Television's Web
Schorr, Daniel
BOOKS Television's Web INSIDE PRIME TIME by Todd Gitlin Pantheon. 369 pp. $16.95. by Daniel Schorr Television is coming to replace government as an authority figure and. therefore, a target of...
...back to Love Boat...
...trying to talk about war without talking about war...
...Yes, Gitlin asserts, it matters because television's "weightless images usurp the space of popular culture," because "the network product crowds out what could be more intelligent, complicated, true, beautiful, or public spirited...
...Television has probably rewired the collective nervous system, making discontinuity the norm of perception...
...Television also overreacted to the boycott threats of the "Far Righteous" before discovering that the likes of Jerry Falwell commanded far less support than thev claimedBy the fall of 1981, Gitlin reports, "the word was going around L.A...
...There is a serious political and ideological consequence of this basically apolitical and unideological industry...
...And so it stands to reason that years of television, cumulatively, seep into the imagination in ways more sweeping than any simple influence on behavior...
...Television is as familiar to infants and illiterates as it is to the educated...
...It has its own factionalism and cronyism...
...television's images can shape childhood's cultural landscape more intensely than the literature of secular cultures...
...It has developed its own system of one-bid contracts and revolving-door executives...
...Gitlin is to be commended for this stunningly written, devotedly researched study of massive mindlessness...
...Most of the shows failed...
...It throws money at ill-comprehended problems...
...Television is not trying to do any of these things...
...That is the cumulative effect on thinking and behavior...
...that the tilt towards the Right had been a mistake...
...Haunted by the knowledge that one rating point is worth $50 million over a year's time, they search desperately for the winning combination of star and script...
...the growing role of the agent as impresario, packager, and producer...
...Distrusting their own taste—those who have taste—they try everything...
...imitate or duplicate a success (producing a thousand clones) and the mortgaging of air time in prospective years to producers peddling desirable programs (guaranteeing future shlock...
...One man-els at the compulsion to Daniel Schorr is senior correspondent for the Cable Sews Network in Washington, DC...
...Television, as practiced in this country today, has a further impact even graver than its cultural and political insults...
...So, back to fantasy and escapism...
...Does it matter that television executives argue that "the public pays for what it is interested in" without, as Gitlin observes, being willing to acknowledge that people "cannot choose what they do not know exists...
...Above all, it is obsessed with popularity, frantically seeking majority support, fearing the disaffection of its public constituency...
...Consider these astonishing figures...
...whom he interviewed...
...Uncertainty is the permanent condition" of prime-time television, controlled by "a little society at one with itself," Gitlin learned in listening to some 200 of its functionaries, high and low...
...As one who knows something about television news but little about the show-biz stage it shares, I found it eye-opening to discover how this entertainment world functions—its hard and soft sells, its culture of ingratiation...
...Does it matter that this vast entertainment industry, pursuing the elusive common denominator, lowers that denominator by its very search...
...Having first concluded that the Vietnam war was a taboo subject, television ventured timorously into the battlefield with formulas emulating A/M'S...
...All it is trying to do is to "hook" us, and it does that and more...
...It has spawned its own inert, self-protective bureaucracy and adopted its own buck-passing...
...They pore over surveys that tell them nothing...
...In a typical year, some 3,000 ideas produce 100 scripts, from which twenty-five "pilots" are developed, of which five or ten end up in the program schedule, of which maybe one or two will survive an initial season...
...In Inside Prime Time, Gitlin generalizes the issue this way: "Television violence can kindle violence in the real world...
...But television got it wrong...
...therefore, a target of public resentment, The epithets once re* served for government—unresponsive, insensitive, arrogant, and manipulative—are being redeployed against "the media...
...About a third of the way through Inside Prime Time...
...An NBC vice president said, "Most people do not put on television what they personally like any more than executives in Detroit make cars that they personally like...
...Then television decided that perhaps it was best "to leave America's ugliest war in the closet" as it set off in pursuit of a perceived demand for law-and-order shows...
...But culture and aesthetics are not the only victims of the mindless quest for the rating point...
...The law-and-order shows mostly bombed...
...He found them generally unable to explain what they were doing...
...1 realized that this industry has also come in some ways to resemble the government it is supplanting...
...Todd Gitlin's masterful dissection of network television...
Vol. 48 • April 1984 • No. 4
