Or, if you can't beat 'em, at least try to join 'em
I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. —E.B. White, 1938
At least as measured by its range, today TV is certainly of age. It captivates an audience that runs to a nightly third of all the men, women and children in America. Images flow out over the population to be absorbed, statisticians insist, at the appalling average rate of 29 hours per week per citizen. The cash flows in. A minute of network prime-time advertising can sell for up to $140,000, or enough to pay the salary of seven or eight high school English teachers for a whole year.
But there is not much saving radiance in the sky. Instead, the air is alive with the sound of lamentation. At various times from various quarters, TV has been accused of raising the crime rate, dropping students' test scores, crippling the imagination, undermining national literacy, and layering American homes with an attention-numbing narcotic. The charges go way back. They were first raised by long-suffering parents and teachers who simply watched the TV viewing of children under their care and came to what they felt were grim, self-evident conclusions. Then the argument shifted a bit to the amount of violence on TV and its cumulative effects on society. To both counts the TV networks reacted as they still do: Life is complex. There is no proof. It's a free country, and people get what they want, as the networks' brutal rating games demonstrate. Besides, haven't those worrywarts heard of such a thing as healthy dramatic catharsis?
When the issue comes to public conflict it is customarily fought out in the wrong terms: an attempt to link one specific act of real-life violence to one specific act of TV violence. About the best documented instance, from the viewpoint of anti-TV forces, occurred in 1966 when NBC screened Doomsday Flight, ignoring pleas by airline pilots not to do so. A made-for-TV special, it presented a fictional extortion attempt by bomb threat against an airliner in flight. After the show the Federal Aviation Agency recorded a dramatic increase in phone-in bomb threats to airlines. More horrifying was the lawsuit against the same network by a mother who asked for $11 million after her nine-year-old daughter was gang-raped with a beer bottle by three teen-age girls and a boy. The assailants had seen a similar rape of a girl by girls on a TV movie only a few days earlier, though the instrument was the handle of a plumber's helper.