Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (2 page)

I already knew that, in America, all advertisers spent more than $25 billion a year to disseminate their information. Now, however, I was beginning to pay attention to an obvious, yet little noticed, aspect of this situation. Virtually all of the $25 billion was being spent by people who already had a great deal of money. These were the only people who could afford to pay $30,000 for one page of advertising in
Time
($54,000 by 1977) or $50,000 for one minute of prime television time ($125,000 by 1977). Ordinary people and small businesses, even those which are successful by most standards, can rarely afford any advertising beyond the want ads, or a small local retail display. Only the very rich buy mass national advertising. And they do this to become richer. What other motive could they possibly have?

A. J. Liebling once said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” I was learning that access to the press was similarly distorted by the possession of wealth. People with money had a 25-billion-to-nearly-zero advantage over people without money. The rich could simply buy access to the public mind while the not-rich had to seek more circuitous routes.

Twenty-five billion dollars is nearly as much as the whole country spends on higher education every year. I began to realize that a distortion was taking place in the quality and kind of information offered to the public. To a larger and larger extent, people’s minds were being occupied by information of a purely commercial nature. As an advertising executive, I was instrumental in furthering this distortion.

The ecology movement pushed me over the edge. Our agency was hired first by the Sierra Club and then by Friends of the Earth and other organizations. Unlike most other do-good groups, these at least had a little money to buy an occasional one-shot ad on some critical issue. (During the early 1970s, all environmental groups together spent about $500,000 per year in advertising in order to offset an average of about $3 billion in corporate expenditures on the same subjects. This ratio was relatively small, only 6,000 to 1, which may help explain the early success of the environmental movement. )

I found myself writing ads about keeping dams out of Grand Canyon, halting the overdevelopment of cities, stopping the development of SSTs, and urging people to stop buying and wearing furs.

The ads attacked the prevailing life-style of the country, which certainly included my own. They spoke of an inevitable conflict between corporate growth and the health of the planet. They encouraged a habit of mind which could grasp the inter-relationships between all natural systems, including humans. They described a growing environmental destruction which reflected itself in individual lives as well as in economic policies.

As I wrote these ads and thought about them, it got harder and harder to separate my new perspective from an awareness that it was in conflict with our corporate work. On Tuesday, I was writing about the impact cars and other technologies had upon the environment, and on Thursday I was promoting the sale of cars.

The crunch came one day in 1969 when a young
Wall Street Journal
reporter named Henry Weinstein called about doing a story on our agency’s public-service work. By that time we had gained public attention for having invented a new style of advocacy advertising. Our ads were characterized by coupons urging changes in policy. The coupons could be torn out by readers and sent to corporations and government agencies. They produced enormous volumes of mail on conservation issues that until then had been considered the province of bird watchers and little old ladies in tennis shoes.

The ads had not only affected policy, they catalyzed and organized the public, because they allowed a new level of involvement. By mailing them, people became more committed to the issue. For once they were doing something more than feeling bad. A number of senators and congressmen publicly gave the ads credit for determining the outcome of several issues, and in
The New Advertising
Robert Glatzer went so far as to credit them with “starting the whole ecology boom.”

Weinstein told us that the
Journal
was interested in the way we had developed this technique. However, when the story appeared on the front page, we learned he was a cagier reporter than we’d realized. While praising our work, he went to considerable lengths to reveal our misgivings about our conflicting roles. He cited my own anxiety at doing ads for an auto account, British Leyland Motors (Rover, Land Rover, Triumph), at a time that I was making speeches that said automobiles were at the heart of so many problems.

Leyland didn’t like this. Within two hours of the story’s appearance we were fired. The next day’s
Journal
carried the headline:

AD MAN NEED WORRY NO MORE ABOUT AUTO ACCOUNT

I could describe fifty less spectacular incidents similar to this one involving struggles with clients over corporate policies that I was beginning to see as antithetical to simple rules of human well-being, or justice or planetary survival. They finally added up to a single generalization: Corporations are inherently uninterested in considerations aside from the commercial.

We began to feel that our balancing act was draining us personally. At last we saw that it was doomed to fail. Maintaining commercial accounts in the hope of using the income from them to finance other projects about which we cared more deeply was not going to work out.

We soon decided to dissolve the agency, and I began to work with a number of other people to establish a foundation-funded, non-profit advertising and public relations office. The first in the country, it was called Public Interest Communications and it was devoted solely to working for community organizations which are largely excluded from media. The project was launched in 1972 with a grant from the Stern Fund. It succeeded for a little while in performing useful services for ecologists and farm workers, consumer groups, Indian rights activists and peace groups. But keeping it alive proved difficult. The problems were much like those we had faced at Freeman, Mander and Gossage.

Whereas I had formerly spent a major part of my day keeping the agency going by caring for the needs of corporations, at Public Interest Communications we spent a majority of our time seeking grants from the few foundations interested in media reform.

Even worse, there was a feeling that everything we were doing was ineffective. A nameless juggernaut was advancing unretarded. We felt as if we were throwing snowballs at tanks. Through enormous concentrated effort, we might stop a dam on one river; meanwhile, a dozen other dams would be built. If the production of an American SST was halted, European SSTs would land at American airports. If an energy crisis developed, rather than signaling the limits of planetary resources, or the absurdity of the way we lived, it produced new drives toward nuclear power and more strip mines.

