Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television

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For both commercial television and public television then it is absolutely necessary to create programs that these one hundred advertisers will support. They are where the action is. Given the costs of television, they are the only action.

We are speaking of control by 100 corporations out of 400,000. The interest of the other 399,900 are irrelevant as far as television is concerned. As for the thoughts, wishes and feelings of the noncorporate segments of American society -nearly 250 million human beings whose perspectives are as varied as the Indian, the artistic, the humanistic, the ecological, the socialistic, to name a very few these are not of the slightest importance.

Broadcast television, like other monolithic technologies, from eight-row corn threshers and agribusiness to supertankers, nuclear power plants, computer networks, hundred-story office buildings, satellite communications, genetic engineering, international pipelines and SSTs, is available only to monstrous corporate powers. What we get to see on television is what suits the mentality and purposes of one hundred corporations.

While purporting to be a mass technology available to everyone, because everyone can experience it, television is little more than the tool of these companies. If four out of five dollars of television income derive from them, then obviously, without currying their favor the networks would cease to exist.

The corollary is also true. Without such a single, monolithic instrument as television, the effective power and control of these huge corporations could not be harnessed as it presently is. Monolithic economic enterprise needs monolithic media to purvey its philosophy and to influence rapid change in consumption patterns. Without an instrument like television, capable of reaching everyone in the country at the same time and narrowing human needs to match the redesigned environment, the corporations themselves could not exist.

The spread of television unified a whole people within a system of conceptions and living patterns that made :a possible the expansion of huge economic enterprise. Because of it, our whole culture and the physical shape of the environment, no more or less than our' minds and feelings, have been computerized, linearized, suburbanized, freewayized, and packaged for sale.

It is a moot point whether those who control television knew what the outcome would be when they dusted it off after the war and sent it out to sell. Whether they invented television for that purpose or it invented them, the relation. ship was symbiotic. Its use was predetermined by the evolution of economic and, technological patterns that led up to it and that have since continued on their inevitable path. As we shall see, its use and effects were also determined by the nature and limits of television technology itself.

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