Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (18 page)

The new American life-style based on commodity consumption, emphasizing credit buying on the never-never plan, and economic growth with its inevitable concentration of economic power, only produced a more virulent version of the older Depression. In the 1930s, as the number of jobs went down, at least prices did too. Now, because economic concentration has advanced to the point where price competition is passe, as jobs disappear, prices go up.

This new phenomenon was summarized in
Mother Jones
(February 1977) by economists David Olson and Richard Parker, reporting on a study by Dr. Howard Wachtel and Peter Adelsheim for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress :

“They found that corporations in food, utilities, rubber, tobacco, computers, aircraft, to name a few, had all raised their prices at times the textbooks say they should have rolled them back. How can corporations raise prices when the economy is stagnant, demand is falling, factories are operating well below full capacity and more and more people are out of work? The answer, Wachtel says, is economic concentration—entire industries increasingly dominated by a small number of ever-larger firms . . . fewer and fewer big businesses need to compete through pricing. This creates a situation in which prices can be increased and inflation kept rising even during periods of recession.”

Meanwhile, the government of this country, like the governments of other Western countries, has been losing the power to control these actions. Existing outside the boundaries of the country, the multinational companies, in concert with banks, are capable of the economic domination of entire nations. Governments slip slowly into a new role subordinate to and supportive of them.

Dr. Lester Thurow concluded his paper in the
Public Interest Economics Newsletter,
“There is no satisfactory answer to the question of why the American people have been content to leave untouched the enormous concentration of wealth that characterizes this economy.”

It is possible that Thurow was being coy when he made that statement, because there certainly is an obvious explanation. Too few people have ever heard of the figures listed here, and many of those that have heard them may have been too indoctrinated with accepted economic theory to grasp their true meaning. All of our cultural institutions teach us that Keynesian economics and the trickle-down theory of economic growth have a certain effect when they actually have an effect which is opposite to what is claimed.

Since the overwhelming majority of Americans are removed from any personal participation in economic processes, we have come to believe in an artificial economic construct propagated by the people who benefit from it and who control the media that explain it to us.

Domination of the Influencing Machine

In 1960, at the moment when our economic growth rate was near its highest point and the nation had been totally wired in to television, the trade publication
Advertising Age
commented, “Network television, particularly, is largely the creature of the 100 largest companies in the country.”

In that year, the one hundred largest advertisers in the country accounted for 83 percent of all network television advertising. The top twenty-five of these accounted for 65 percent of the 83 percent. Since that time, the ratio has scarcely altered.

The domination of the one hundred largest is most apparent in network television, but it applies in other media. In 1974, for example, the top one hundred accounted for 55 percent of
all
advertising in all media, 59 percent of all network radio advertising, and 76 percent of network television ads. Since virtually all media in this country depend upon advertising for survival, it ought to be obvious that these one hundred corporations, themselves dominated by a handful of wealthy people, can largely determine which magazines, newspapers, radio stations and television stations can continue to exist and which cannot.

Public television also fits the mold. During 1975, more than 40 percent of all public-television programming was paid for by these same one hundred companies: mainly oil, chemical and drug companies. This is not quite the same level of domination that is found at the commercial networks, but the effect is the same. Survival depends upon them.

For both commercial television and public television then it is absolutely necessary to create programs that these one hundred advertisers will support. They are where the action is. Given the costs of television, they are the
only
action.

We are speaking of control by 100 corporations out of 400,000. The interest of the other 399,900 are irrelevant as far as television is concerned. As for the thoughts, wishes and feelings of the noncorporate segments of American society—nearly 250 million human beings whose perspectives are as varied as the Indian, the artistic, the humanistic, the ecological, the socialistic, to name a very few—these are not of the slightest importance.

Broadcast television, like other monolithic technologies, from eight-row com threshers and agribusiness to supertankers, nuclear power plants, computer networks, hundred-story office buildings, satellite communications, genetic engineering, international pipelines and SSTs, is available only to monstrous corporate powers. What we get to see on television is what suits the mentality and purposes of one hundred corporations.

While purporting to be a mass technology available to everyone, because everyone can
experience
it, television is little more than the tool of these companies. If four out of five dollars of television income derive from them, then obviously, without currying their favor the networks would cease to exist.

The corollary is also true. Without such a single, monolithic instrument as television, the effective power and control of these huge corporations could not be harnessed as it presently is. Monolithic economic enterprise needs monolithic media to purvey its philosophy and to influence rapid change in consumption patterns. Without an instrument like television, capable of reaching everyone in the country at the same time and narrowing human needs to match the redesigned environment, the corporations themselves could not exist.

