Cable subscribers are provided with the signals of all over-the-air stations in the immediate vicinity and some that are far distant...

...Not yet announced are the additional products of the young swifties who are shepherding the poor old networks through their final hours...

...NBC News has a comparable deal with the Washington Post...

...Until the squeamish recent decades, criminals were executed in public...

...But first every possible nickel must be squeezed to miraculously accomplish each year a greater profit than the year before...

...Except that would require writers and directors and all the rest who have become non grata in television's petulant senescence...

...They then did what they have always done, they imitated...

...Now, not only professionals in broadcasting's electronic palaces but hobbyists in their home electronic workshops edit it like film: assembling, emphasizing, eliding...

...They arrived hours early to secure the best spots, and were tended to by food and gewgaw hawkers who always gathered like flies when such crowds formed...

...This was OK because it meant free advertising for the paper, and even the American Newspaper Publishers Association did not object to that...

...These twilight days are being played out against a rapid increase in the number of actual television outlets, for the bulky equipment originally needed to record, assemble and present programs has gotten inexorably smaller and cheaper...

...Although a couple of competently done series manage to emerge each season, most new programming has for more than a decade been the kind that requires none of the imaginative skills needed to mount a continuing drama, a situation comedy or even a soap opera...

...The bookkeepers who under these hostile circumstances keep the costs down and miraculously deliver more profit this year than last are not concerned with what a program is about so long as there is one...

...Initially at the bottom of the ladder, the local all-news cable channels, then further up at the larger stations reporters have increasingly been required to videotape their own pictures and simultaneously ask questions when there are interviews to be done...

...Growing out of what we now have, it is certainly likely to consist of images transmitted electronically to a transparent surface, but probably will be controlled by akeyboard instead of a dial...

...In the late '20s and early '30s America's daily press saw radio, the rising new medium of the time, as a mortal threat...

...The public reason given to explain the lure such shows have had for network chiefs—often cited by print journalists who think they're in the know about the strange world of television—was that news magazines were cheaperto produce than dramas of equal length and were popular with the young males so sought after by advertisers...

...The other way radio got some news for broadcast in the medium's early stages was through its own wire service, a cooperative of stations and the then infant networks called Trans-Radio Press, which cribbed most of its information from newspapers in its cities...

...A television program packager, charging that the existing rules are exclusionary and discriminatory, might apply through the courts to open up the events to everyone...

...Current schedules, for example, include fewer than half the soap operas they used to...

...They are also responsible for installing and checking lights and microphones...

...For an extra fee, they can receive special interest channels featuring uncensored and uninterrupted movies, boxing and wrestling matches, rock concerts, and other entertainments...

...Television news is being deprofessionalized...

...It helped, but ABC still leads the pack...

...Another of the genre is recording the struggle for survival of contestants marooned on a desert island...

...Radio stations wanting to present some sort of news had to get it by arrangement with local papers that provided both news summaries and reporters possessing suitably dramatic voices, who broadcast from their newsrooms while clicking and clanking provided an authentic background...

...Nothing will be free...

...Indeed, it has been so miniaturized that it can fit in the display window of a drugstore...

...They left out that no budding Shakespeares or Hitchcocks are needed to get them on the air...

...Toll-free phone numbers have become sources of revenue along with Procter & Gamble and General Motors...

...As for the news, the cable news channels are not equally energetic about covering it, but they all give a lot of time to programs that talk about it...

...COUNTING the networks, the stations and all the cable services, there may be up to a hundred times as many hours to be programmed as there were, say, on this date in 1980...

...Why not...

...So their first response was to salt those periods with three or four weekly versions of news magazine shows—graceless copies of CBS' long-established, enticingly profitable 60 Minutes...

...Its negative consequence could easily be that, robbed of competing picture coverage, each news program or service will have as the basis for its audience appeal only the physical attributes and public acceptability of its anchorperson, who, empowered by this great economizing innovation, will be able to negotiate for a few more millions...

...Another down-at-heels Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson, an unemployed David Mamet or Harold Pinter, might have spared us Jerry Springer...

...The audience potential is awesome...

...Not skill but shrewd calculation and abdication of taste must generate today's new offerings...

...The geometric expansion in the number of outlets may not have produced a shortage of bookkeepers, but it hasn't sufficiently increased the number of skilledpractitioners of the creative crafts...

...A typical Westchester bar mitzvah boasts better and more video accouterments than any NBC studio I worked in during the early '50s...

...Public television, the commercial networks and some cable channels now aggressively promote the sale of videocassette copies of the program you have just seen...

...For the poor, public executions were rare entertainment...

...The Radio and Television News Directors Association and various press clubs might enter briefs as friends of the court citing "the people's right to know...

...troops were sent to kill American defectors...

...and what required a network's major capital investment is today a suitable, affordable gift for the holiday season...

...The cost-consciousness that motivates the new owners of old stations and managers of cable empires dictates this method of news coverage by what are known in the trade as "one-man bands...

...Or three or four chairs, even if one of them is on another continent...

...A brisk trade existed briefly in weekly magazines that published program listings, the ancestors of TV Guide...

...Talk shows and discussions trying to explain news could not churn up audiences of the size the networks must have for their prime time hours...

...Having hesitated since the scandals of the '50s to revive big money quiz shows, and not being quite as desperate as ABC to increase audience, NBC, CBS and Fox were outmaneuvered...

...Not without additional payment...

