The Wasteland Revisited

I've been giving some thought to the matter of majorities. The networks are always talking about the majority audiences for whom they have to program, and I decided to try to figure out who they are.

I first thought the networks meant everybody under 28 years of age--because that's the majority of the American people. But CBS canceled the Smothers Brothers' show, which appealed principally to that audience, so it must have a different majority in mind. I thought about blue-collar workers. But there are only 27,000,000 of them--scarcely more than the number of nonwhites in America, and everybody knows they're a minority group.

There are 56,000,000 students in colleges and other schools--over twice the number of blue-collar workers, it's true; but they're still not a majority. Twenty million Americans are under five years of age. Another 20,000,000 are over 65. Clearly, television programing is not for either of those groups.

It's very difficult to find that majority the programing is intended for. Finally, I began to appreciate the perceptiveness of the phrase "the silent majority." I hadn't realized how silent they are. But I didn't give up. I found the group. Examine the ratings and you will find that majority audience. In television homes, at any given time, a majority of Americans turn the television set off. Startling, but obvious once you think about it.

The networks are really doing a great job of programing for this majority audience. More sets are turned off now than ever before. Some people have kept their sets off for so many hours that the picture tubes are lasting longer and they don't need to replace their sets so often. Equipment manufacturers report set sales have hit new lows in the past few months. Some families may miss the tingle of X-ray radiation given off by their color sets, but so far, no one has heard many complaints. Meanwhile, book, record and hi-fi sales, audiences at motion-picture theaters (especially from that majority of Americans under 28) and other entertainment and recreational expenditures seem to be on the upswing.

The increase in the number of television commercials has, of course, helped this trend. In my judgment, however, some people in the advertising industry are giving themselves too much credit. One of the country's leading advertising executives, Fairfax M. Cone, has modestly recognized the true heroes of the networks' audience-building strategy: "The greatest medium yet discovered for the dissemination of information has quickly become an instrument primarily of entertainment ... entertainment at a level that is more often than not witless and absurd." I think he is right. The credit (continued on page 264) Wasteland Revisited (continued from page 229) must really go to those network executives who have done their best to stifle creativity at every turn, to produce the kind of programing that will encourage the majority audience to keep its sets off. We all owe these men a great deal and I am one who is quite prepared to give credit where it is due.

As with any scientific contribution, there is always the danger of unintended adverse side effects. Because we had earlier built up a dependence upon television as a soma-type drug, polls indicate that 60 percent of the American people still believe they get most of their "information" from television. Anyone who has watched any television programing will immediately suspect that figure. After all, how much information is there on television? As guitarist-writer Mason Williams has said, "When television gets off into life, it gets lost." One week after the crucial first ABM debate began, the same percentage of the American people--60 percent--hadn't the foggiest notion of what the ABM was or of what they thought about it.

It's no coincidence that the Nixon Administration announced a multibillion-dollar expansion of the ABM system the same week the Administration eliminated all danger of inflation by cutting back on the education budget. Education has always been a dangerous program, anyway, one that always threatens to increase the capacity of future generations to understand what's going on. Ignorance and secrecy are essential ingredients in much of politics and commerce, and our national security and prosperity depend on television and radio to promote these conditions.

Words, for example, flood from Washington each year, most of them dutifully repeated (not reported) by the news media in the fashion desired by the officials involved. But only one document each year makes any difference at all: the budget. It tells what's really going on in Washington. Understandably, the nation would be ill served should this document ever be fully explained to the American people. The news media have met their responsibilities in this area; most Governmental programs have been permitted to continue or even expand over the years because citizens have been told to resent their tax dollars going to "bureaucrats in Washington."

If it were widely known that the total of all expenses associated with the entire legislative branch of Government, the judicial branch and all the regulatory commissions combined constitute less than one half of one percent of the Federal budget, people would ask what happens to the other 199 billion dollars. They might want to know why President Nixon recommended increasing maritime subsidies, for example, when every independent economist who's ever examined the subsidy program has concluded that it's a giveaway with virtually no economic benefit whatsoever to the American people.

They'd probably ask why the 264 largest farmers in the country receive average annual subsidies of $200,000, while the 540,000 other farmers average only about $100 each. They might wonder why they have to contribute over $80,000,000 a year in tax dollars to subsidize tobacco growers while the Department of Health, Education and Welfare gets only $2,600,000 to spend on anti-smoking efforts.

