Violence on the Air

...Hamlet runs it a close second," and "There is haftlly a book or a play that would be considered a classic . . . that doesn't extend human emotion to the point of violence...

...Over the years their power has made itself felt in the White House, the FCC, and the Congress—authorities which, at least until this year, let the networks have their way...

...Like the Pied Piper, the industry has lured tens of millions of human beings, including millions, of little children, into a vicarious world more violent than any...

...Those in policy-making roles in the television industry have tended to uphold program content, while those who follow their dicta—notably writers and producers—have attacked progam quality, often with astonishing bitterness...

...In another two years, they'll be entirely out of prime time...

...Much to the surprise of CBS and NBC network officials, practically all of their beefed-up public service time has been bought by sponsors, who sense an increased public interest in this type of program...

...To charge a channel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with violation of the NAB Seal for showing a crime show forced on it by New York is ludicrous...

...Said Minow: "I invite you to sit down in front of your television set . . . You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western badmen, Western goodmen, private eyes, gangsters, and cartoons...

...He will also obstruct progress in the form of changes recommended by Minow and the Senate, notably the licensing of the networks, a move that is anathema to the industry...

...No Hearst ever wielded the power of a Sarnoff...

...One might as well blame the steering wheel when the driver makes an illegal turn...

...But the public and the advertiser may be one move ahead of the broadcasters...

...Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Abraham Ribicoff has announced that 1959 marked the eleventh consecutive year in which court delinquency cases and police arrests of juveniles increased over the previous year...

...The letters from Wauseon are but part of a vast flood of mail—about a quarter of a million pieces—which has inundated the offices of FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow, the Federal marshal deputized by President Kennedy to bring law and order to that new frontier of American life, our violent airwaves...

...Directing these efforts is NAB President Leroy Collins, a former Florida governor whose deft chairmanship of the Democratic National Convention last year was as impressive and polished a performance as TV viewers enjoyed in the days before Playhouse 90 and Studio One were dropped because they lacked "mass audience appeal...

...its profits'are made from mayhem...

...It is not every day that spokesmen for an industry in which Omnibus has no place have retained Homer as counsel for the defense...

...no publishing empire ever reached so many millions so often and so intimately...

...Only one has ever lost the seal, and it was because of false advertising rather than programming of violence...

...On the other side of Michigan Boulevard, in the offices of Chicago's Daily News, which runs no TV outlet, television fare is "cheap and brutal and vicious and simply not good enough for us" and it "corrupts the minds of little children...

...Minow, a thirty-five-year-old attorney who formerly shared the Chicago offices of Adlai Stevenson, is an affable, thickfeatured egghead whose horn-rimmed focus has disconcerted fearful network executives to the point of launching a "get Minow" movement...

...The new NAB gambit to establish an enforcement office to police individual broadcasters must be inspiring mirth in some quarters...

...Even the most cursory observer will note that the indexes of juvenile crime—which President Kennedy has stated is costing the nation $5 billion annually— have taken their most pronounced and alarming upturn since the advent of television...

...When comedian George Jessel gagged that his mother has changed her line from "Every morning I bring the violets" to "Every morning I bring the violence," an ABC vice president, Thomas W. Moore, asserted his network endeavors to avoid misplaced sympathy for villains and that sociologists have not proved a link exists between television's badmen and the national crime rate...

...Half of prime evening time has been surrendered to cowboys, killers, and private eyes...

...To date, TV's gestures of reform are grossly unconvincing...

...While this work does not blame TV for anti-social behavior-, it does contend that the medium contributes to "damaging and stunting" of the emotional lives of some children addicted to it...

...To the network chiefs, there is nothing sacred on TV, unless it is the sop thrown to religion in the form of a Sunday morning hymnal or a sign-off sermon...

...They made a strong case against the TV industry yielding such a thick chunk of its time to violence glorifying crime...

...While publicized as a> "moderate" among reactionary Gulf State governors, his tenure in Tallahassee was virtually unblemished by the "stain" of integration, although school districts elsewhere in Dixie were opening their doors to Negro pupils...

...In his testimony, the NAB head denied any link between crime and TV and then announced that "violence for the sake of violence . . . which seriously downgrades the television art" should be eliminated through "the efforts of the broadcasters themselves...

...the needs of informing a nation go unmet...

...The response of the nation's press to the effect of such fare on nearly 180 million Americans clustered around fifty-five million TV sets an average of five hours daily, seems to depend on whether or not the publisher owns a TV channel...

...Collins, a suave, handsome, and convinc ing salesman, is a past master of the smokescreen technique...

...Bureau of Prisons, reveals that one quarter of those interviewed believed such programs "were in some way responsible for their conflict with the law...

...And most of all, boredom . . . And if you think I exaggerate, try it...

