PARTING SHOT LESS THAN MEETS THE EYE: WHY EVERYTHING BECAME TV

Even war makes good television. During our little excursion into Panama, the networks brought us great combat visuals, moving interviews with the GI in the street, and even a soundtrack-the blaring rock songs aimed at the ex-dictator who looked like a villain on “Mission Impossible.”

Against this backdrop, I read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, the best book I’ve found on contemporary culture. Postman begins with the assumption that every technological advance, from the can opener to the car, has unintended consequences; all “gadgets” really do more for us-and to us-than their inventors could ever know. As the dominant medium in the world today, television not only brings us the world; it also reshapes the way we perceive the world. Television exerts an irresistible tug on every other means of discourse-politics, religion, newspapers, magazines. Everything must either become televisible or be dismissed, by increasing millions, as a boring anachronism.

The problem is that television, notwithstanding the lofty ideals of its pioneers, is irrevocably a visual medium for entertainment, not a verbal medium for the analysis and exchange of ideas. These are not merely the death rattles of another print dinosaur. Any writer must admit that print has its limitations (if you doubt it, try writing about the sounds of a rock concert). Likewise, television does certain things very well and other things very poorly. The tube may flirt with the word-on the “MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour,” for instance, or a Bill Moyers special-but it is married to the image.

So what? So plenty. Take politics, for instance. We need words so we can exchange ideas about complex subjects, argue, reason, refute, persuade-in other words, all the things that politics used to be about. A good politician of fifty years ago might be short, bald, warty, and bucktoothed, but he could not be inarticulate, because in the crunch he had to use language (not slick commercials) to get his ideas and plans across to the voters. A George Bush could never have won political office before the age of television, because the odd, almost autistic shorthand of Bushspeak would have baffled audiences and disqualified him. (Of course, you could push it a step further and argue that television actually helped to create the president’s choppy, fragmented speaking style, which can only be a reflection of choppy, fragmented thinking.)

To the extent that politics survives on television, it is no longer about principles, or persuasion based on appeals to logic, or even party loyalty. No, it’s about “nerds” riding in tanks, and apple-cheeked majorettes marching against a flag-filled sky. Occasionally some wet blanket interrupts the show to natter on about capital gains taxes or acid rain, but there are no sexy visuals about capital gains. Political discourse suffers greatly on television, which is why our “debates1’ are such a bad joke. Candidate A says that this plan destroyed 530,000 jobs. Candidate B says that the same plan actually created415,000 jobs. Surely this is a matter of fact, not opinion-but who’s right? Days later, someone might dig up the truth and run it on page 37. Meanwhile, millions are flipping over to Hardbodies II, which at least has a clear message that works on TV.

As Marshall McLuhan said (in a book), the medium really is the message. Suppose a news show does give scientists three whole minutes to debate the greenhouse effeet. The talk will likely be followed by a wisecracking weather guy taking credit for the sunshine, or a solemn commercial stressing the nightmares of using the wrong long distance service. Everything is equally important-and unimportant-on TV. Post-man calls it the “And Now This.. .” syndrome, and it’s seen in its purest form on TV news: an incoherent mishmash of events, most of them stripped out of context and bearing no relationship to each other. “Not everyone died in that hotel fire, Terry. Several people who didn’t gathered for the annual Polar Bear Club dip in the icy waters of. .. And it may be cold in Manhattan, but it’s hot water for Leona Helmsley.. .And now this.. .”

Hemingway wrote that everyone needed a built-in, shockproof crap detector. We’ve had centuries to work on spotting crap in print, where non sequiturs and fallacies tend to stand out, but we’re still learning how to protect ourselves from television. In that task we need help from our media critics. Locally, only David Zurawik of the Dallas Times Herald knew how to stand outside the medium and watch it as a Shaper of consciousness and values; his departure is a serious loss. The rest of the city’s critics are good at telling us which local station did the best earthquake coverage, or why tonight’s episode of “Designing Women” is worth catching, or how the “Today” show is doing without Jane Pauley. That’s not nearly enough in a country where everything, great and trivial, is forced through the narrow funnel of the television.

In the 1988 presidential election, Michael Dukakis ran a dumb, condescending campaign of pictures and lost. George Bush ran a much better dumb, condescending campaign of pictures and won. (Someone had to, and the Republicans are much better at tailoring their non-messages for television. When and if the Democrats catch up, things will be much, much worse.) On election night a veteran GOP strategist, watching the Bush celebration, mused aloud: “You know, I didn’t think it would work one more time.”

It worked. And it can work again and again, unless-what? Unless we force television to be what it cannot be? I don’t have an answer or an upbeat ending, except for this thought: for some reason, the printed word still holds a position of respect in our country. When the Reagans and Judge Robert Bork want to set the record straight, they do not make videos or rely solely on the talk shows; they write books, or at least cause them to be written. Bork’sbook, The Tempting of America, proves there is much more to the man than his televised hearings ever showed. Someday, when the White House thing is in a wind-down mode, George Bush will probably write a book, Then at last, we-and he-may find out what he thought.