How Educational Can Television Be?

What ETV ought to be doing is addressing itself to the backlog of public deficits, very often blue collar in nature, which the commercial channels don't handle in any systematic way. Retraining automation's unemployables, developing a broadly based attack on urban blight, facing squarely the obdurate pockets of religious and radical obscurantism, overcoming the deficits in quality teaching in our public school system-these would seem to me to be first on any thoughtful agenda, not creating more High Culture programming for minorities already well served by FM radio, high price paperbacks, and long playing records.

But the ETV policy makers are in a tough economic bind. As their foundation money runs out, there will be an increasing tendency to turn to the public relations arms of large corporations for support. The men who disburse such funds are themselves, generally, High Culture enthusiasts. They are also likely to be viewers of ETV as presently programmed. And opera and drama, as "high status" as they are noncontroversial, are prime objects for the Timid Patron.

The tangled social and economic problems that ETV should explain to blue and white collar alike are not the kind that make fancy and reassuring presentations to boards of directors. But they are the realities we must consider, even if it means delaying for a while the kinds of immediate high-level gratifications the arts provide.

Perhaps the most hopeful direction ETV seems to be considering is a more wholehearted support of Instructional TV (ITV). Roughly forty per cent of the programming of ETV stations is in this area of formal instruction, largely because school systems and universities have been more stable in their financing than community stations which must beg from year to year. Until very recently there has been a reluctance on the part of NET to get deeply involved in experiments like Midwest Airborne Television and the videotaped and filmed courses of Learning Resources Institute. But if we are to incorporate the blue collar into the consensual society, if we are to wean him from his self destructive reliance on excessive fantasy, then the formal cultural institutions of school, library, and museum must join forces with NET to achieve this essential breakthrough.

Wilbur Schramm points out that blue collar and white collar peers share their media fantasies until adolescence. Why, then, not try to internalize the norms of delayed reward in all children by revivifying our educational system through first-rate ITV? In fact, the process should start before school with children's programming. If ETV were to invest a much greater share of its finances and talent in the children's sector, then in ten, fifteen, or twenty years, it would have incorporated huge sectors of blue and tattle-tale-gray collars into audiences capable of selecting a balanced diet of cultural and public affairs programming. This isn't the glamorous alternative, but it would seem to be the one that insures the maturing of the total American society rather than the separating of our cultural economy into the undevelopable blues and the overdeveloped whites.

Opportunity for Research

To accelerate this process of finally fulfilling the revolutionary democratic ideals of the eighteenth century, the school of communications has a marvelous opportunity. The new edition of Wilbur Schramm's book of classroom readings, Mass Communications (University of Illinois, 1960, $6.50) attests to the vitality of the very best in this new discipline. Warren Breed's brilliant analysis of the covert ways a reporter perceives what not to report, Raymond Nixon's convincing analysis of the paradox that newspaper monopoly is often a much better condition than excessive competition, Elihu Katz' description of how people are influenced by the mass media indirectly through their group opinion leaders, the Wolfenstein-Leites examination of American sexual mores through the "good-bad" girl who starts out looking merely sexy but in the last analysis can be brought home to mother, the Langs' analysis of TV's latent editorializing by which a MacArthur parade in Chicago that was dull to see in the flesh was "exciting" when viewed on television-these are among the few essays in Schramm's collection that give TV viewer and policymaker alike valuable insights into the new institutions that so influence the quality of American life today.

But mass communications research can hardly be said to be flourishing on the basis of these few brilliant "takes." For one thing, given the investment in money and time that Americans have made in television, one would hope that there would be much more research on the history and dynamics of the new medium. Where are academicians with interim reports on the new medium as good (at a higher level of insight) as Martin Mayer's Madison Avenue, U.S.A.; Irwin Ross's The Image Merchants; and Stan Opotowsky's TV: The Big Picture?

The academic fraternity must accustom itself to a faster rate of social change in its research, even if it means quick, penetrating snapshots for policymakers on the run rather than massively documented works that try to shut the barn door long after the horses of power have left. Wilbur Schramm's earlier book, Responsibility in Mass Communication (1957), was just such a book, and I think it still has more to say, in clarifying the ethical and esthetic ambiguities of mass media policymakers, than his latest attempt to integrate our children's experience of television with the latest sociological theory.

For example, in the former, more journalistic book he discusses Captain Kangaroo's policy directive to his own program people as an excellent set of standards worthy of emulation by all who produce programs for children. Yet in his comprehensive book on how children use TV, Captain Kangaroo appears only twice-in tables with run-of-themill programming. There is something seriously wrong with a systematic theory that blacks out the most significant single innovation in the first ten years of TV for children. Perhaps what is needed is research which starts with the best programs and tries to document how they began and survived, or, as is so often the depressing case, why they died.

What is the real story behind the demise of indigenous drama on TV? What hidden struggles did Murrow have to keep his documentaries on CBS-TV? What happened to the "Home" show started by Pat Weaver at NBC? Why did "Disneyland" go western? Why doesn't "American Bandstand" feature real singers like teenager Joanne Baez?

My hunch is that these qualitative questions frighten off those who, first and foremost, want communications research to be an academically respectable enterprise adequately and continuously financed. I fear that the academic organization man, who wants an associate professorship rather than a vice-presidency, may prevent communications research from asking the tough, embarrassing questions. Schools of communications have to be financed too, and the most obvious source of money is the wealthy media entrepreneur. There is a reluctance on the part of many school administrators to be critical to the point of alienating donors. After all, the rationalization goes, our students have to get jobs, and who wants to hire soreheads? Gradually we will improve media standards-gradually. And the stern face of dissent dissolves in smiles of affability.

One final dilemma faces the mass communication researcher who after all wants his work to influence policymakers in a positive direction. Schramm's very careful book on the interactions between children and TV, time and again points out how difficult it is to prove causality between, say, violence on TV and juvenile delinquency. Such conclusions are arduously arrived at and meticulously phrased. But to the TV executive hauled before a congressional committee, the book says just one thing: You can't prove any connection. In other words, in most cases all this research work has done is to get the lazy and irresponsible executive off the hook.

In the handful of reviews of Television in the Lives of Our Children I have seen, the selective perception is shocking. The book in its effect merely reassures; it doesn't seem to lead to corrective action or even a well-deserved sense of guilt. What responsibility does a scholar have to see to it that his hard work isn't abused to justify the status quo? It might be instructive to do a content analysis of all the reviews of, and allusions to, this book to get a sense of just how feeble a corrective the raised eyebrow approach is-as a regulatory device. Such a study might itself raise a lot of scholarly eyebrows.

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 51, No. 8 (Nov., 1962), pp. 588-590
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English