...Collins said that much has already been done and that the NAB had agreed to his suggestion to open an enforcement office...

...It is doubtful that the FCC will be content with the mild slap on the wrists which Collins proposes for the TV industry...

...Television is a sick industry, and a strong likelihood exists that it is communicating its sickness to a disturbed society in a disturbed age...

...It is piety of this sort which has given the hearings their unreal, otherworld atmosphere...

...When one considers that the average child between three and sixteen years of age spends as much time in front of the TV sets as in the classroom, and that about four million children in this age group watch The Untouchables, it is difficult to doubt the seriousness of the impact...

...If the nation does not license the networks and" establish and enforce a set of standards in the name of the general welfare, it has no right to expect better treatment at the hands of the NAB, whose Seal of Good Practices will likely be ignored by those who create and disseminate the violence which fills our homes and probably our streets...

...Minow's blunt cadences are still graying hairs among network chiefs grown accustomed to an FCC whose putty-like "public" servants kowtowed to an industry in which the public interest had, and still has, virtually no place...

...the other stabbed his principal with a five-inch-blade, "intending to kill...

...Perhaps one of the best is Television in the Lives of Our Children, recently brought out by Stanford University...

...The protests of mothers and minority groups are ignored...

...Violence ON THE AIR by SHERWOOD ROSS IN THE QUIET, tree-shaded town of Wauseon, Ohio, a typical small midwestern farm community, a grieving mother broke the news of an uncle's death to her three-year-old son, who inquired: "Who shot him...

...One youth knifed a twelve-year-old girl to death on a school bus...

...It worked...

...no newspaper chain ever determined taste as does a network...

...NBC announced plans for a Saturday newscast designed for teenagers...

...Clara S. Logan, president of the National Association for Better Radio and Television, testified to an upturn in crime shows during hours when the number of children viewers is greatest...

...The danger is that the networks, trimming sail as usual during the current storm of protest, will tack back to their old course once the public outcry subsides...

...Knowing that the child's presumption of violence sprang from his addiction to television, the distressed woman wrote an angry letter to the Federal Communications Commission...

...He noted that these indexes have more than doubled since 1948, although the juvenile population has increased by less than one half...

...Ralph J. Garry, Boston University professor of educational psychology, testified that surveys reveal widespread violation of the NAB Code provision on crime...

...In his opening statement, Senator Dodd reminded the networks that violence-packed shows have tripled since Fellows testified for "good taste and judgment...

...Yet they see no causeandeffect relationship between what they show on the screen and the increasing addiction of young people to cheap violence...

...Its promises are made of paper...

...Purportedly, this office would compel the 380 of 534 United States TV stations which subscribe to the NAB Code to abide by its tenets or face loss of the NAB Seal of Good Practices...

...Which exists even in our time...

...In one week, she said, the Association counted 144 murders, fifty-two "justifiable" homicides, several massacres, and other assorted gore pumped into the Los Angeles area on shows broadcast before nine p.m...

...If TV's role in disgorging cheap violence in American living rooms is incontestable, the question of its effect on the public is not easily answered...

...George Polk, of Batten, Barton, Durstine, & Osborne, told Time: "The networks put the public service shows on this year to get the government off their backs...

...These remarks of the late Harold Fellows, NAB president, were seconded by the vice presidents of CBS and NBC...

...While we do not have any firm evidence of a causal relation to TV," he said, "we do know both boys had free access to their TV sets and spent considerable time watching pictures of crime and violence . . . We have never had anything like these cases in this county before...

...Across the nation today, millions of Americans are haunted by the growing suspicion that TV violence has a corrosive effect on the public conscience in general, and on juveniles in particular...

...Spokesmen for twentyone million Italian-Americans protested vigorously against The Untouchables, but the show goes on...

...The officials of the unlicensed and unregulated networks are men who live outside the law, not by their design but by our failure...

...One authority, Robert H. MacRae, director of the Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago, feels that TV, along with the other mass media, has cheapened human life and personality...

...Probably the most incisive statement yet read into the Subcommittee record was that of Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review, who observed: "The TV operators made all sorts of claims about the power of their medium to sell all sorts of goods...

...Feared loss of the seal hardly keeps broadcasters awake nights...

...They boast about the ease with which they dominate the fashions of teen-agers just by having TV stars dress in a certain way...

...His view got a literary lift from Warner Brothers, where the Old West profitably lingers on, if only in thirty-minute celluloid segments...

...In the past, the network chiefs have incontestably influenced a nation which had no choice but to tolerate their caprice...

...The Association also claimed that NBC shows monitored in the City of the Angels revealed a 500 per cent increase in killings during a spring week in 1958 compared to a like period six years earlier...

