-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Evolution of Mass Culture In America - 1877 to the Present
Gerald R. Baydo, Editor
The Forum Press, Inc.©1982
Arlington Heights, Illinois 60004
ISBN 0-88273-260-9
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Television —
Reflection of Modern America
James C. Williams
The end of the Second World War found most Americans riding a crest of
affluence hardly dreamed of in the 1930s. Together individuals and
corporations had saved more than $48 billion during the war years, thus
stimulating an unexpected postwar economic boom. Most Americans chose to
ignore the problems festering under the surface-international instabilities,
race relations, persistent poverty, and urban decay. Millions of people moved
upward into a middle-class way of life which included ranch-style homes,
leisurely weekends, automobiles, boats, trailers, expensive hobbies, air
conditioning, and pre-packaged foods. Prominent among new products available
to Americans was television.
Originally developed during the 1920s, television was introduced commercially
by RCA at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Although the war cut short the new
media's growth, RCA rushed TV sets on the market soon after the 1945 Japanese
surrender. By late 1948 the Federal Communications Commission had issued 108
station licenses, but wave spectrum interference problems and the lack of
continental TV cables and microwave relays slowed television's growth.
Nevertheless, the media's popularity was evident. In 1951 cities having TV
stations reported movies, nightclubs, and sports events were suffering
audience losses. jukebox and taxi receipts dropped, and radio listening
declined substantially. Network radio sponsors were ready to switch to
television when American Telephone and Telegraph Company completed nationwide
cables and relay stations in 1952. The countdown for TV passed its final
stage.
A scramble to open stations followed the solution to interference problems,
and by the end of 1952 over nineteen million TV sets were tuned to I Love
Lucy, Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town, Arthur Godfrey's Friends, and the
Philco Television Playhouse. Of America's homes 46 percent had "the tube,"
launching a new age in communications media. By the end of the decade
almost90 percent of America's homes had a TV, and by the 1970s New York State
courts had ruled that TV-along with tools, pots and pans, and prosthetic
devices-was an essential necessity of life and as such beyond the reach of
creditors. More homes had a TV than had indoor plumbing, refrigerators, and
telephones. Indeed, 45 percent had two or more sets in 1978.
Television has grown so rapidly that there has hardly been time to examine
its significance. Critics of the media have generally pointed to its negative
impact upon Americans. They have argued that TV made Americans passive; it
eroded important differences in regions and social classes; violence on the
screen prompted an increase in real world violence; children raised on TV
grew up as illiterates; and TV conditioned us to seek simple, formulized
solutions for problems. Marshall McLuhan bravely saw TV as a positive force,
reshaping the very nature of humankind and making us all inhabitants of a
"global village." Now we are beginning to see that television, both as an
industry and in its programming, is as much a reflector as it is a
conditioner of society. In and behind the flickering images we see are many
facets of our urban-industrial world, our political and economic System, our
nation's international role, and our values.
The urban-industrial environment in which modern Americans live has
profoundly disconnected people from the natural world. We are no longer
personally involved with the nuances of nature, its plant and animal life.
The steel and concrete architecture of our cities and the repeated sameness
of our suburbs has come to stand between us and our primary experiences with
nature. Even the rural areas have felt this mediation of experience at
secondhand, as single crops replaced the diversity of natural environments.
Urban life often has seemed an abstraction, a sort of arbitrary
reconstruction of reality. Single-family homes and apartments separated
Americans in both social and physical distance from places of work and the
decisive political and economic centers of society. Our lives thrust toward
mobile, fragmented privatization. "Broadcasting in its applied form,"
observed Raymond Williams, "was a social product of this distinctive
tendency." The central transmitter broadcasting images to domestic sets
provided "a whole social intake" to privatized homes. Our use of television
accentuated the privatization process even further when individuals within
each home switched on their own sets. TV, argues ex-advertising agent Jerry
Mander, became the archetypal mediating machine. Its images further
interposed between us and the natural world, thereby standardizing,
reinforcing, and confirming the validity of the artificial environment
created by our urbanindustrial society.
In 1944 Leo Lowenthal published "Biographies of Popular Magazines" in a
volume entitled Radio Research. He observed that biographical articles
appearing in The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines had shifted
between 1901 and 1941 from describing the lives of public figures who
succeeded because of hard work and achievement to describing the lives of
people who succeeded because of a lucky break. Biographies of industrialists
and financiers, immigrant scientists, and prominent politicians gave way to
those of boxers, ballplayers, stars and starlets, and a sideshow barker.
"Idols of production," he argued, had given way to "idols of consumption."
Success was no longer something to be achieved; it happened to these people.
No way was left for readers to identify themselves with the great or to
emulate their success, except by identifying with them as fellow consumers.
Consequently, the biographers carefully noted that after all their fame and
fortune these heroes used the same deodorants, soaps, and toothpastes as the
readers. America had transformed itself into a consumer society by the end of
the Second World War.
Television became the perfect reflection of this new society. By encouraging
privatism and artificial reality, discouraging activism for passivity, and
adopting radio's method of selling advertising time to pay for programming,
it became, as John Kenneth Galbraith suggested in The New Industrial State
(Second edition, 197 1), the main instrument "for the management of consumer
demand." Advertising based heavily on the pleasure principle had been the
essential part of the consumer economy as early as the 1920s, but not until
television had it really worked well. Pushing escapist entertainment,
television's single high purpose soon became the capture of huge audiences
for the consumption of advertising messages.