We were not the only ones with this problem. The Vietnam War was halted, but the arms race and military aid to rightwing regimes advanced. Nixon was thrown out, but government reform came down to a lame Senate ethics bill. Unemployment was growing and welfare lines with it, yet in the end economic reform measures always seemed to hurt the very segments of the population they purported to help while the rich got richer.

One young activist told me, “We seem to be running on a treadmill; as we advance, we are always in the same place.”

Every issue had to be fought as though it were the first one. People seemed unable to connect one issue to another, to find common threads in, say, a struggle against high-rise office buildings and nuclear power plants and colonial wars. Specific victories were possible, but overall understanding of the forces that were moving society seemed to be diminishing.

People’s minds seemed to be running in dogged, one-dimensional channels which reminded me of the freeways, office buildings and suburbs that were the physical manifestations of the same period. Could one be affecting the other? Could life within these new forms of physical confinement produce mental confinement? For the first time, I began to think this might be possible.

We were told we had the highest literacy rate in the history of the world and the best-informed population, and yet the information seemed to be less well processed. As mass media grew until it too became a kind of environment, I began to think that it might not really be contributing to any pool of useful knowledge.

I was confused by this emerging perception and at first took a traditional view of what needed to be done. It meant we all had to work harder to reach more people with every message. Since in any specific struggle we might be outspent by several hundred times, we needed to be more clever, more creative.

That led me to think that the problem was too much information. The population was being inundated with conflicting versions of increasingly complex events. People were giving up on understanding anything. The glut of information was dulling awareness, not aiding it. Overload. It encouraged passivity, not involvement.

Then I began seeing some amazing statistics about television.

The Replacement of Experience

The first really shocking burst of figures appeared in news-papers in the early 1970s.

It was reported that in the generation since 1945, 99 percent of the homes in the country had acquired at least one television set. On an average evening, more than 80 million people would be watching television. Thirty million of these would be watching the same program. In special instances, 100 million people would be watching the same program at the same time.

The average household had the set going more than six hours a day. If there was a child, the average was more than eight hours. The average person was watching for nearly four hours daily. And so, allowing eight hours for sleep and eight hours for work, roughly half of the adult nonsleeping, non-working time was spent watching television. Considering that these were average figures, they meant that half of the people in this country were watching television even more than that.

As these numbers sank in, I realized that there had been a strange change in the way people received information, and even more in the way they were experiencing and understanding the world. In one generation, out of hundreds of thousands in human evolution, America had become the first culture to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world. Interpretations and representations of the world were being accepted as experience, and the difference between the two was obscure to most of us.

I heard many people say, “Television is great; there are so many things on TV that we’d never otherwise experience.” People were seeing television images of Borneo forests, European ballets, varieties of family life, distant police actions, current events, or re-creations of historical crises, and they were believing themselves to be experiencing these places, people and events. Yet the television image of the Borneo forest or the news or historical events was surely not the experience of them and not to be relied upon to the same extent. It was only the experience of sitting in a darkened room, staring at flickering light, ingesting images which had been edited, cut, rearranged, sped up, slowed down, and confined in hundreds of ways. Were people aware of the difference?

Despite my work in advertising, I had never yet made any thorough investigation of the power of images themselves. I did not know how people’s minds related to imagery, whether they could separate one kind of image—that which is directly experienced—from another kind, which has been processed and altered, and which arrives out of context. It was not clear whether people ascribed the same credibility to both, either consciously or subconsciously, and how this changed the quality of their understanding.

Nonetheless, it was obvious to me from my own work that something was going wrong with what people were understanding and what they weren’t. A new muddiness of mind was developing. People’s patterns of discernment, discrimination and understanding were taking a dive. They didn’t seem able to make distinctions between information which was pre-processed and then filtered through a machine, and that which came to them whole, by actual experience. Perhaps seeing was believing in a way that overrode the conscious mind. At the same time, no one was even writing about how the machine changed the information. Very few people understood it. Only advertisers studied the way the machine altered data, because it was the basic work of advertising to alter and confine information
in advance
so that it would have the desired effect. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent discovering how to do this.

Slowly I began to see how the ubiquitousness of television, combined with a general failure to understand what it did to information, might affect the political work we were doing. If people were believing that an
image
of nature was equal to or even similar to the experience of nature, and were therefore satisfied enough with the image that they did not seek out the real experience, then nature was in a lot bigger trouble than anyone realized. Or, if people believed that images of historical events or news events were equal to the events or were even close approximations of them, then historical reality was in big trouble. As television became the major mental and physical experiential field for most of the people in the country, as it began to merge with environment, the confusion of television information with a wider, direct mode of experience was advancing rapidly.

The Unification of Experience

Because so many of us were confusing television experience with direct experience of the world, we were not noticing that experience itself was being unified to the single behavior of watching television. Switching from channel to channel, believing that a sports program was a significantly different experience from a police program or news of an African war, all 80 million viewers were sitting separately in dark rooms engaged in exactly the same activity at the same time: watching television.

It was as if the whole nation had gathered at a gigantic three-ring circus. Those who watched the bicycle act believed their experience was different from that of those who watched the gorillas or the flame eater, but everyone was at the circus. Worse, as we all watched from our separate living rooms, it was as if we sat in isolation booths, unable to exchange any responses about what we were all going through together. Everybody was engaged in the same act at the same time, but we were doing it alone.