It is easy to think of television in America simply as cheap entertainment and harmless diversion, at worst a source of unintentional amusement due to the desperation and illogic that seem to drive much of the programming.
It is easy, that is, if you are in TV’s demographic bulls-eye: middle- to upper-middle class, under 50 but over 20, most likely white, educated, and with a consuming interest in, you know, consuming. You cruise the malls and Internet, you buy the Pampers and powdered cocoa mix, and you look forward to the moment that you, too, can drive a Lexus.
If you exist outside that target, however, television becomes less benign. It’s still the thing that everybody watches, still a kind of social glue, but it somehow never portrays you or, when it does, it doesn’t portray you as you see yourself.
As the chief propaganda minister of the prevailing culture, TV, many experts contend, leaves minority kids with a stunted self image, turns old people, especially women, into crones and cartoons, and what it does to those not riding the economy’s gravy train -who do not, after all, consume enough to count – amounts to a kind of genocide. The poor nearly do not exist on TV, which is almost like saying they do not exist in the nation.
You could go on. TV teaches us to worship wealth, youth and beauty, but only a very specific, television-friendly kind of beauty. TV gives us superficial political campaigns and superficial candidates and guess what kind of public policy as a result. TV damages even the people it most wants to reach, teaching them that the United States is a place of, by and for them, and leaving the false impression that everybody else is doing just fine too.
Many, many, many theories attach themselves to the medium, some of them conflicting, but the one thing they have in common is how difficult they are to prove. Trying to pin something on TV — violence, alienation, teen acne — is like trying to pin something on oxygen. You can’t nail down television’s effect on America, because you can’t find an American place that hasn’t been affected by TV for comparison.
“There’ve been 30 years of studies trying to establish the TV-violence link . . . and there is no academic consensus on this,” says Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. “And the reason is we can’t use our strongest empirical methods. The strongest design would be an experiment where you assign one group of people to watch years of violent TV, a second years of nonviolent TV, and a third maybe no TV at all. Well, you can’t do that, ethically or practically. You can’t compel that. So you come up with designs that are less powerful, less compelling and therefore the results are more mixed.”
We still don’t know even what to do with E. B. White’s 1938 prophetic hedge about television, that the new medium would prove either “a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky.”
It is both, and neither, exactly, and these discussions rely, in the end, mostly on supposition and anecdote, even when the anecdote is as powerful as Scott Sassa, NBC’s West Coast president, talking during the summer about how isolated TV left him feeling as an Asian-American boy.
What television does to people in American society, and to that society as a whole, is again under the microscope as the networks field protests about the absence of minorities in their programs and their front offices — Sassa being a rare exception — and as the fragmentation of the TV universe yields the veneer of diversity in programming, but not, some critics argue, true diversity.
It is logical to think that, with so many more viewing options, and with people sensitized to the new world of narrowcasting now occupying some of the top jobs, we could take for granted that groups of people would not be left out of TV’s picture. Every group, after all, has needs that advertisers can meet and profit from. As more channels develop, the target audiences become smaller — tiny enough, in theory, to make pitches targeting ever-smaller societal segments cost-effective.
“In the magazine world, we call it `twigging.’ It’s not the root, the branches, the trunk — it’s the twig,” says Martin Marty, the University of Chicago emeritus historian. “The advantage is, you’re represented. The disadvantage is, you don’t get to meet anybody but your own kind.”
The fear that the nation is losing television as a social coherent — the place where we all gathered to watch both “The Beverly Hillbillies” and Neil Armstrong’s moon walk, and where we sometimes did meet new types of people — is supposed to be mitigated by TV’s push toward what could almost be called personalization.
Television is expanding like a galaxy, with an outward momentum that will only increase as digital broadcasting, with its capability of carrying several channels in the space now occupied by one, becomes the standard in the next decade. Yet the medium was actually more inclusive earlier in its history, as critics point out, after some of the social enlightenment brought about by 1960s protest movements but before niche television and the concurrent rise in demographically driven audience-targeting took hold.
During the late 1970s, for instance, the shows had their flaws, but the broadcasters were unabashedly trying to reach the whole country and they understood that doing so meant including predominantly African-American shows such as “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times.”
Yes, there are more African-American male characters on prime-time TV now: 1.7 times their representation in the general population, according to a recent study. But that same study found Asian-Americans, Latinos, African-American women, older women, and women in general still underrepresented.
“The world of television is frozen in a time-warp of obsolete and damaging representations,” concluded the 1998 study of more than 9,000 characters in 645 prime-time and daytime network dramatic programs, done by George Gerbner’s ongoing Cultural Indicators Project for the Screen Actors Guild.
And now, as the country saw last May, the four leading networks can order up and schedule a couple of dozen new shows for fall, and be so focused on their narrow goals of reaching this or that market, plugging this or that hole, that they miss the big picture: Those shows collectively failed to include minorities or senior citizens in almost any leading roles.
So much for America the Melting Pot. So much for the demographic fact that we are rapidly becoming an older and more diverse society. So much for any sense of social responsibility in using the airwaves that, after all, the public only loans to broadcasters.
But even if the networks aren’t offering it, you can always go to the rest of TV for diversity, right? Not really, says Gerbner, a prominent television researcher and commentator. Despite the more than 50 channels routinely available to cable subscribers, he argues that TV programming amounts to a number of different iterations of the same formula, still mostly targeting the same audiences.
“There are really only a handful of types of programming because they’re all marketing driven,” says Gerbner, the Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunication at Temple University. “There are a few exceptions, obviously. The selective viewer will still find high quality and diversity, but that selective viewer is few and far between. The majority of TV viewers are ritualistic.”
