The Trouble with Television is America/part 2

II. The Mythology of Free Enterprise

We need a seemingly impossible task to energize us off dead center. The kind of idealism that moves Peace Corpsmen and the Urbana Quakers to donate 1 percent of their income to the UN is what will help us undertake a qualitative revolution at home that will in turn make us willing to support the quantitative revolution abroad.

Once we begin to expect of ourselves as individuals the high performance that justifies fully freemen, we can turn to our institutions and purge ourselves of illusions about them. Then we shall lay the ghost of Adam Smith. The clichés we swap about competition, progress, and freedom from government initiative simply no longer square with the corporate America we are living in.

The folksays of the 1920s—the business of America is business, what we need is more business in government and less government in business—are not only useless as guides to action but they dangerously try to keep imposing rural politics on an industrial culture. A complex, interdependent technological society needs a strong active government at all levels. The very vitality of the private sector of our economy has developed imbalances in the public sector that only an energetic government can handle.

Let us not forget that the FCC was first founded in the 1920s because business needed an umpire to quiet down the squealings and howlings of unregulated wavelengths. The extension of government concern to the character and program promises of applicants for wavelengths was a perfectly legitimate safeguard that we would not squander a scarce public resource the way we wasted our physical resources in the predepression period.

The theory that the best government is that which governs least was true when one wanted to throw off the arbitrary rule of despotic kings and when the wide open spaces separated one man from his neighbors. Even Jefferson however stated federal aid to education in 1787 by setting aside land for the support of schools in the Northwest Ordinance. I think we should update political theory to say that the best government is that which attracts the least incompetence in public officials.

If we could begin to attract the very best men into public service, the debilitating idea that politics is per se corrupt and inefficient would soon disappear. The fact is that today there are many sources of power that limit our freedom—big corporations, big agriculture, big labor, big trade associations. To continue to assume that government is the only potentially despotic power is innocent beyond imagination.

Take the issue of censorship. Soap companies and cigarette manufacturers have exercised a virtual censorship over prime time broadcasting out of all proportion to their contribution to the GNP for years. These high volume, low unit cost firms find fun and games more conducive to their marketing needs than controversy and significance. If the FCC can propose rules of competition that would insulate prime time schedules from the excessive power of such advertisers, I think such rules should be tried.

And to complain about federal interference per se links the fact that powerful economic forces in the private sector are not always in the public interest. If regulations of the three networks could have prevented ABC from having depressed the level of nighttime programming, then I’m willing to entertain schemes for raising a floor of higher standards under inter network competition.

Which brings up another myth about our business system—competition. I don’t really believe that 3,500 radio stations have served us better than 1,000, unless you consider the substitution of Chubby Checkers for a balanced schedule of news and public affairs an improvement. And the penchant networks have for counter-programming documentaries and specials, or overlapping an opponent’s schedule is competition that doesn’t always redound to the viewer’s advantage.

I have no easy solution to these problems of competition in broadcasting or in other sectors of American life for that matter. But I am sure that ritual incantation of phrases like “individual initiative” and “progress and competition” are no substitute for the steady and continuing examination of changing economic and social realities in America. After ten years of struggle, the educational broadcasters have successfully sought relief at the public treasury for tax money to accelerate the growth of a crucial part of the public sector.

If this pump priming works, perhaps we should find further ways of helping the chronically undernourished educational broadcasters to fulfill their potential. I no longer believe the myth that the private sector is the only wealth-producing part of the economy. Public health, public education and other non-private institutions have contributed just as much to our abundance as has entrepreneurial leadership.