They might ask why a taxpayer who earns an average of $3,000,000 a year pays taxes of less than 1 percent while most taxpayers pay 20 percent or more. They might question the wisdom of giving the Department of Defense 40 billion dollars a year for Pentagon propaganda and public relations--while the Department of Justice gets only $5,000,000 for civil rights enforcement. They might wonder why we spend about twice the cost of the Medicare program on new-weapons research alone. And why the mere development of the ABM system in 1970 will cost two billion dollars, which is more than both the Community Action and Model Cities programs.

The danger of making this kind of information widely and dramatically available on television is obvious. But we in Government can count on the networks, for beyond the industry's simple patriotism, its self-interest is also involved. The same corporations that pay for commercial messages are involved in other pursuits that more seriously affect the American people and so should be of immediate concern.

For example, environmental pollution, a potentially dangerous subject, really can't be avoided at this time. But the networks courteously soft-peddled the fact that the Administration's new anti-pollution proposals actually cut back on spending in many environmental programs. They have also neglected to subject to tough questioning those upstanding corporate officials who are ultimately responsible for 80 per cent of all air pollution in America: the presidents of the three major automobile companies who have suffered embarrassment enough over their deliberate decisions to design automobiles that needlessly kill over 50,000 Americans each year in collisions (as many as die from all other accidents combined). They are, after all, major advertisers.

If these and other businessmen were subjected to rigorous questioning on camera, it would be difficult to avoid certain questions: why 11.5 percent of all 1968 and 1969 automobiles failed to meet weak Government safety standards (including brake failures in 10 of the 73 cars tested); why Dunlop refused to recall 90,000 unsafe tires when over 50 percent of these tested (30 of 56) failed a strength test; why the automobile manufacturers are making it virtually impossible for customers in most states to obtain the pollution-reducing equipment required on all cars in California; why they use bumpers that can't withstand an impact of six miles an hour, creating an unnecessary one-billion-dollar-a-year investment in bumpers and repairs; why roughly one third of all auto repairs are unsatisfactory. Even a limited investigation of these issues would make it much more difficult to sell cars to a docile populace.

Sensitive matters, of course, are hardly limited to the auto industry. Roughly two thirds of all fish-processing plants couldn't pass the sanitation requirements for meat plants, according to a little-publicized Department of the Interior report. Ralph Nader has revealed that 30 percent of all Federally inspected sausage making failed tests for cleanliness. Manufacturers of a rat poison, thallium sulphate, were ordered by the Department of Agriculture to take it off the market in 1960 because of its threat to children. Two years later, there were 400 children poisoned by thallium sulphate. There are about 10,000 fires annually caused by late-model TV sets that suddenly burst into flame; despite urging, the manufacturers are apparently unwilling to recall the defective sets. Over 3,000,000 acres of American landscape have been destroyed by strip mining--and less than 16 percent of it has undergone reclamation efforts from industry. When the citizens of Santa Barbara complained about the pollution of their beaches, a spokesman for Sun Oil said simply, "This is a big, expensive operation. We can't stop now."

We in Government are also gratified by the responsible job the media have done in covering the law-and-order issue. Those crimes that the poor and disadvantaged are most likely to commit have received widespread coverage. Consequently, the American people have focused their attention almost exclusively on these offenses, thus allowing white-collar crime to continue unabated without fear of public outrage. The only way the poor can take money that doesn't belong to them is by stealing it, and since robbery is usually accompanied by a great deal of publicity, this gives the poor a bad name. The rich, by contrast, can go to work for a bank and use the technique of embezzlement. The rich are able to take great sums of money every year in this way and--thanks to the understanding of the mass media--with almost no publicity whatsoever.

How many Americans have ever been told that a single price-fixing conspiracy may rob them of more than all the money taken by the poor in all robberies, burglaries and larcenies combined throughout the entire United States in a single year? It's vital to keep such information from those who cannot be counted on to respond to it with understanding. One official in New York, U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau, never learned this rather simple lesson. He once said, "We just felt that when accountants break the law and they do it knowingly and they certify a commercial balance sheet, they should be held responsible in a criminal case, just the way somebody is who robs a bank or steals a car." Well now, you can't just go putting some of the finest people in town in jail; ultimately, it became obvious to everyone that Mr. Morgenthau would have to be replaced.

Corporate executives regularly eat, and quite grandly, at public expense--half the bill paid by the public as taxpayers, the other half paid by the public as consumers. While it is possible to feed a small portion of the population in this way, it would be administratively difficult for the great masses of poor people to be permitted to feed themselves in the same fashion, simply signing a slip of paper to have the bill paid by others. Were the millions of poor and hungry well informed, they might demand such extravagances for themselves.