In 1955 Revlon, sponsoring The $64,000 Question, illustrated television's
advertising power. Erik Barnouw describes the event:
On each program actress Wendy Barrie did stylish commercials for a new Revlon
product, Living Lipstick, but in September the Living Lipstick message was
suddenly omitted and a commercial for Touch and Glow Liquid Make-up
Foundation substituted because, it was explained, Living Lipstick was sold
out everywhere. Stores were phoning the factory with desperate pleas for
additional shipments. Hal March, master of ceremonies, pleaded with the
public to be patient .... In January 1956 board chairman Raymond Spector of
Hazel Bishop, Inc., explained ruefully to stockholders that the [company's]
surprising 1955 [profit] loss was "due to circumstances beyond our control."
In six months Revlon had badly shaken its principal competitor's sales, and
following years saw advertisers rushing pell-mell to sponsor programs. By
1975 companies willingly invested up to $120,000 per minute for network
messages and that year spent some $4.5 billion on TV advertising. As many as
eighty million people watched TV on the average evening, perhaps thirty
million watching the same network program and commercial messages.
Television advertising both reflected and furthered the mediated urban
environment and also worked toward the revision of many preconsumer society
values. Television quickened the American tendency to replace reverence for
what is natural with a desire to reprocess it, from hair and body odors to
eyelashes. Americans evermore sought bread that was a pleasure to squeeze,
refined foods, and diet supplements. The spender, not the saver, was
extolled. Dollars measured everything-success, loyalty, affection. "If
children do not spend on Mother, on Mother's Day," observed Harry Skornia,
"they obviously do not love her." The sexual sell reduced modesty, added
Barnouw, and restraint of ego lost standing. "If one does not proclaim
oneself 'the greatest,' one is suspected of not being much good." Advertising
encouraged self-love and adoration. "The woman caressing her body in shower
or bathtub [became] a standard feature of commercials. A woman applying
perfume says: 'It's expensive, but I think I'm worth it.'" Perhaps, in the
mediated urban world, people were partially right when they said ,'money buys
happiness." If it did, it bought it from only a few sources.
The high cost of network television advertising confined its broadest use to
only a few of the 500 largest American corporations. In 1960 the nation's 100
largest advertisers bought 83 percent of the networks' commercial time, and
the top twenty-five advertisers accounted for over 50 percent. In 1975 the
leading 100 advertisers accounted for 76 percent of network TV advertisements
plus 59 percent of the nation's network radio commercials. In fact, these
supercorporations paid for over 55 percent of all the advertising media in
the country-radio, television, magazines, newspapers, billboards, and direct
mailings. Among these advertisers were always the top three automobile
manufacturers (Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler), the ten major drug and
cosmetic companies (from American Home Products to Gillette and
Bristol-Myers), the three major soap and cleanser producers (Procter &
Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Unilever), the leading processed food
manufacturers (from General Foods and Ralston Purina to Kellogg and Campbell
Soups), as well as leading companies in liquor, oil, soft drinks, appliances,
retail chains, and telephone equipment and service. The 1970 advertising
leader, Procter & Gamble, spent over $128 million on its TV messages, and in
1976 the firm led the nation in overall advertising expenditures, anteing up
$445 million. TV advertising, then, reflected not only consumerism but the
overall activities of corporate America.
One of those activities, the continued and accelerating worldwide thrust of
American business, had been fueled by fears of post World War II depression.
The expansion of the American economy via international investments and
markets plus the political instabilities perceived in Europe and Asia helped
precipitate the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and
presented a blueprint for American empire. Television, according to Erik
Barnouw, spearheaded the process, serving as "an advance herald for empire."
Whether or not television led in the expansion of American business,
military, and political interests abroad, it certainly reflected the
international tensions. American fears of Soviet communism had been fostered
during the late 1940s by investigations of the House Un-American Activities
Committee and in the early 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy's accusations
that communists had infiltrated the government. Although Edward R. Murrow's
See It Now (CBS) courageously focused on McCarthyism in 1953 and all the
networks carried the 1954 Senate Army-McCarthy hearings so instrumental in
McCarthy's political downfall, the TV mainstream remained uncritical of
America's struggle with communism. TV news closely followed the worldwide
travels of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, relaying to Americans his
speeches about the nation's struggle with Communists and its obligations to
liberate captive peoples, reporting the growing number of Cold War alliances
America entered into with noncommunist countries.
In 1952 NBC aired the 26-part Victory at Sea series, which traced American
naval combat during World War II. The series presented an inspiring view of
America's role in the world and, according to Peter C. Rollins, fully
developed the American "psychology of self-righteous moralism-what some have
called 'the Cold War mentality.'" As America struggled with communism in
Europe, China, and Korea, Victory at Sea reinforced the American notion that
"it is our mission to transform the rest of the world into our image. If we
become frustrated in our attempts, we are justified in using any power
necessary, for we represent the cause of freedom." The series showed our
technological superiority and material wealth drown the enemy. American
deaths were depicted as worthwhile compared to those of the enemy, and
victory was seen as ensured because the American land of liberty and plenty
was designed by nature and God. Historian Bernard DeVoto, speaking of the
theme of liberation, wrote in Harper's magazine in 1954: "We forget too
easily; everyone should see the whole series every year. It will be all right
with me if Congress sees it twice a year." And columnist Jack O'Brian wrote
that the series illustrated that enemies cannot "push the U.S. too far. It
might even be a good idea to show Victory at Sea to Nikita Krushchev. A very
good idea."
