Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture

6. What Was Broadcasting?

What Was Broadcasting? *6 A SignalCastBroadly Like the national debt, the homeless population, gun ownership , and job insecurity, television grew prodigiously in the 1980s. In terms of quantity, a steadily increasing number of channels served a steadily increasing number of audiences who were putting their sets to a steadily increasing number of uses. In terms of quality, programming got simultaneously much better and much worse than it ever had been, establishing a fresh context for the mediocrity that still dominates it (and every other artistic endeavor thus far attempted). Ironically, during this period of prolific expansion in the form, function, and spectrum of television, broadcasting steadily diminished in importance. This is neither a joke nor an academic language trick, but rather an apparently invisible fact. American culture was conquered and dominated for more than five decades by common-band broadcast transmission. Two technological innovations ended that reign: closed circuit delivery systems (e.g., cable) and self-programming options (e.g., the VCR). The diminishing importance of broadcasting in American mass communication has directly paralleled profound economic restructurings and social polarizations that have reshaped society . A perplexing question crystallizes in the face of this: how can an expansion in the number of cultural options accompany a contraction of democratic values and institutions? 167 Demographic Vistas "General interest" broadcasting, much like universal suffrage , retains inherently democratic potentials, even though the process is often manipulated toward anti-democratic ends. The spectacular feat of rhetoric, music, drama, and the other stuff of culture being "cast broadly" to a full complement of citizenry should have marked the crossing of an important threshold in the development of democracy. Structured for transdemographic address, broadcasting solicits rich and poor, egghead and illiterate, gang member and unaffiliated, theocrat 168 and atheist, offering all parties abrupt association as members of a single audience, and adding the security of physical isolation from each other in the bargain. Before the rise of the commercial broadcasting networks in the late 1920s, only the great transnational religious networks, such as Christianity and Islam , had ever pitched a cultural tent so wide. An entire nation-state addressed by its leader as one big audience is a distilled image of the twentieth century, likely to share prominence in CD-ROM textbooks with the camps, the mushroom clouds, and the automobile. The remembered figures of the century will surely be broadcast figures, including radio characters such as Hitler, Churchill, and Roosevelt as well as 1V characters such as Cronkite, Reagan, and Oprah.' In the case of the radio stars, heads of state imitated a quainter state of technology: the passionate address to the crowd in the public space. By contrast, the 1V people have tended to function as spokespersons and interlocutors, calmly promoting the ways of life and points of view of their corporate sponsors. Mussolini did his radio work from a balcony; Pat Robertson makes eye contact from a studio chair. It is already a cliche to mention that what we have come to call The News was created in print during the nineteenth century as the telegraph allowed newspapers to gather information instantaneously from distant points without having to transport it. The character of the daily news has since that time been altered repeatedly by a sequence of adaptations to electronic media: broadcast radio, broadcast television, cable television , on-line services, and so on. Less attention, however, has been paid to what cumulative effects the resulting imago mundi might have on the imagination of history, which now can be thought of as the mega-news. We have already seen how the audio-visually documented What Was Broadcasting? assassination of John F. Kennedy levitated him and his presidency into an historiographical mythosphere once occupied only by the likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. By contrast, William McKinley never had a chance. The 0.]. Simpson trial is assured a place in the popular history of twentiethcentury American jurisprudence that few if any Supreme Court rulings might hope to occupy; Judge Ito has already eclipsed Oliver Wendell Holmes in recognition factor. Father Coughlin will have generated far more usable material than Pope John XXIII, and Billy Graham more than both. Who is likely to be a 169 more dominant presence in the digital archives? Albert Einstein or Carl Sagan? Dr. Freud or Dr. Ruth? Charles Darwin or Pat Robertson? Mother Teresa already has a higher F-score than Albert Schweitzer. In the future the past will...