The public may misunderstand the gentleman's agreement between the Administration and the media. Many applauded the Vice-President's criticism of the networks for rather feebly attempting to analyze one of President Nixon's Vietnam speeches. A fan of the Vice-President, Miss Tricia Nixon, expressed her admiration directly when she said: "He's amazing, what he has done to the media.... You can't underestimate the power of fear. They're afraid if they don't shape up...." Even the Vice-President is pleased: "Sometimes when I look around at the tube from time to time, I think I have had a modicum of success."

It would be embarrassing to explain to the public that the Administration will apparently guarantee the economic interests of the broadcasting industry, as long as the media give the Administration favorable coverage in return. It would be awkward to explain that while the Vice-President complains that the media are too uniform and concentrated in too few hands, the Administration has recently signed into law the newspaper industry's monopoly-authorization bill (the so-called Failing Newspaper Act) and the President's Director of Communications, Herb Klein, has announced his opposition to Senator Thomas McIntyre's bill to split up some of the larger media monopolies. Klein spelled it out in an informal luncheon with the Radio and Television News Directors Association. Bill Roberts reported: "Klein maintained that the real way to determine the Nixon Administration's attitude toward broadcasters is from its appointments to the Federal Communications Commission, not through its speeches. And he posed the question--aren't the ... Nixon Administration appointees good men, from the industry's point of view?"

The Administration has apparently begun a protection racket. If broadcasters pay up with free time and favorable news coverage, the Administration will protect the industry against economic loss from legislation to limit ownership and advertising time, public participation in the license-renewal process, antitrust suits and the like--by means of counter-legislation and favorable FCC appointments. On the whole, the arrangement seems to be working fairly well.

Where does all this leave us? A growing number of people in this country are so shocked and disgusted with what they believe to be the current state of the union that they propose simply to opt out of it. Norman Mailer thinks "the only way to end our smog is for citizens to take up muskets, get on barges, go to Jersey and explode all the factories." Let's hope that isn't necessary yet.

Quite apart from these criticisms, one main gripe today is the state of the media. There are people who just don't believe television anymore. Twenty percent of the American people believe we never actually landed on the moon. TV has sold products that harm them, are overpriced, don't work, don't deliver on their promises of sexuality and happiness or that they really don't want. The frustration and outrage are understandable.

Television has been characterized as the ultimate product of a mass-produced, plastic, throwaway society: Package and product are instantaneously consumed at the moment of manufacture. But the news medium is simply too vital to our country to discard it along with the other throwaway accouterments of our culture. Pete Seeger has remarked that for someone to say, "Let the boobs watch television, I get my enjoyment from books," is like saying, "What do I care about polluted rivers? I have a swimming pool." I think it's a matter of desperate urgency that we worry about the pollution of our minds as well as our rivers.

Some have made courageous choices. Ralph Nader is one. Mr. Nader is a fine lawyer. He could be working for a large Wall Street law firm making a large income. But he has chosen to work for a cause in which he believes--the welfare and safety of the American people--and there are few in this country who are not in his debt. Gary Greenberg, former attorney with the Justice Department, made his choice, too--and resigned rather than defend a "go-slow" policy of school desegregation in the Federal courts.

There aren't many comparable examples in broadcasting, but their scarcity makes them all the more noteworthy. Fred Friendly resigned as head of CBS News when his network chose to broadcast the fifth rerun of I Love Lucy rather than Senator Fulbright's hearings on the Vietnam war. Warren H. Braren, onetime director of the NAB Code Authority, resigned his position rather than perpetuate the myth that the Code Authority independently reviewed the industry's cigarette commercials. And Tom and Dick Smothers made their choice, too. It's worth reading what Tom had to say about it: "My brother, bless his heart, said you've got carte blanche to do what you want to do--and that was his career. It amounted to millions.... So I'm saying it because I believe in it: You only go through life once, and if you see a wrong being done, or someone in trouble, or a fellow man that is in need, and you don't do it now, you'll never be past that point again." Not many have had that courage.

The people in radio and television face myriad pressures. Within their control are two of the most powerful instruments ever created to influence the mind of man. There are many who want to use radio and television primarily to serve corporate interests--to sell products. I believe radio and television can operate both on a commercial basis and in the public interest. But it isn't easy to make them work when all the tugging and pulling comes from one end--the commercially oriented, profit-maximizing end.