The struggle between good and evil came in full force to television with the
successful 1955 western Cheyenne. Lawman and Gunsmoke followed, and by 1957
action, hero-villain dramas overwhelmed the comedy programs which had taken
their cue from the early success of I Love Lucy. Thirty western series
dominated the networks in 1958, complemented by policecrime series including
Dragnet, Highway Patrol, M Squad, Richard Diamond, and Perry Mason. Violent
endings and forceful subduing of evil men by heroes was not entirely new.
Motion pictures of the 1930s and 1940s established such a tradition because
love scenes were severely restricted; however, it was now seen continuously
in the home environment. While westerns reinforced the notion that outsiders
were not to be trusted by showing communities obliterating "the agents of
external dangers," police-crime series showed evil overcome by leaders
representing order, authority, and efficiency.
More directly reflecting the Cold War, foreign intrigue series moved the evil
persons out of the United States. The programs of the mid-1950s—Dangerous
Assignment, Captain Gallant, and A Man Called X—were followed by others, as
references to CIA intrigue in Cuba, Guatemala, Laos, Malaysia, and Indonesia
appeared in print. Allen Dulles' book, The Craft of Intelligence (1963), and
David Wise's The Invisible Government (1964) made international clandestine
warfare a topic of the times. Amos Burke, the millionaire cop of Burke's Law,
became Amos Burke the millionaire secret agent, and The FBI became primarily
concerned with communist agents. For children, Tarzan championed emergent
nations against communism. The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Man Who Never Was, I
Spy, and Mission: Impossible all suggested that Americans lived among
unscrupulous conspirators, that America's mission Was to search out monsters
to destroy. The heroes' instructions were always to do anything the enemy
might do-lie, steal, cheat, kill-for the end justified the means; might made
right. Erik Barnouw points out that the "official lie" was even enshrined at
the start of each Mission: Impossible episode, when the leader of the
Impossible Missions Force received his tape recorded instructions:
VOICE: As always, should you or any of your IMF be caught or killed, the
secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This tape will
selfdestruct in five seconds .... Good luck ....
Generally, television seemed to reinforce the notion that God smiled upon
Americans. Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter suggests that electronic
communications itself freed our spirit, in a sense, from the flesh:
The moment we pick up a phone, we're nowhere in space, everywhere in spirit.
Nixon on TV is everywhere at once. That is St. Augustine's definition of God;
a Being whose center is everywhere, whose borders are nowhere.
We had become angelicized. Is it any wonder that TV reflected America's
almost religious struggle with the international evils of communism?
When the Cold War turned hot in Vietnam, an eruption of heroic military drama
and comedy about other American wars occurred on TV: Rat Patrol, Combat,
Twelve O'Clock High, Hogan's Heroes, and McHale's Navy. Toy advertisements
pressented[sic] Mattel's Fighting Men and G.I. Joe, with "a ten-inch bazooka
that really works" and a gas mask "to add real dimension to your play
battles," and Saturday morning cartoons such as Crusader Rabbit and Secret
Squirrel presented imaginary wars and battles against evil forces. News
correspondents adopted the language of military handouts which implicitly
supported war policies: Viet Cong attacks on South Vietnamese villages were
"terrorist attacks" and American mass bombings were described as breaking
"the will of the enemy." Air War in the North, a 1967 CBS documentary,
prompted Michael Arlen to write in the New Yorker magazine "that CBS is
another branch of the government, or of the military, or of both." When
Morley Safer of CBS News appeared with a filmed report about American
soldiers burning some 120 Vietnamese huts, the Department of' Defense let CBS
know it would no longer welcome Safer. Self-censorship became the rule.
Canadian TV critic Nell Compton wrote in 1965 that network Vietnam coverage
was generally a variation "on the official line," and he noticed that CBS and
NBC presidents, Frank Stanton and Robert Kintner, were in frequent touch with
Lyndon Johnson.
Networks and advertisers were unwilling to show things that might undermine
current government policies, noted Barnouw, so they "thereby gravitated
toward its support." Until 1968, when NBC and CBS news telecasts began to
suggest the war was a stalemate, "a visitor from another planet watching
United States television ... might have concluded that viewers were being
brainwashed by a cunning conspiracy determined to harness the nation-with
special attention to its young-for war." Even after 1968, those who protested
America's involvement in Vietnam were persistently shown as peaceniks,
yippies, and hippies.
In their business activities, the television industry also became involved in
America's drive for empire and in the Cold War. The beginning of foreign
commercial television in the mid-1950s offered a new market to producers of
telefilms. Network and other distributors sold telefilm episodes for as
little as $1,000 each, getting foreign buyers and audiences hooked and
keeping foreign film-makers out of the market. As the demand for American
telefilms increased, prices went up, but Hollywood and New York safely became
the world centers for production, attracting foreign actors and directors
such as Lorne Green and Art Hiller. By 1968 one hour shows brought $7,000 per
episode from the United Kingdom, $6,000 each from West Germany and Japan, and
$4,400 each from France. For the oil countries and others about whom our
nation was very sensitive, prices were reduced: $180 for Kuwait, $120 for
Saudi Arabia, and $90 for Taiwan. Sales were even made to Eastern European
nations, as overall income from the trade increased from $15 million in 1958
to $80 million in 1968. TV became an instrument of worldwide Americanization.