...Their announcement left dangling whether CNN and NBC, with their much wider reach through cable networks here and abroad, might be invited to join in this cost-reducing victory of sensible bookkeepers against obsessively competitive journalists...

...It was therefore decided to turn to shrewd and cynical formulas that manipulate the least admirable traits of the public...

...there haven't been many of them for quite a while...

...From serving for half a century as the justification for commercial television's right to exist, news has been transformed into simply another of the medium's program categories, like Westerns or cop shows or hospital dramas...

...This year, in line with Engels' observation that when history repeats itself it is not quite the same, ABC, CBS and Fox News have arranged to share videotape pictures of news events...

...the hours of "warmup" time are barely memories...

...If anyone can do it everyone will...

...For a while the news magazines did very well, but lately their audiences have begun to go elsewhere, eliciting from the rajahs of the magic box the usual responses: erratic scheduling, truncated time periods, and reduced access to the network's promotion apparatus...

...The marriage recently led to awkward public embarrassment for the famously self-regarding staff of Time magazine when it reprinted the cable network's virtually uncorroborated claim that during the Vietnam War U.S...

...The rationale behind combining video coverage is that all pictures of a fire, or a news conference, or a new Italian government going up and down stairs, are practically the same...

...For years newspapers not only refused to print program listings but actually prevented the Associated Press and United Press from selling their services to broadcasters...

...Whatever he chooses, though, will have a price...

...During the spring and summer of 1999, the mighty Disney corporation saw its stock bartered, in part because the ratings of ABC television were in a virtual free fall...

...The networks have met the creativity drought in a different way than the local stations and the cable channels: by settling for inferior material, just as professional football and baseball did after making room for all those expansion teams...

...Now 70 or 80 years later, television has gone through most of its life cycle and reached its final period of decadence...

...the new jackpot game sucked away their viewers and annihilated their schedules...

...With dizzying frequency, too, new devices are announced that will unite in the same box the Internet, whatever form TV shows will take, and a telephone...

...Indeed, a few deaths might bring network television back to life...

...Inside the Time Warner media empire, the staffs of what used to be Henry Luce's magazines are in synergy—that treacherous word—with CNN...

...The programs show it...

...Saturday night, once one of commercial TV's golden periods, has become the networks' vast commercial wasteland because so many people who used to tune in are instead watching rented videotaped movies on their VCRs...

...ABC News and the New York Times have agreed to share editorial resources for programs like 20/20...

...Anyone canmake television pictures...

...That is, no consumer will go to his local dealer, buy a receiving device, plug it into a wall socket in his study or living room and expect to see something...

...Showing Millionaire three times a week, it invariably occupies three slots among each week's 10 most popular programs, and more often than not the top three...

...After videotape arrived in the '60s, it took a skilled professional an hour to make four edits...

...At least one of them must have pointed out to his superiors the irrefutable audience appeal of seeing someone die...

...Thus American commercial network television, born by authority of the Federal Communications Commission in the spring of 1948 so that it could cover the upcoming national political conventions, is staggering to what everyone both inside and outside the field concedes is its imminent demise...

...It might be logical to expect the fading news magazines to be replaced by cowboy series...

...But you cannot fill 22 hours a week of network prime time with quiz shows...

...The common denominator of those programs is their low production costs...

...Given the recent rise in the number of executions and the attraction the television camera has for governors and other officials, it should not be hard to arrange that enough states schedule their executions on the same day of the week, at the same hour of the day—prime time, of course —so the producers could have a regularly scheduled weekly series...

...What could be cheaper than a table and two chairs...

...Our laws still make obeisance to the idea of public execution, requiring the presence of certain witnesses...

...Then, in August, ABC bought the rights to a British quiz show called Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and not only reversed Disney's fortunes but forced change on all network television...

...Many of public TV's programs are in effect commercials for themselves...

...or shouters, like John McLaughlin, who used to be a Jesuit priest, and Chris Matthews, who used to be a liberal Democrat...

...In fact, there are clear signs that cable is supplanting broadcast television...

...There are insinuators, like Geraldo Rivera...

...The goal here, too, is attracting the biggest possible audience, and that is governed largely by the style and personality of the host...

...Its positive result, besides saving money, could be that people in the news, the exalted who flourish in the spotlight as well as the humble who are thrust into it stammering nervously, will not be forced to face the intimidating battery of cameras and microphones that have become today's journalistic hue and cry...

...And the most successful premium cable service proclaims many times a day, "IT'S NOT TV IT'S HBO...

...This will continue until that ultimate moment when the executives review the separation clauses in their contracts as the helots mail out resumes...

...The time the soaps once occupied has been given over to talk programs featuring a host bantering with someone promoting a book or movie, to make-believe judges adjudicating real but trivial disputes, and to the many manifestations.of "reality" in which the life crises of the poorest and least educated are cynically paraded...

...Already programs have been announced that will show what hidden cameras see as they spy on ordinary people doing mundane things around the house...

...Meanwhile, in less than two decades almost every sizable American city—despite usually boasting three commercial network stations, a public one and a few independents—has seen the addition of outlets of three more commercial networks (one major, two minor), plus the availability of cable channels by the dozen in more than nine out of lOhomes...

...The imitators put heavy emphasis on unsolved crimes, official malfeasance, exclusive interviews with miscreants, and the occasional sob story that had or had not yet made it to the supermarket tabloids...

...There is no paying everybody for rehearsal time, no painting of backdrops for each new scene, no rewrites, no casting problems, no music royalties...