TV diversification has followed two primary paths. There has been the demographic splintering of the networks where, instead of the whole-America viewership they used to aim for, CBS targets older folks, ABC and NBC shoot at those 50 and under, and Fox, WB and UPN go younger still.
And the explosion of cable channels has primarily followed interest-group lines. Discovery wants science buffs, History Channel goes for World War II junkies, the Food Network grabs home chefs, etc.
It is true that there are a couple of programming outlets that target by ethnicity, in particular cable’s Black Entertainment Television for African-Americans and broadcast TV’s Univision and Telemundo for Spanish-speaking Latinos.
But out of dozens of channels, a handful is not many for those outside society’s mainstream. There is no senior citizen channel, to speak of. No Asian-American channel.
And all of the outlets mentioned covet the same basic viewer, Gerbner says. The will of the marketplace does not produce TV democracy, but rather TV plutocracy: television programming governed by the interests of the wealthy.
And television that fails to portray the poor, he says, contributes to a country in which there is little outcry over the fact that the poverty rate is roughly the same as it was in 1989, despite the intervening economic boom. People are too busy being amused by dotcom ads and entranced by the stock market — with the considerable aid of all the new market-watching TV programs.
In this area, the programming pattern of the startup networks is instructive. Fox, derided as Rupert Murdoch’s pipe dream fourth network, began life in the late 1980s actively courting African-American viewers with programs packed with black actors and rooted in black culture. (Viewership studies document that with a very few exceptions — “Monday Night Football,” “ER” — blacks and whites watch different programs.)
As soon as it had a foothold, Fox dropped its black shows, moving toward the broader, more mainstream audience it could draw with fare like “Melrose Place” and “Ally McBeal.”
When the four biggest broadcasters — ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC — included virtually no leading minority roles in their new series this year, there was an outcry, and it was heard, proving, perhaps, that racial interest groups are more effective than those representing the poor or that the nation is simply more receptive to messages about race.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, joined by a coalition of other ethnic interest groups, protested the “whitewash” vehemently and has kept the pressure high, speaking of boycotts and demanding results to surveys asking about such things as minority employment in network power structures.
As recently as mid-December, a parade of network leaders pleaded their cases in front of NAACP officials, making their usual arguments: that the 1999-2000 fall season was an anomaly, that efforts are underway to correct it, and that, as ever, they will “do better” in the future.
The issue is important because of television’s power, as undeniable as it is unquantifiable.
You can argue about the “drip” versus “drench” theories: Does TV influence attitudes by gradual accumulation of images, or does it do so in more of a rush, as when a potentially attitude-altering sensation occurs, like the 1980s “The Cosby Show” and its portrayal of an affluent African-American family?
You can argue, still, about the effects of TV violence on real-world violent behavior. After 30 years of diligent research into the question, well after the surgeon general did declare a causal link in 1972, the academic community remains divided, in large measure because it is so hard to pinpoint where TV influences begin and others end.
But you cannot say those influences do not exist. If television does not affect behavior, then the whole TV advertising industry — the medium’s basic economic model — is a fraud.
TV’s failures of reasonable social representation amount to more than hurt feelings, and involve the question of, say, how white Americans would feel if the characters in shows were suddenly almost all black, says Peggy Charren, founder of Action for Children’s Television.
Charren says that as a grandmother, she can deal with not seeing fellow older women on television. “If you still need a role model when you get to my age, that’s sort of unfortunate,” she says.
“But it’s particularly serious for children. Children are the most vulnerable population. They haven’t gotten there yet. They need to feel they are part of the world they live in.”
The evidence of American social research suggests that poor and minority kids do not grow up with that feeling.
In one of the nation’s leading ongoing population surveys, “low income and being a member of a minority group are the strongest indicators of feeling left out, left behind, thinking the world treats them unfairly,” says the U. of C.’s Smith.
“And even controlling for income levels, minorities — primarily blacks, to a lesser extent Hispanics — believe that America treats them unfairly and they are disadvantaged,” Smith adds. “One of the three strongest predictors of saying you are less happy (than the norm) is being a minority. The other two are not being married and saying you have had a recent financial reverse.”
The General Social Survey does not try to discover whether or how much of a factor TV may be in this.
In his decades in the field, though, Gerbner thinks he has found a way to make results of research into TV influences compelling. He does it by comparing groups of “heavy” TV watchers with “light” TV watchers.
Certainly his findings are, at a minimum, highly suggestive. Gerbner says his researchers have developed a “mean world theory” by “teas(ing) out the contribution television makes toward one’s world view, one’s feelings of vulnerability and security.”
He reads a paragraph: “Our research consistently finds that heavy viewers are more likely than comparable groups of light viewers to conceive of their reality as mean and gloomy.” The more they are exposed to TV, he continues, “the more they are desensitized to violence and feel vulnerable to victimization.”
And heavy viewers subsequently, he says, are more inclined to agree with repressive societal measures, including the belief in incarceration above rehabilitation that has led to the boom in prison building and stiff sentencing laws.
“Television makes people more dependent and feel more vulnerable,” Gerbner says. “I don’t like to use the word `scared’ because `scared’ implies they are aware of it.”
More than a researcher, Gerbner is an activist, an advocate of less TV, more diversified ownership of TV and more responsibility by TV. He started the Cultural Environment Movement, which had its founding convention in 1996, to try to counteract the way that, he says, television has taken over society’s storytelling role.
Stories, says Gerbner, are far more profound than mere entertainment. They are the way children learn about the world, what is expected of them in whatever sexual, racial, geographic or income group they are in.
“In general terms I think television has taken over the role of parenting,” he says. “Parents can no longer compete with television.”
What he wants parents to ask themselves, as television continues to split and splinter, is whether they are content to have so narrowly focused a storyteller reading to their kids?