Bonanza was seen in aver eighty countries in 1968 and The FBI, Mission:
Impossible, and The Fugitive were not far behind. Exploitation of cheap
foreign labor was also tapped by producers of commercials in 1960. To avoid
residual payments to actors and obsolete hair styles and clothing, producers
turned to costly but effective animation. Soon animated sequences for some
agencies were being completed very cheaply in Japan, Spain, and other
countries.
Richard Bunce argues that "the electronic communications system is simply a
business adjunct to corporate America." Manufacturers of broadcasting
equipment and receivers, both in radio and television, gave impetus to the
broadcasting industry. The first network, NBC, was formed cooperatively by
RCA, Westinghouse, and General Electric in 1926. Six years later Westinghouse
and G.E. were forced by government antitrust action to give up their control
over RCA, but under David Sarnoff's leadership, RCA continued to expand. The
company operated two radio networks until 1941, when the government forced it
to divest itself of one of them. Selling the NBC-blue network in 1943 to
Lifesaver king Edward J. Noble gave birth to ABC. Meanwhile, CBS, founded in
1927 by the Columbia Phonograph Record Company, bought and guided by cigar
Magnate William S. Paley, and backed for a while by Paramount Pictures,
became a sizable competitor in the industry. Most of the network leaders
during the 1930s retained control of the industry during the 1960s, and it
was perhaps not surprising that they argued that "real competition" still
existed and that network broadcasting was still a "risky and insecure
business" in these later years. However, little could shake their secure
corporate foundations, and their arguments seemed more rhetoric than reality,
reinforcing the somewhat mythical values of free enterprise rather than
revealing oligopoly. Indeed, as Harry Skornia argues, "the favorable position
of the United States corporation in the minds of most citizens [was] achieved
as a result of industry's control of the electronic media."
Indirect corporate access to and influence over national TV audiences
illustrates Skornia's point. The networks and owners of stations obviously
exerted profound influence on programming, and Richard Bunce showed that many
companies, including the networks, owned several TV stations during the 1960s
and 1970s. CBS, ABC, NBC, Avco Corporation, and Westinghouse Electric each
owned five; Kaiser Industries owned seven; General Tire & Ruibber[sic]
Company owned four. In addition these companies had many other economic
interests. When one watched programs on American space exploration between
1967 and 1971, one watched CBS, RCA (NBC), Westinghouse, General Tire, and
Avco. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration assigned each
contracts for major research and development or production jobs. It was not
surprising that NBC led the networks in TV coverage of the space program, for
RCA played a strategic role as a NASA contractor. With few NASA contracts,
CBS trailed NBC coverage; ABC, with no contract incentives, devoted barely
one-half the program time set aside by NBC for the space program. Similar
linkages existed in other areas which might affect programming, such as
health care, surveillance and security systems, and mass transit.
The TV industry particularly reflected the military-industrial complex, about
whose unwarranted influence and power President Dwight Eisenhower cautioned
Americans in 1960. Between 1961 and 1967, RCA received over $2 billion in
prime military contracts from the Department of Defense. With the exception
of Kaiser and CBS, all the aforementioned corporations appeared among the
nation's top 100 military contractors in 1972 and during most of the previous
ten years. By producing nuclear naval vessels, helicopter engines,
antipersonnel weapons, communications systems, and other military goods,
corporations involved in TV broadcasting became deeply a part of the
military-industrial complex, its dreams, themes, and taboos. The partnership
of the electronic communications industry and the military, for example,
dated back to World War I, when the navy needed wireless communications and
participated in the creation of RCA. In 1936 a military engineer, David
Sarnoff, became the NBC president, and many of his army associates got top
positions in the firm's management. Sarnoff worked with the military in World
War II, producing programs, and he promoted military-political uses of RCA
technology, from its equipment to its propaganda services, until his
retirement in 1970.
"The idea that there exists a military-industrial complex," observes Bunce,
. . is neither novel nor a particularly recent point of view." However, the
broadcasting industry and its affiliates "continue to show conspicuous lack
of attention for the whole subject of military-corporate relations and
policies." In 1968 CBS documentary producer Gene De Poris was removed from
research on the subject with the explanation that no such complex existed.
Peter Davis, who produced The Selling of the Pentagon for CBS in 1971,
perhaps the most critical commercial TV program on the subject, was given an
indefinite leave of absence from the network the following year. And, in a
most celebrated case, Fred Friendly, CBS News president, resigned in 1966
after his superiors decided to carry a rerun of I Love Lucy rather than cover
the portion of the Senate Hearings on the Vietnam War which would hear
critics of government policies.
The federal government's regulatory agency for broadcasters and
communications is the Federal Communications Commission. Among its duties is
the licensing of TV broadcast stations, including review of new and renewal
applications to ensure that stations operate within the convenience and
necessity of the public interest. Like the Interstate Commerce Commission
which has generally protected big truckers over small and railroads against
truckers, like the Civil Aeronautics Board which has a record of refusing new
licenses and promoting large air carriers over small, like the Federal
Maritime Board which tends to suppress rather than promote competition, Harry
Skornia reminds us the FCC has been "capable of regulating the weak but not
the strong-"
The notion that big business should be regulated by government in the public
interest was conceived of before World War 1. By the 1920s staffs of the
various regulatory agencies had come to associate so closely with the
managers of the industries they regulated that they identified with these
people and defended them against outsiders. Regulatory agency commissioners,
appointed by a succession of Presidents, were generally friends of the
industries, often people who did not believe in regulation, and sometimes
used the commissioner position as a stepping stone to rise in a particular
industry. In essence, the regulatory bodies became captives of private
enterprise. The history of the FCC reveals much of what has plagued
government efforts to regulate private enterprise.
