The power of the box
That’s what the telly men are trying to hide, says Milton Shulman
There is a curious compulsion among those who work in TV to deprecate the importance of the medium. Conscious, perhaps, of the frustrations they encounter — the gap between promise and performance; their inability to make the medium meaningful they fall back on the easy out that TV is intractably and, of necessity, a repository for the trivial.
On the highest level, this eagerness to belittle the small screen is understandable. After all, if TV were as significant, as important, as powerful, as dominating a social force as some claim it is, what society in its right senses would allow the people who now run it to remain in charge?
If it were decisively proved that TV was the major element in creating a society that was ungovernable by contemporary standards; that TV was largely responsible for the creation of an anarchic, violent and insensitive state; that TV possessed more truly-educative potential than all the the universities and primary schools put together, would we be content to allow the shaping, direction and destiny of such a social juggernaut to be determined bv men like Lord Hill, Lord Aylestone, Mr. Fox and Sir Sir Lew Grade?
Conditioner
Even Lord Hill, Lord Aylestone, Mr. Fox and Sir Lew would, I suspect, modestly agree that they have not the intellectual, or administrative, equipment to control the most important conditioning force mankind has ever devised—more important that school, family, church or neighbourhood.
Their justification for being where they are is that TV is nothing like this powerful, and terrifying, medium I have conjured up
It is a peripheral, uninvolved, insignificant transmitter of entertainment news and advertisements, they argue — and any reasonable man, with some show-biz sense and an ability to keep our of serious controversy, can run it without much trouble. So why not us?
Unfortunately for them, there is a growing uneasiness that TV may be something more significant than a national yo-yo. At the moment, for example, the charge they are most eager to refute is that the box is in some way responsible for the spread of violence — particularly student and minority violence — in Britain and America.
Ignorance
Hiding behind a plea of ignorance, the TV hierarchy claims there is no research “methodology” to discover the link between TV and violence. They therefore feel they have a clear conscience in going on doing what they have always been doing.
Another charge they are eager to contradict is that the medium plays any influential part in the creation of political attitude, or that it favours one political system as opposed to another.
Television is probably the only institution mankind has ever devised that not only strives to be a eunuch but actually is proud of it.
An official of NBC, the American broadcasting corporation, recently boasted that “NBC was never in the vanguard of anything.”
In Britain it is the devout wish of most senior TV executives that every political fact or event that is transmitted can be guaranteed neutralised to the point of nullity; germfree of controversy and balanced to the verge of immobile sterility.
No surprise
A book published this week, THE HALF SHUT EYE (Macmillan, 35s.) should please all those who believe that an ostrich-like posture is the proper stance for TV, with its head in the sand and only its backside available for judging outside responses.
Written by Mr. John Whale, it is no surprise to discover that he has been in the business. From 1964 to 1968 he was ITN’s political correspondent in London and Washington and, therefore, had an admirable opportunity to observe the part TV was playing in such traumatic political experiences as tne British General Elections of 1964 and 1966 as well as the 1968 Presidential Election in America.
As a factual record of the way in which TV has been used to enhance or deprecate, political figures and parties over the past decade or so, the book has some merit.
Basic error
But his grandiose deduction from these events — that TV has been overrated as a political force; that it plays only a minimal role in the choice of political leaders — that it has only a marginal impact in determining political attitudes — is based upon a dubious series of sweeping generalisations, unproved assumption and short-sighted historical perspective.
Probably his basic error is to discount the tiny number of years that TV has actually been in existence. “So long after the beginning of the TV age,” he writes, “no politician has yet been elected to high office chiefly because of TV, in America or anywhere else.”
So long? The astonishing feature about TV is what an infant it is in the communications world. Regular TV broadcasting is only 22 years old in Britain and America.
Assuming that a baby was first allowed to get a conscious reaction from a TV screen at the age of two, there is not yet one generation of voters that was born at the beginning of consistent TV transmission.
Who knows what TV has done to their political attitudes since they haven’t started to express them? Judging from the riots in universities, there is some evidence that they don’t think the same way about political institutions as their fathers or grandfathers did.
Mr. Whale himself cites statistics that show that TV only became a mass medium in America in 1955, when there was one set to every six people. The same density of TV watchers did not appear in Britain until 1958. From a mass viewpoint, then, the generation of voters who might be said to have been really conditioned by the small screen are still in their teens.
Reverse
Pushing his tenuous case for pooh-poohing TV, Mr. Whale claims that there is little evidence that telegenic considerations had much to do with choosing either Humphrey or Nixon as Presidential candidates or Heath, as opposed to Maudling, as leader of the Tories — or even Wilson over George Brown as leader of the Labour Party.
The very reverse is probably the case. No political party in their right mind would today select as leader someone who was obviously bad on the box. The choice that parties in Britain and America have had to make is between two performers of about the same skill on the small screen.
It is probably arguable that George Brown’s excessive bon-homie, and rambling irrelevance in the speech he made on TV on the night of John Kennedy’s assassination shifted enough Labour MPs’ votes away from him as to destroy his chances of leading the party.
An easy test about the change TV has made in the choice of political leaders is to ask oneself whether it would have been possible, in the telly age, for Harding, Coolidge or Hoover to have become President of the Unted States. Or Bonar Law, Neville Chamberlain or Attlee to become British Prime Minister?
And, in discussing Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s tenure of office, Mr. Whale belittles the import of TV on his career without once mentioning the BBC satire shows which must have seriously influenced those youthful and marginal and floating voters who, in the final analysis, make or break governments.
Mr. Whale, alas, has his nose so firmly fixed to the minutiae of current affairs and news programmes that he cannot examine their impact in their total context.
The mosaic of TV — its triviality, its breeding of scepticism about institutions, its questioning of the past, its glorification of violence, its denigration of authority — are creating the true, authentic political attitudes of the future.
The fact that political parties will adjust to these attitudes and colour them red, blue or pink is the real significance of TV’s poltical stature.
Whether, in the short run, a good speech, a fortuitous incident of a photogenic politician garners votes is of minimal importance.
