The Politics of the Box Populi

By LANCE MORROW

Time Essay

No one has ever decided what television is really supposed to be for. Is the wondrous box meant to entertain? To elevate? To instruct? To anesthetize? The medium, in its sheer unknowable possibilities, seems to arouse extreme reactions: contempt for its banal condition as the ghetto of the sitcom, or else grandiose metaphysical ambitions for a global village. The tube is Caliban and Prospero, cretin and magician. "What makes television so frightening," writes Critic Jeff Greenfield, "is that it performs all the functions that used to be scattered among different sources of information and entertainment." Television could, if we let it, electronically consolidate all of our culture --theater, ballet, concerts, newspapers, magazines and possibly most conversation. It is a medium of eerie and disconcerting power; one college professor conducted a two-year study that asked children aged four to six: "Which do you like better, TV or Daddy?" Forty-four percent of the kids said that they preferred television.

An old question keeps recurring: Who should control so pervasive a force? A Civil Rights Commission report last winter on the role of minorities on television complained that women, blacks and others, including Hispanics, Pacific Island Americans, American Indians and even Alaskan natives are underrepresented in or virtually absent from TV dramas. Composed in a spirit of bureaucratic pedantry, the report suggested that the Federal Communications Commission should lean on the networks a bit by formulating rules that would "encourage greater diversity."

The argument is simplest if it turns on TV purely as entertainment, with no intent larger than diversion. On that basis, the laissez-faire system of the ratings possesses absolute logic: the people decide, voting with their channel selectors. What works as diversion will presumably be highest rated and therefore most successful. But there is a fallacy here: a laissez-faire principle of rule by ratings would be admirable if a wide variety of choices existed. Too many network shows are devoted almost entirely to exploring new dimensions of imbecility. That seems an old and boringly elitist criticism of TV, but it acquires fresh force, even urgency, if one sits through a few hours of Supertrain, The Ropers and The $1.98 Beauty Show.

Television drama--leaving aside the question of TV news, whose effects are a different phenomenon altogether--becomes more complicated when it is considered as a medium of persuasion, the little electronic proscenium alive with potentially sinister ideological glints. In years past, American TV has been considered a moderately conservative influence. From the suburban complacencies of Ozzie and Harriet through the vanquishing six-gun authority of Sheriff Matt Dillon, TV entertainment seemed an elaborate gloss on the status quo.

A sometime television writer, Ben Stein, claims, on the contrary, to see in TV entertainment an infestation of liberal chic. In The View from Sunset Boulevard, Stein argues that, each night in its prime-time sitcom diet, the vast American TV audience receives near lethal doses of liberalism from a small band of some 200 Hollywood writers and producers, who exercise a preposterously disproportionate influence in TV's almost subliminal channels of opinion making.

The message of this liberal chic, according to Stein, is, among other things, both antibusiness and antimilitary. The thrust of CBS's top-rated MASH, for example, is that the Army is constantly trying to get as many people killed as possible, to burn down villages, to separate loved ones. Small towns fare badly on the tube, according to Stein. The Bad Day at Black Rock syndrome applies: repeated episodes of peaceful, postcard towns in which something terribly evil is afoot.

Despite this interpretation, most programs obey no pat formula. Battlestar Galactica, for example, seems to teach a rigorously militaristic sort of watchfulness; the peacemakers tend to be soft fools with good intentions. On the durable detective show Hawaii Five-O, the hero McGarrett exhibits some of J. Edgar Hoover's least attractive qualities. Many shows are almost entirely innocent of meaning: What is the political content of Mork & Mindy? What can the bizarre Incredible Hulk signify except perhaps an adolescent's fantasies of puissance and rage?

In fact, it would be extremely difficult for a Sunset Boulevard conspiracy to retail a coherent party line even if it wished. Says Michael Jay Robinson, a political scientist at Washington's Catholic University: "Programming is really a sausage--created by grinding together the values of the producers, a few dozen formula plots, network perceptions about audience, and the implied guidelines given by the censors, affiliates, FCC and even the National Association of Broadcasters. And, obviously, the ratings." The National PTA exerts a heavy influence against violence. Since kids so often control the dial, the low audience age dictates a certain level of abject foolishness.

The operating politics of television has an unexpected subtlety. Through the mid-and late '70s, a procession of shows like All in the Family, Maude, Three's Company and Laverne & Shirley has promoted a progressive, permissive, liberalized attitude toward such previously untouchable subjects as premarital sex and homosexuality. But, as Robinson suggests, a complex crisscross may have occurred: while television may indeed have coaxed Americans to shift leftward in social matters, the nation seems at the same time to have moved a bit to the right politically. These movements aside, it may well be that television's greatest consequence has been to impart sheer velocity to ideas and fads. From antiwar protests to disco dancing, such trends tend to start on the coasts and then get transfused with astonishing speed into the life of the heartland between. TV thus serves to obliterate regional and local distinctions, to create national social values.

This powerful national theater does not often rise to its responsibilities. A certain grotesque Gong Show brand of schlock-peddling could be forgiven if it were not for the stupefying dimensions of the American TV habit. The average household's TV set runs six hours a day. Although television does useful service in informing and entertaining, its strange power is bound to arouse a great deal of spiritual disquiet. People may expect too much of TV. It will never replace the printed word as an instrument of thought. Its entertainment side may ultimately be rescued from mediocrity by technological diversifications into cable TV, video-tape recorders, video disc and other elaborate equipment. The new technology will bring a greater selection --and thus a wider, though more personal, choice--to the audience. It is possible, of course, that this could mean that a public already besotted with the tube might become even further enslaved by it.

--Lance Morrow

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