The parent of the FCC, the Federal Radio Commission, was formed in 1927 and
reflected the interests of the young radio industry. In 1934 President
Franklin Roosevelt formed the FCC, bringing regulation of telephony,
telegraphy, and radio together. The industry lobbied hard and got Congress
and the President to base the new FCC law almost entirely on the 1927 one. It
placed no restrictions on the networks and later amendments conformed to this
precedent. NBC's David Sarnoff argued convincingly that the industry would
regulate itself, ensuring presentation of' programs which broadly reflected
the public interest and limited the time given over to advertisements. The
National Association of Broadcasters, today considered one of the most
powerful lobbies with the federal government, supported Sarnoff and adopted a
code for self-regulation in 1939.
The sort of cooperation between government and industry illustrated in the
early stages of broadcast regulation also reflects the new American
polltical-economy born in the 1930s. Labeled "the Broker State" by John
Chamberlain in The American Stakes (1941), it consists of government action
"in an ad hoc and piecemeal fashion on behalf of those groups with sufficient
political or economic power to obtain assistance." In the case of
broadcasting, government handed control of virtually all aspects of
commercial broadcasting to the industry. In succeeding years the industry
ignored violations of the NAB code, and the FCC built a record of renewing
licenses automatically, never denying renewal because of a station's public
service performance.
In 1957, for example, contestants on The $64,000 Question revealed that the
question-answer show was rigged, and a TV quiz show scandal began. A
congressional subcommittee held hearings and grand juries probed. Losing
contestants instigated law suits which lasted for years, and various other
improprieties revealed in the industry and by FCC commissioners prompted the
resignation of two commissioners. In the end the industry gave more
pronouncements of self-regulation and scrapped big-money quiz shows. As a
political peace-offering, David Sarnoff donated time for debates between
presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in 1960. Daniel
Boorstin suggested in The Image: A Guide to Pseudoevents in America (1964)
that, like the quiz shows which offered right, simple answers to complex
questions, "delivered pithily and without hesitation," the debates were
successful in "reducing great national issues to trivial dimensions. With
appropriate vulgarity, they might have been called the $400,000 Question
(Prize: a $100,000-a-yearjob for four years)."
In 1963 a sampling of stations by the FCC found 40 percent had been violating
the NAB code limiting the amount of time devoted to advertising. FCC Chairman
E. William Henry modestly proposed that, since the industry had set up its
own code and referred to it proudly, the FCC might logically adopt it as the
official guide in renewing licenses. "The industry reaction to this was one
of horror and outrage," recounted Erik Barnouw, and a bill was immediately
introduced in Congress "forbidding the FCC to take any action to limit
commercials." Industry influence led to its quick passage in the House of
Representatives, 317-43, the Senate ignored the issue, and the FCC dropped
the idea of curbing commercials and adopting the code.
The FCC has seen Congress, which delegates its powers, generally support the
broadcasters. Industry influence has been helped by the fact that individual
congressmen and senators need access to TV for election and many are owners
or part-owners in broadcast properties. Pressure on Congress has kept the FCC
budget and staff small. The agency's 1100 people have been barely able to
oversee ham and CB radio operation, telephony and telegraphy, not to mention
both radio and TV broadcasting. Furthermore, limited staffing has caused the
FCC, as it has other regulatory agencies, to turn occasionally to industry
for expert assistance and thereby give broadcasters even more influence. In
the final analysis the TV industry has been self-regulated and therefore
reflected in both its operation and programming the interests and values of
the private corporate sector of American life.
Bill Moyers recently observed that commercial TV "sees America as a vast
homogeneous society of consumers-as a market, not as a country." While some
broadcasters and sponsors may feel they are sincerely involved in public
interest work, none can forget their first concern must be business. Erik
Barnouw suggests the sponsor, network executive, or station operator "may
himself be a lover of nature, and contribute to the Sierra Club and Audubon
Society, but in business his eye is on sales and profits." Any ultimate
conflict is usually avoided. Consequently, controversial subjects, those
which might offend any sizable audience as perceived by the industry, have
generally been confined to non-prime time hours, if aired at all.
Courageous sponsors and network executives have been rare, and sometimes
their courage has been prompted by less than gallant reasons. In 1951 when
Alcoa decided to sponsor Edward R. Murrow's See It Now documentaries, the
company saw the opportunity as a way to refurbish its tarnished image,
acquired by losing a major antitrust battle. When Murrow's attacks on Joseph
McCarthy prompted mail running five to four against him, Alcoa held firm, but
a year later, in 1955, it withdrew sponsorship. See It Now died within three
years, lacking a full-time sponsor. In the early 1970s, confrontations
between American oil companies and the oil countries led to an embargo, price
hikes, and investigations unearthing high-level, international bribery
involving the companies. They were then quite willing to begin underwriting
public television programs, partly to restore their public image.