...Only six years ago, industry officials summoned to Washington argued eloquently that the NAB's Television Code Review Board possessed machinery to act "quickly and effectively" in a manner that would justify national confidence in broadcasters to regulate themselves with respect to "good taste and judgment," yet without "limiting in any sense the arena for creative thought...

...Milton G. Rector, executive director of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, says TV is stimulating American youth to aggressive behavior while glamorizing "the criminal who has prospered for many years before his downfall in the last three minutes of the program...

...In the face of the barrage laid down by Minow, Dodd, segments of the press, pressure groups, and the public, the TV industry has been waging an impressive rearguard action, yielding ground grudgingly and concealing its retreat with a thick smokescreen of new promises and holy vows...

...The "option time" rule which compels network affiliates to program the gore demanded by the networks and Madison Avenue means that an individual station is not the master of its own house...

...It was only one of 330 such letters written by residents of surrounding Fulton County, a conservative, and once placid community recently stunned by two stabbings perpetrated by thirteen-year-old boys...

...Perhaps it is a revealing gauge of the TV industry's sense of reality that Orr, whose studios grind out Cheyenne, a series noted for bizarre tortures, can compare such flicks to the Bible...

...The editors of Christian Century magazine, for instance, have documented at least one case in which a young grocery clerk looted the till shortly after viewing a Hitchcock presentation...

...If network officials took Minow's advice, it was not evident in their testimony before the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, headed by Senator Thomas J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat...

...Nevertheless public service shows, at least as far as the networks are concerned, appear to be on the way out...

...The domination of the networks has been as great on Pennsylvania Avenue as on Main°Street...

...According to a Chicago Tribune critic, whose paper operates WGN-TV, the Top Ten listed above are popular because "people prefer passion, conflict, excitement, and daring in their drama...

...This fresh evidence of broken faith stirred up widespread antagonism among the press and public, resulting in still more unkept pledges for reform by network officials, and the skeptical approach of the Subcommittee chairman...

...Does the public count...

...Its architects of program content have left shanties, not skyscrapers, as memorials to themselves...

...And, endlessly, commercials— many screaming, cajoling, and offending...

...An impartial viewpoint is hard to come by...

...He charged that crime programs appearing on prime viewing time increased from sixteen per cent in 1954 to fifty per cent in 1961...

...For all the public outcry) the Congressional inquiries, the letters of protest, and the FCC warning, this season's television appears to be "the bloodiest ever...

...SHERWOOD ROSS is a free lance writer who has been making a special study of radio and television in the United States...

...CBS reportedly rejected one episode of Gunsmoke until its West Coast contractor reshot an objectionable scene...

...If the network officials have their way, Collins will protect the public from the "unnecessary and undeserving" violence he concedes afflicts the airwaves...

...Moreover, ABC, said to sponsor "the cheapest type of programs," does not subscribe to the NAB Code or covet its seal, and the other networks have not takenthe Code seriously...

...In order of popularity, these programs were Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, The Real McCoys, Have Gun, Will Travel, 77 Sunset Strip, Danny Thomas, Perry Mason, Candid Camera, Ed Sullivan, and The Untouchables...

...This pronouncement, however, sounds no more impressive than the 1955 NAB pledge to "broaden the monitoring operation...

...In the current debate over TV violence and TV licensing, the manner in which these powerful men have abused their power and -broken faith with the public ought not be forgotten...

...A stronger point of view, one much in keeping with Rector's, is that television crime shows lead directly to criminal behavior...

...A poll of inmates in two Federal youth institutions reported by James V. Bennett, director of the U.S...

...Now the networks are sneaking them out as fast as they can...

...The NAB then announced it was contemplating a step-up of its "juvenile responsibility program" and "broadening of its monitoring operation," among other things, and no more came of the matter until last year's ubiquitous outbreak of crime shows...

...Yet even this encouraging development does little to cure the basic sickness in television programming...

...Like many other Fulton County residents, its prosecuting attorney, John H. Barber, has nailed his indictment to the door of the television industry...

...much of the remainder is devoted to cheap situation comedies...

...Senator Dodd's witnesses for the public consisted of a parade of authorities ranging from sociologists and criminologists to TV writers and directors...

...For them, there are no laws, nor will there be, unless the President and the Congress take action...

...There may be considerable merit in this approach if one considers that six of TV's Top Ten rated programs last year, viewed weekly by thirty to forty-five million persons, trafficked in violence...

...The studio's William T. Orr, vice president in charge of production, likened today's TV to Homer, the Bible, and Shakespeare, on grounds that "Macbeth has murder in every act...

...Their unrest dates back to Minow's brash, history-making "vast wasteland" address before the National Association of Broadcasters last May, a literary affront unsurpassed in New Frontier phrase - making...