Loose Links (Friday)
¶ What's wrong with television? Let's hear what other people have to say. Googling the phrase "what's wrong with television" brought up a few interesting links; here are four from the first ten. In History Today (but in an issue from 2002), Tom Stearn analyses what's wrong with history programs. He seems to think that producers could do better, but his arguments suggest otherwise.
¶ In an interview with his publisher, Jeffrey Sheuer, author of The Sound Bite Society, gives his answer to the question:
One really has to ask, "What's wrong with television and politics, or television and society," because they are totally intertwined. I'm not ferociously anti-television, but I do think it is generally bad for children and their viewing should be limited and closely monitored. But my specific prescriptions are more political. They include reversing Buckley Vs Valeo, the terrible Supreme Court decision in 1976 that equated campaign spending with freedom of speech; revoking the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which purported to be about increasing competition, but which in fact only accelerated the concentration of media ownership and further dampened competition; and an excellent idea of Lawrence Grossman and others, to replace public television as we know it with an information "freeway" on the superhighway. The bottom line is this: television is overwhelmingly commercialized, which limits its value and makes it a dangerous tool of political inequality instead of an arena of democratic conversation.
I couldn't agree more about overturning Buckley v. Valeo; it's the Dred Scott decision of our times.
¶ On a site called Deep DT's Pages, the question is the title. DT reasons that television needs to be more exciting than ordinary life, or people wouldn't watch it. "This need to be larger, more exciting than life and to constantly maintain peoples attention from minute to minute leads to the television that we know and hate - the fake, false nonsense that poisons our minds."
¶ On a page belonging to Superman.ws, "Smallville" cast member John Schneider seems to want to go back to "Father Knows Best."
Schneider observed that on television, parents are not given the respect they're due. Instead they're usually depicted as "the dumb people in the house." "If it weren't for the innate intelligence of their teenage son or daughter they would never be able to make it through the day." It's this lack of respect for authority, and for the institution of parenthood, that Schneider thinks is most damaging. "Far beyond the language or even visual content, this is really what's wrong with television."
That line of criticism is as old as television. Almost all of these positions would favor some kind of censorship (or self-censorship) if only "censorship" weren't a per se bad thing. This implies a belief in the possibility of good television that I don't share. Television can be entertaining, certainly, and it can certainly help pass the time. But it is inherently flawed, because we are not wired to cope with it, as I shall argue in a little while. (See the Against Television archives.
