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Robert MacNeil (1931- ) was born in Montreal, Canada. He is a radio
and television journalist. He has worked for NBC radio and for the British
Broadcasting Corporation. In the mid-1970's MacNeil came to public
television station WNET to host his own news analysis program, which has
grown into the highly regarded MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. This differs from
other news programs by offering more in-depth reports on important issues.
In the folliwng essay, MaNeil criticizes American television programming.
It is difficult to escape the influence of television. If you fit the
statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at
least 20,000 hours of television. You can add 10,000 hours for each decade
you have lived after the age of 20. The only things Americans do more than
watch television are work and sleep.
Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours.
Five thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical college undergraduate
spends working on a bachelor's degree. In 10,000 hours you could have
learned enough to become an astronomer or engineer. You could have
learned several languages fluently. If it appealed to you, you could be
reading Homer in the original Greek or Dostoevski in Russian. If it didn't,
you could have walked around the world and written a book about it.
The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. Almost
anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive,
consistently applied effort. The dullest, the least gifted of us can
achieve things that seem miraculous to those who never concentrate on
anything. But television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells
us instant gratification. It diverts us only to divert, to make the
time pass without pain.
Television's variety becomes a narcotic, not a stimulus. Its serial,
kaleidoscopic exposures force us to follow its lead. The viewer is on
a perpetual guided tour: thirty minutes at the museum, thirty at the
cathedral, then back on the bus to the next attraction--except on
television, typically, the spans allotted are on the order of minutes
or seconds, and the chosen delights are more often car crashes and
people killing one another. In short, a lot of television usurps one
of the most precious of all human gifts, the ability to focus your
attention yourself, rather than just passively surrender it.
Capturing your attention--and holding it--is the prime motive of most
television programming and enhances its role as a profitable advertising
vehicle. Programmers live in constant fear of losing anyone's attention
--anyone's. The surest way to avoid doing so is to keep everything brief,
not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant
stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement. Quite simply,
television operates on the appeal to the short attention span.
It is simply the easiest way out. But it has come to be regarded as a
given, as inherent in the medium itself: as an imperative, as though
General Sanoff, or one of the other august pioneers of video, had
bequeathed to us tablets of stone commanding that nothing in television
shall ever require more than a few moments' concentration. In its place
that is fine. Who can quarrel with a medium that so brilliantly packages
escapist entertainment as a mass-marketing tool? But I see its values now
pervading this nation and its life. It has become fashionable to think
that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a fast-moving,
impatient public.
In the case of news, this practice, in my view, results in inefficient
communication. I question how much of televisions' nightly news effort
is really absorbable and understandable. Much of it is what has been
aptly described as "machine gunning with scraps." I think its technique
fights coherence. I think it tends to make things ultimately boring and
dismissable (unless they are accompanied by horrifying pictures) because
almost anything is boring and dismissable if you know almost nothing
about it.
I believe that TV's appeal to the short attention span is not only
inefficient communication but decivilizing as well. Consider the
casual assumptions that television tends to cultivate: that complexity
must be avoided, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought,
that verbal precision is an anachronism. It may be old-fashioned, but
I was taught that thought is words, arranged in grammatically precise ways.
There is a crisis of illiteracy in this country. One study estimates that
some 30 million adult Americans are "functionally illiterate" and cannot
read or write well enough to answer a want ad or understand the instructions
on a medicine bottle.
Literacy may not be an inalienable human right, but it is one that the
highly literate Founding Fathers might not have found unreasonable or even
unattainable. We are not only not attaining it as a nation, statistically
speaking, but we are falling further and further short of attaining it.
And, while I would not be so simplistic as to suggest that television is
the cause, I believe that it contributes and is an influence.
Everything about this nation--the structure of the society, its forms of
family organization, its economy, its place in the world--has become more
complex, not less. Yet its dominating communications instrument, its
principal form of national linkage, is one that sells neat resolutions to
human problems that usually have no neat resolutions. It is all symbolized
in my mind by the hugely successful art form that television has made
central to the culture: the thirty-second commercial: the tiny drama of the
earnest housewife who finds happiness in choosing the right toothpaste.
When before in human history has so much humanity collectively surrendered
so much of its leisure to one toy, one mass diversion? When before has
virtually an entire nation surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for
selling?
Some years ago Yale University law professor Charles L. Black, Jr.
wrote: "...forced feeding on trivial fare is not itself a trivial matter."
I think this society is being force fed with trivial fare, and I fear the
effects on our habits of mind, our language, our tolerance for effort,
and our appetite for complexity are only dimly perceived. If I am wrong,
we will have done no harm to look at the issue skeptically and critically,
to consider how we should be resisting it.
I hope you will join with me in doing so.
Copyright © 1989 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey 07632. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt from
Prentice Hall Literature Silver ISBN 0-13-698523-8
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