Los Gatos Weekly-Times

TV no longer sees itself as a guest in America's home

By Vern Hansen

'Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have enough room for a network president's heart." --Fred Allen

The radio station was abuzz over the weekend. The manager had been informed by office memo on Friday: "All staff, except those responsible for keeping the station on the air, will meet in Studio A. at 9 a.m. on Monday. Be prompt. This is important."

The boss rarely called an all-staff meeting, except to announce plans for the company Christmas party. What could this be about?

"As you know," he began on Monday, "we have been trying to get FCC approval for a television license. Our application has been approved. Shortly, we will be operating a television station as well as a radio station. And I just have this to say: Television is the most intimate form of communication.
So we must always remember that we are guests in the American home."

This vignette is fact. It happened at the Midwestern CBS affiliate where I was employed in the '50s. Fast-forward to the '90s. This time, imagine that a broadcast executive has called a staff meeting for an important announcement: "I am here to tell you that the FCC has approved our application for a television license. So let's get smut, sex and violence off our streets and on television where it belongs."

This vignette is fiction. Or is it?

When I was a part of the broadcasting industry, filmed television shows were sold like sausages in the hotel hospitality suites where broadcasting executives attended their conventions. No doubt, they still are.

The old burlesque theater never completely disappeared from the scene, where the salacious and sex-hungry could ogle scantily-clad girls, listen to bathroom-joke comics and a tired trombone-led trio and an audience yelling, "Take it off!"

The burlesque theater was merely cut up into millions of pieces and placed in American homes as television sets. What it offers is now in your face, turning American pop culture into "The Land of the Frayed and the Home of the Bawd."

What good is a multibillion-dollar technology when it is used for things that aren't worth a dime?

Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote and directed Network, said that "TV is democracy at its ugliest." A more gentle critic, Art Buchwald, said: "TV has a real problem. They have no page two."

To an extent that is not good for society, television has usurped verbal intimacy between parent and child, school and child, and church and child, as molders of character and behavior. Who should we blame?

Producer Norman Lear once charged that "television is a convenient whipping boy for the ills that affect society," which is itself a convenient dodge for the producers of film and TV fare to be socially responsible; in effect, exacerbating the ills they claim they are only mirroring, not influencing, by what they do.

Freedom of expression under the U.S. Constitution doesn't allow anyone the right to throw garbage onto our lawns. So why does a minuscule segment of our population have the right to shovel it into our homes electronically?

It is difficult to believe that the framers of our Constitution intended that the First Amendment should shield unbridled license.

The ACLU and others can haggle all they wish over what is considered decent and indecent. Let the courts decide. For the rest of us, there is an instinctive revulsion on the part of those who call themselves gentlemen and ladies toward that which is unseemly and indecorous. We are unwilling to accept without protest the unrelenting infusion of Anglo-Saxon vulgarisms by television into common parlance and use.

We deplore censorship and wish to safeguard the free expression of ideas and information. But when the profit motive goes beyond the bounds of propriety and produces undeniable harm to the young, if those who do so do not police themselves, it will be done by an aroused and irate public.

Count on it.

Music is one of the strongest influences on our youth. American popular music has been in retrograde ever since the end of the big-band era. Who was it that said: "I don't know anything about music. In my line, you don't have to." Can't guess? Elvis Presley.

Dedicated musicians have fought a losing battle against the puerility of rock & roll since the mid-'50s. As Wynton Marsalis observed: "The sincerity has got to come back into music. The 1960s let a lot of people in who were willing to be charlatans ... each of our generations got weaker instead of stronger."

From its early inanity, rock & roll has mutated into savagery, sedition and subversion. It is an incontrovertible fact that the mind grows by what it feeds on. And, as someone once said, "all paths are difficult, except the ones that lead downhill."

Are we willing to tolerate heavy-metal, drug-dealing, hotel-trashing fugitives-from-paternity-suits as role models for our youth? Well, whatever will be, will be.

And it is rather late for Robert Dole and others to be inveighing against the whirlwind we are reaping from what we have sown.

Vern Hansen is a Los Gatos resident.