An exceptionally brave period for the industry occurred briefly during the
presidency of John F. Kennedy. Caught by the Kennedy aura and spirit of
"unthinkable thoughts and impossible dreams," network news teams pushed
within the industry for expansion. Network news programs were increased to
one-half hour in 1963, and CBS Reports' "Harvest of Shame," ABC's Close Up
series "The Children Were Watching," and NBC's documentary The Tunnel
represented unprecedented programming dealing with migrant workers,
integration, and refugees. But the end of the Kennedy era saw a return to TV
as usual, although increased news division budgets and scheduling changes
remained. Gulf Oil, which had readily sponsored The Tunnel in 1962, was
unwilling to sponsor NBC's three-hour Labor Day special on civil rights, and
ABC could find no prime-time sponsor for its fivepart series on the same
subject. ABC finally scheduled its series for late Sunday evenings, following
a tradition established in the 1950s for odd hour scheduling of volatile,
controversial topics.
Industry executives and sponsors have both sought an ideal of 100 percent
acceptability-acceptability by audience and by corporate state. Commercial TV
public service advertising reflects this desirability and is guided by the
National Advertising Council which maintains a virtual stranglehold over
production of such advertisements. The Ad Council had been the industry's
answer to meeting the FCC licensing requirement that a certain proportion of
public service ads must be aired. Consisting of representatives of
advertisers, ad agencies, and the media, the Council carries out ad campaigns
for various organizations. It decides which campaigns to undertake and
routinely denies access to its services by advocates of anything
controversial. Planned Parenthood and the "save the whale" campaign were
turned down by the Ad Council, and the National Organization of Women's
campaign to remove female stereotypes was initially denied support. Roughly
one-third of the Council's annual $500 million expenditures advertise
government programs ranging from the Peace Corps to President Gerald Ford's
WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign. If not supporting government programs, Ad
Council campaigns reflect interests of the corporate state. The campaign to
end pollution urged viewers to pick up after picnics and stop littering the
highways ("People start pollution. People can stop it.") but it made no
mention of industrial causes of pollution.
Even the Public Broadcasting Service has not been entirely free to present a
full range of public interest programs. Established in the early 1950s when
the FCC set aside channels for educational television, National Educational
Television (PBS) has always been a beggar. Since the 1950s the Ford
Foundation granted it sizable amounts of money, but local stations have had
to regularly carry on donation drives. In 1967 Congress underwrote the
system, but PBS expenditures still only amounted to five percent of the
nation's total TV spending. Budgetary constraints have limited PBS
documentary work and resulted in the importation of many British dramas. TV
critic Robert Sklar points out that PBS has carried virtually no avante-garde
theater, music, film, dance, or video, and the diversity of American ethnic
and subcultural life is ignored by PBS as much as by commercial TV.
During the Vietnam War, PBS aired a considerable number of anti-war,
anti-establishment programs—Who Invited Us?, Behind the Lines, The Great
American Dream Machine—but it ultimately brought negative political response.
In 1972 President Richard Nixon vetoed both a two-year and more modest
one-year public TV appropriation. He then made it clear via White House
spokesmen that to get his signature on the bill the bulk of federal money
would have to go to local stations, not the networks; every federal dollar
would have to be matched by two and one-half dollars from other sources; and
the system had to deemphasize public affairs programming, leaving it to
commercial broadcasters. Fortunately for PBS, oil company funds became
available, but dollar matching requirements began a steady PBS pilgrimage to
large corporations. By 1975 corporate money supported 40 percent of the
system's programming.
Programming itself reflected the values of the corporate state, particularly
on commercial TV. Corporate produced technological gadgetry has been ever
present in police and spy programs, with special emphasis in science fiction
shows. Big, complex technology overwhelmed evil people, whether on earth or
in space. The Six Million Dollar Man implicitly suggested that "humans may
ultimately exercise absolute control of their environment" via technology,
and Star Trek was committed to technological progress as the solution to our
problems. Viewers were also reminded that ours was a society of experts, from
detectives and lawyers to teachers and doctors. These cool, unemotional,
efficient experts all found their identity in their work. They were the
epitome of corporate people, tireless and selfless, completely loyal to their
profession and employer, unswerving in their eagerness to help the multitude
of souls who lacked their skills. They were the very image of the sort of
employee every supercorporation would wish to have.
In addition to reflecting its own interests and avoiding controversy, the TV
industry has provided an anesthetic for Americans who live in a world which
David Littlejohn described as "messy, unfair, technologically run, out of
their grasp, and devoid of much human community." Programs fostered illusions
of awareness, understanding, democratic participation, discussion of
problems, conversation, order, and control. In doing so they reflected the
conventional myths and ideal values of the national societywhat Edward Shils
has called the "culture of consensus." America's past, as presented in
Alistair Cooke's America: A Personal History of the United States, the CBS
Bicentennial Minutes series, and NBC's Project XX programs the "Jazz Age" and
"Life in the Thirties," reinforced the notions about their history that
Americans wanted to hold-America never lost a war, it remained just in God's
eyes and was the land of opportunity, plenty, innocence, and piety. In a
multitude of programs such as Happy Days, Little House on the Prairie, Good
Times, and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the real world, too, was befogged but
accepted by viewers as what was really happening, because TV presented what
Americans wanted to believe and felt they had worked hard to get.
The family has also been presented usually in an ideal way. In the 1950s The
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet found their way from radio to TV, offering a
"down home" feeling of security, simple pleasures, and middle-class morality.