The spread of television unified a whole people within a system of conceptions and living patterns that made possible the expansion of huge economic enterprise. Because of it, our whole culture and the physical shape of the environment, no more or less than our minds and feelings, have been computerized, linearized, suburbanized, freewayized, and packaged for sale.

It is a moot point whether those who control television knew what the outcome would be when they dusted it off after the war and sent it out to sell. Whether they invented television for that purpose or it invented them, the relationship was symbiotic. Its use was predetermined by the evolution of economic and technological patterns that led up to it and that have since continued on their inevitable path. As we shall see, its use and effects were also determined by the nature and limits of television technology itself.

ARGUMENT THREE

EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON THE HUMAN BEING

Television technology produces neuro-physiological responses in the people who watch it. It may create illness, it certainly produces confusion and submission to external imagery. Taken together, the effects amount to conditioning for autocratic control.

VIII
ANECDOTAL REPORTS: SICK, CRAZY, MESMERIZED

D
URING
the years I was preparing this book, occasional pieces of publicity appeared about it. With each exposure mail would arrive in my home. From one article alone I received more than two hundred fifty letters. Most were passionate and troubled. It became clear that watching TV was an experience that an amazing number of people were eager to describe.

I also kept an informal record of the terms people used in ordinary conversation to describe how they felt about television. In all, I recorded about two thousand conversational and written descriptions.

While I make no claims about this amounting to any kind of bona fide scientific sampling, the phrases people chose had a definite consistency. To give you an idea, I’m going to list the fifteen phrases most frequently used.

If you could somehow drop all preconception of television and read this list as though people were describing some instrument you’d never seen yourself, I think the picture you would obtain is of a machine that invades, controls and deadens the people who view it. It is not unlike the alien-operated “influencing machine” of the psychopathic fantasy.

At one point I heard my son Kai say: “I don’t want to watch television as much as I do but I can’t help it. It makes me watch it.”

I don’t mean to suggest that there weren’t many favorable reports. Often the people who described themselves as “spaced out”
liked
that experience. They said it helped them forget about their otherwise too busy lives.

Many added the word “meditative”; others found it “relaxing,” saying that it helped them “forget about the world.” Some who used terms like “brainwashed” or “addicted” nonetheless felt that television provided them with good information or entertainment, although there was no one who felt television lived up to its “potential.”

In all the time I collected responses, only eight people suggested they watched too little.

I also kept track of my own reactions. Though I now watch very little television—perhaps two or three hours per month, just to keep my hand in, as it were—I used to watch more. My reactions to the experience invariably reduced to one or two constants. Even if the program I’d been watching had been of some particular interest, the experience felt “antilife,” as though I’d been drained in some way, or I’d been used. I came away feeling a kind of internal deadening, as if my whole physical being had gone dormant, the victim of a vague soft assault. The longer I watched, the worse I’d feel. Afterward, there was nearly always the desire to go outdoors or go to sleep, to recover my strength and my feelings. Another thing. After watching television, I’d always be aware of a kind of glowing inside my head: the images! They’d remain in there even after the set was off, like an aftertaste. Against my will, I’d find them returning to my awareness hours later.

My objective in keeping all these records was not so much to catalog how many people liked television and how many did not, or how many felt guilty about their habit, but rather to gather descriptions of the experience in the terms people chose to describe it.

After a while, I came to realize that people were describing concrete physical symptoms that neither they nor anyone else actually believed were real. The people who would tell me that television was controlling their minds would then laugh about it. Or they would say they were addicted to it, or felt like vegetables while watching, and then they’d laugh at that.

People were saying they were being hypnotized, controlled, drugged, deadened, but they would not assign validity to their own experience. Yet if there is any truth in these descriptions, we are dealing with a force that is far more powerful and subtle than Huxley’s hypnopaedic machines. If television “hypnotizes,” “brainwashes,” “controls minds,” “makes people stupid,” “turns everyone into zombies,” then you would think it would be an appropriate area of scientific inquiry. In fact, someone should call the police.

Science has a name for such collections of descriptions. They are called “anecdotal evidence” or “experiential reports.” Such reports are not totally ignored by researchers, although they are not exactly taken seriously either. In the case of television, there is the problem that the symptoms are not fatal, they are subtle. Few people go to doctors complaining about them. They therefore remain below the threshold of visibility for scientific inquiry. Even when such reports are noticed, science does not accept them as valid unless they have been put through the grinder of scientific proof. Since it is beyond science to validate exactly what is meant by “zombie” or “brainwash” or even “addiction” or, as we will see, even “hypnosis,” these symptoms inevitably remain unzproved, leaving people who need external validation at a loss.

I have already stated my opinion that one major result of modern science has been to make people doubt what they would otherwise accept as true from their own observation and experience. Science, medicine, psychology and economics all deeply depend on people being mystified by their own experience and blind to the strict limits of scientific method.