So what do we do? Listen to Fred Friendly: "[The] broadcast newsman of today can no longer afford the luxury of abdicating his role in a decision-making process that now so clearly affects his profession and his standards.... Television's battles will not be fought or won with the polemics of corporate handouts, First Amendment platitudes or full-page ads. They will be won by what is on the air and they will be lost by what is not on the air." That's what we're talking about--what is on the air, especially in network prime time.

Some may have to take risks to get something on the air that they believe to be important. It may be necessary to stand up to a manager, a programing executive, a news director, a Washington Vice-Presidents an advertising agent or a sponsor. Just as young lawyers have to decide whether they want to represent clients whose products pollute the air and cause cancerous lungs and young medical students have to decide whether they will work for the ghetto poor or earn large fees specializing in diseases of the rich, people in communications must decide which side they are on.

Communications people in other countries have faced similar problems and are working toward solutions. In Paris, for example, the journalists who work on the newspaper Le Monde exercise a controlling vote in the affairs of the paper. Journalists on a German magazine, Der Stern, have gotten management to sign editorial statutes assuring them that they will not be pressured to write articles counter to their consciences. In Britain, a Free Communications Group is trying to bring newspapers, television and radio under the control of the people who produce them. And in Italy, a group of 450 Italian journalists has set up a Movement of Democratic Journalists for the Freedom of the Press to use collective bargaining to protect newsmen's independence. I see no reason why American journalists shouldn't be able to work toward their own independence from management and corporate-sponsor pressures.

Let's not forget Fred Friendly's blunt description of our predicament: "Here we stand, with the image orthicon tube, the wired city and the satellite, the greatest tools of communication that civilization has ever known, while the second highest officeholder in the land implies that we use them less. Here we are in 1970, Mr. Vice-President, with one leg on the moon and the other on earth, knee-deep in garbage. That's going to require some news analysis." That certainly is going to require some news analysis.

It will not be easy to change all this. As Justice Douglas has reminded us in his book Points of Rebellion, "While the establishment welcomes inventive genius at the scientific level (provided it can get the patent and lock it up against competitive use), it does not welcome dissent on the great racial, ideological and social issues that face our people." So you have to be prepared to pay a price for freedom. Remember the exchange between Billy and George in Easy Rider?

Billy says, "What the hell's wrong with freedom, man? That's what it's all about."

And George answers, "Oh, yeah; that's right--that's what it's all about, all right. But talking about it and being it--that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you're bought and sold in the market place. 'Course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah--they're gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom--but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em."

Free individuals are frightening to the occupants of an institutional world operated by interchangeable people with interchangeable parts. But freedom is what it's all about. It's not enough that we stop needlessly killing each other in the cause of ever-escalating corporate profits. There is something so irrevocable and irrefutable about death that the immorality of putting corporate profits ahead of human life would seem to require no discussion. Societies and governments are instituted among men to enhance the human condition, to preserve the right to the pursuit of happiness, to make possible the kind of life that Goethe described, in which a sense of the beautiful plays a prominent part.

The people want their sky back. That is a modest enough request. Air, water, food, good medical care, safe products and a safe technological environment, protection from the crimes of rich and poor alike--these are fundamental necessities. But they aren't ends in themselves. The end should be a society in which each individual, each man and woman, is given the opportunity to attain the ultimate of which he or she is capable; intellectually, emotionally, aesthetically as well as economically.

As political scientist Arnold S. Kaufman has written, "The gap between rhetoric and reality is so wide, the values actually operative so unrelated to biological, intellectual and spiritual development in its fullest sense, that an authentically human existence for most Americans is an impossibility."

How many men and women feel truly fulfilled by their jobs? We know of the dehumanizing effects of racism and ghetto schools. Should we not also attend to the dehumanizing effects of corporate personnel practices? Architect Paolo Soleri has looked at our society and finds everywhere "teeming human ants." But the human ants are beginning to respond. Dr. Martin Luther King reported, "All over the world, like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history.... You can hear [the great masses of people] rumbling in every village street, on the docks, in the houses, among the students, in the churches and at political meetings." And his truth goes marching on. These masses of people want the necessities of creature comfort, yes. But they also want the necessities of human fulfillment: joy, beauty, love. By the millions, they look to television to provide a sense of direction. And they are frustrated by the promise constantly held out but never kept.

Mason Williams has predicted:

The first television network that has

The courage to help this country

Instead of sell to it

Will truly become a champion ofJustice

And will be loved and respected

By the people

Not just watched.

Only then will it be a true majority medium.