It was just what affluent, suburban America wanted—a sense of timeless
importance in the value of family. When the program ended in 1966, it may
have reflected the 1960's counter-culture view of the traditional family
structure as outdated, irrelevant, and unhealthy; but that very sort of
family was reincarnated during the 1970s in The Waltons. Anne Roiphe writes
"the Walton family is the ideal family as we all wish ours was: the one we
would choose to come from; the one we would hope to create." Unlike The
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or its contemporary Leave It to Beaver, both
shows suggesting real live families, The Waltons was set in the 1930s, a time
remembered somewhat mistily. Nevertheless, the ideal values of family
solidarity, love, and cooperation were the same. The program's producer Lee
Rich believed the series succeeded because America was suffering a loss of
values: "Many people see ethical qualities in this family that they hope that
they can get back to." Even family shows with only one parent, such as
Bonanza and The Big Valley, while they reflected society's slow recognition
of the real existence of single-parent families in the late 1960s, reinforced
the warmth and security of the traditional, ideal family experience.
Single parents should remind us that males and females coexist in America,
and TV has consistently reinforced the traditional sex roles of their
existence. Until the 1970s virtually no females starred in continuing
primetime dramatic or situation comedy shows. By 1975 nine or 13 percent of
that year's shows starred women or were women-oriented, 63 percent were
maleoriented or had male leads, and the rest were general family-oriented
shows. A survey by the National Organization of Women in 1972 revealed that
of 1200 advertisements in which women appeared 43 percent were engaged in
household tasks, 38 percent were adjuncts to men, 17 percent appeared as sex
objects, and 0.3 percent were "autonomous people leading independent lives of
their own." In drama and soap operas the same survey showed women portrayed
only one fourth of all characters, they usually appeared in sexual contexts
or romantic or family roles, and two out of three were engaged or married.
Another 1975 study of sex roles in cartoons found that animated characters,
including animals, were also three-fourths male, girls were subordinate to
males as pretty teenagers or housewives, and male occupations compared to
female were several times as diverse.
On advertisements women served men gaily, uncomplainingly, singing all the
while. Almost all sick adults receiving attention and those receiving food
were men, the providers women. Men, on the other hand, protected and
defended. They confided only to other men ("My broker is E. F. Hutton, and
Hutton says . . ."), and they bought so as not "to leave their family
defenseless." Frank Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow remind us that "Mom in The
Brady Bunch, rebuffed by one of her daughters in an offer of help ('Mom, I've
got to speak to Dad; this is a math question') . . . , seems to be playing
Everywoman." They add that even the invincible Maude at her first day on the
job in a real estate office "broke down in tears and stormed out in what
could only be called a snit." Motion pictures may have reflected the sexual
revolution and feminist movement, but TV hardly did. Under great pressure
during the 1970s from the National Gay Task Force and Gay Media Action, some
programs included homosexual roles in series, though not overtly; traditional
sex roles remained largely unaffected.
Television has reflected cultural change in society very slowly. Throughout
most of its existence TV catered to the white middle class, reflecting the
race and wealth of its owners and operators and their perceptions.
Consequently, black Americans, when they first appeared on the screen in the
1950s, reflected the white stereotype of blacks. Beulah presented a black
domestic working for a white family, and her friends were the "neighborhood
domestic gang." Amos and Andy presented a similar white stereotype of the
black urban neighborhood. In 1956 NBC undertook The Nat King Cole Show, the
first black star variety program, but could find no sponsor. They went ahead,
supporting it at $20,000 a week, and finally got Rheingold Beer to agree to
co-sponsor, a practice uncommon in the 1950s when shows had single sponsors.
However, no full sponsor was ever found, so the show died in December 1957.
Not until 1966, with Sammy Davis, Jr., did the networks try again.
Indeed, in 1962, eight years after the Supreme Court's desegregation decision
in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and many civil rights events, a
two-week prime-time survey showed how little TV reflected the existence of
blacks in America. Blacks appeared in only eighty-nine of 398.5 hours of
viewing. In twenty-seven they were featured as singers, dancers, or
musicians. The next highest rating was for news and documentary programs,
where appearances were primarily transient and non-weekly. The lowest rating
was for drama, where blacks appeared as walk-ons, maids, and in crowds.
Gradually blacks got regular series parts during the 1960s—Ossie Davis in Car
54, Where Are You? and Bill Cosby in I Spy-and Diahann Carroll starred in
1968 as Julia, a middle-class black nurse. But opposition had been strong, as
suggested by General Motors' 1963 threat to withdraw its sponsorship of an
episode of Bonanza which introduced a black character. Not until the civil
rights movement had subsided in the 1970s did blacks begin to be represented
on TV with some measure of regularity.
A similar cultural lag by television existed in its reflection of the
youthful counter-culture of the 1960s. At first TV presented the changing
life-style in terms of teenie-boppers and hippies in the news. An implication
of disgust was plain. In 1967 PBS briefly dipped into the work of underground
film and fringe theater, inevitably reflecting subcultures, but commercial TV
held back. Then, in 1968, a new look and new sound reflected what Erik
Barnouw called a cry for relevance and the political upheavals of the Nixon
presidency. Black, brown, and yellow faces appeared with long-haired males
and an ethnic mix in clothing, hair styles, and language. Ethnic whites found
representation in Banacek, Colombo, Petrocelli, Kojak, Chico and the Man, and
Rhoda. TV seemed to have caught up, and Frank Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow
suggested that sponsors and networks finally perceived that audiences besides
the white middle-class had money to spend.
