Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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Roots was not an exception to this rule. In fact; it proves the rule. In the book, the cultural nuances of relationships were emphasized and developed, while the TV production avoided them altogether. Nor was there much effort to present the subtle ambience of the African natural environment, which was also highly developed in the book. The television production wisely concentrated on the larger, more explicit, and therefore more reproducible elements of conflict in the story and the kinds of family attachment made familiar by soap operas.

This is not to say that the production didn't have value. It is only to remark that the values which were conveyed were the simplest ones to convey. The more subtle values, which are at the heart of the African culture and, therefore, formed the basis for the quality of feeling that existed among the uprooted slaves, were necessarily dropped out. In the end, the viewer got some fairly good information and feeling about good guys and bad guys during a certain period of history, but virtually no understanding of the successful repression of an entire culture and way of mind.

So it goes in all dramatic programming. Nuance is being sacrificed to the larger and more visible elements of story and the came of the sacrifice A a technical limitation of the medium.

Problems of subtlety don't present themselves in quiz shows, sports events and sitcoms. These are confined to areas of human expression which are easy to capture, easy to communicate, and easy to understand, even with directors and writers of ordinary talent and in a medium as vague as television. As a result, there is a tendency to favor such productions.

The bias toward the coarse, the bold, and the obvious finds its way into all other categories of television programming, including even those that deal with so-called objective events in the world. Pub lic affairs programs are seriously biased away from coverage of highly detailed, complex, and subtle information, and so are news shows. Ordinarily this bias is believed to result from time factors—it takes too long to explain complicated issues. However, certain kinds of visual information are harder to capture than others. News producers will always choose the more easily communicable image.

Edward Epstein, in his very important News From Nowhere, interviews television news producers, seeking to define an inherent bias in the news that is related to technical and other factors. He observes:

"The one ingredient most producers interviewed claimed was necessary for a good action story was visually identifiable opponents clashing violently. This, in turn, requires some form of stereotype: military troops fighting civilians, black versus white students, workers wearing hard-hats manhandling bearded peace demonstrators, were cited by producers as examples of the components for such stories. Demonstrations or violence involving less clearly identifiable groups make less effective stories, since, as one CBS producer put it, 'It would be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. " . . . since news stories tend to be constructed from those aspects of a happening that can be easily filmed and recorded, and not from the poorly lit, softly spoken or otherwise inaccessible moments, events tend to be explained in terms of what one producer called 'visual facts.' One correspondent pointed out, for example, that television coverage of riots or protests at night tends to focus on fires, even if they are insignificant trash can fires, since they provide adequate light for filming. Hence urban riots tend to be defined in terms of the 'visual facts' of fires, rather than more complicated factors. Visual facts, of

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