Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Style Supersedes Content

The changes wrought upon movements by the emergence of ,television were similar to the changes in traditional political process.

Richard Nixon, probably the first major public figure to understand television deeply, realized that four hours of TV debate with Kennedy had turned probable victory into slim defeat. He understood that TV appearances were more important than personal ones. By the time he ran again, he had revised his image. He became the "new Nixon."

Even though many people understood that his change was only cosmetic, he won. This confirmed for me the idea that something in the nature of television imagery allows form to supersede content. Once elected, Nixon made his first appointments—Ziegier and Haldeman—from advertising, the field that pioneered conveying pseudocontent in place of substance.

By his third campaign, Nixon appeared only on television; never in pubtic. McGovern, meanwhile, made the mistake of trying to deliver "content" through a medium predisposed to resist it.

Having used the media so well, Nixon developed a fatal arrogance about it. He and Agnew may have been right in claiming that their various transgressions were nothing special in American political history. But like the SLA, they forgot that they themselves were media illusions. The gravest mistake that can be made by a media creature is to assault the machine. The machine doesn't care about its fantasies. A new one will do. Bringing Nixon down was just as good for ratings as supporting him. Better. More action. The only goals of the machine are to continue to be the real power behind the throne, no matter who is king, and to remain the primary factor in all public perception. Television has the power to create presidents, and it has the power to destroy them.

Lyndon Johnson apparently also understood this power. So fiercely did he desire to dominate television that he kept three sets going in his offices at all times. He never succeeded in controlling mass media, but he did have a few dazzling moments. For example, the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened, but it was carried as legitimate by every news outlet. That convinced both Congress and the public and gave Johnson the approval he needed to escalate the Vietnam War.

This event was later exposed as only one of the many non-events pushed through the media to sell us that war. It occurred to me that the very fact that this could be done at all—fictional news about fictional military events expanding faraway wars that no one watching the images could observe firsthand—was cause for serious alarm about the power of the media to pursue fictitious realities.

Johnson was finally done in by his personal style. It turned out to be better television to caricature his way of speaking and his bawdy behavior, to make him a cartoon or folk character than to present him in a favorable light.

By the 1976 campaign, politicians had to become successful media artists or fail politically. That campaign was unique in that it displayed no content at all, only form. It was a contest between images and advertising stereotypes.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print