Some observers feel TV could not have been anything other than it has been.
Jerry Mander argues the visual and auditory indistinctness of television, the
technology itself, forced concentration on highlighted, actionpacked
subjects, values of competition inherent in sports and good versus evil
themes, and clear-cut behavior. The nuances of slower, subtler rhythms would
be lost, and even the news editors, writes Edward Epstein, consciously
chopped out the dead wood and dull moments. Other critics, while not slipping
into the abyss of technological determinism, have seized the notion of
determined technology and argued people have consciously, perhaps
conspiratorially aimed television at reinforcing certain values. Since TV has
raised no essential questions about the structure of society and has affirmed
the status quo, suggests Erik Barnouw, "the overwhelming absorption of tens
of millions of mid-twentieth-century Americans in football games and
struggles against cattle rustlers was a political achievement, in a class
with the imperial Roman policy of bread and circuses." Finally, Raymond
Williams believes the way TV developed reflected America's own "social and
cultural definition" of itself. Our notions of free enterprise and public
freedom defined the ownership and use of radio and blazed a trail for
television, a continuum of America's tastes and habits from the popular
novels of the late nineteenth century through radio-defined programming, and
the corporate state's successful rise to power, wealth, and influence defined
TVs development and use after World War II.
Since its commercial inception, television has presented Americans with
formulized, ritualized programming. It has focused on conventional, national,
white mores while emphasizing the special values of networks, sponsors, and
other powerful forces of society. It has reflected America's thrust toward a
mediated urban environment, her drive toward empire, and the interlock of
corporate, political, and military interests. It has generally ignored the
ethno-cultural, racial, sectional, and localistic diversities of America; and
what it has not presented, or recognized only belatedly, has reflected
America's overall conservatism. In doing all this it also presented a vision
of reality bathed in happy endings and simplistic, swift, distinct solutions
to problems; it focused on the exciting, inspiring, or catastrophic now.
"The 'reality' of television," observed Mankiewicz and Swerdlow, "established
a bench mark that the 'reality' of reality cannot hope to reach." Yet 51
percent of Americans in 1976 felt television was more believable than
newspapers (22 percent), magazines (9 percent), and radio (7 percent),
according to a Roper Organization survey. Furthermore, 70 percent of those
polled felt the TV industry's performance was excellent, better than
churches, schools, police, and local government. Perhaps they were correct in
their assessment, though one would hope Americans had not become
metaphorically chained to their TV screens and, like Plato's cave dwellers,
blind to the real world behind them, unable to differentiate between shadow
and substance.
Suggested Readings
Erik Barnouw's A Histoiy of Broadcasting in the United States, 3 vols. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1966, 1968, 1970) and his condensation and
updating of this trilogy, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American
Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), are indispensable
general works on television. An earlier valuable study of television as a
social institution is Harry J. Skornia, Television and Society: An Inquest
and Agenda for Improvement (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). Recent important
and provocative works are Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and
Cultural Form (New York: Schoken Books, 1975) and Jerry Mander, Four
Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William Morrow & Co.,
1978). Peter C. Rollins, "Victory at Sea: Cold War Epic," Journal of Popular
Culture, 6 (Spring, 1973), pages 463-82, is very suggestive of the reflective
qualities of television concerning America's overseas involvements; and
Herbert I. Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1971), discusses the Americanization of the Third World via the
airwaves. Richard Bunce, Television in the Corporate Interest (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1976) is excellent on the corporate character of TV, and
Fred Friendly's Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control (New York: Random
House, 1967) records the collision between profit and public interest at CBS
which led to his resignation. Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern
Potentate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) is outstanding on the
commercial nature of TV, and Paul A. Carter, The Twenties in America (2d ed.,
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975) integrates Leo Lowenthal's notions into
the early development of the consumer society.
An early study suggesting TV is a stronger reinforcer than changer of society
is Joseph T. Mapper, The Social Effects of Mass Communications (New York: The
Free Press, 1960); and more provocative studies include Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGrawHill, 1964) and
Edmund Carpenter, Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me: An Anthropologist in
the Electronic World (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973). Frank
Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow, Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation
of American Life (New York: Times Book, 1978) is excellent; and Douglas
Cater, et al., Television as a Social Force: New Approaches to TV Criticism
(New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), which includes David Littlejohn's
"Communicating Ideas by Television," is quite good. Perhaps the best
anthology critiquing television is Horace Newcomb, ed., Television: The
Critical View (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), which contains Anne
Roiphe's incisive "Ma and Pa and John Boy in Mythic America: The Waltons."
Edward J. Epstein, News from Nowhere (New York: Random House, 1973) is a
superb critique of TV news. Important journal articles include Marilyn Diane
Fife, "Black Image in American TV: The First
Two Decades," The Black Scholar, 6 (November, 1974), pages 7-15; and Richard
S. Tedlow, "Intellect on Television: The Quiz Show Scandals of the 1950s,"
The American Quarterly, 28 (Fall, 1976), pages 483-95. Finally, Richard M.
Levison's "From Olive Oyl to Sweet Polly Purebread: Sex Role Stereotypes and
Televised Cartoons," Journal of Popular Culture, 9 (Winter, 1975), pages
561-71, is outstanding among many articles on television in that journal.
pps. 159-177
-----
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Roads End
Kris
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