Has Television Changed You?

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A WINDOW on the world. That is how television has been described. In the book Tube of Plenty—The Evolution of American Television, author Erik Barnouw notes that by the early 1960’s, for most people [television] had become their window on the world. The view it offered seemed to be the world. They trusted its validity and completeness.

However, a mere window cannot select the view it presents you it cannot determine the lighting or the angle of view nor can it abruptly change the view just to hold your interest. TV can. Such factors dramatically shape your feelings and conclusions about what you are looking at, yet they are controlled by the people who produce TV shows. Even the most unbiased of newscasts and documentaries are subject to such manipulation, however unintentional it may be.

A Master Seducer

Most often, though, the people who control television are trying outright to influence viewers. In advertising, for instance, they have virtually free rein to use every seductive gimmick at their disposal to lure you into the mood to buy. Color. Music. Beautiful people. Eroticism. Gorgeous locales. Their repertoire is vast, and they use it masterfully.

A former advertising executive wrote of his 15 years in the field: I learned that it is possible to speak through media [such as TV] directly into people’s heads and then, like some otherworldly magician, leave images inside that can cause people to do what they might otherwise never have thought to do.

That television has such formidable power over people was already evident in the 1950’s. A lipstick company that was making $50,000 a year began to advertise on U.S. television. In two years, sales skyrocketed to $4,500,000 a year! A bank was suddenly avalanched with $15,000,000 in deposits after it advertised its services on a TV program popular with women.

Today, the average American watches over 32,000 commercials every year. The ads play seductively on the emotions. As Mark Crispin Miller wrote in Boxed In—The Culture of TV: It is true that we are manipulated by what we watch. The commercials that pervade daily life influence us incessantly. This manipulation, he adds, is dangerous precisely because it is often hard to discern, and so it will not fail until we learn how to perceive it.

But television sells more than lipstick, political viewpoints, and culture. It also sells morals—or the lack of them.

TV and Morals

Few people would be surprised to learn that sexual behavior is depicted more and more frequently on American TV. A study published in 1989 in Journalism Quarterly found that in 66 hours of prime-time network TV, there were in all 722 instances of sexual behavior, whether implied, referred to verbally, or actually depicted. Examples ranged from erotic touching to intercourse, masturbation, homosexuality, and incest. The average was 10.94 instances every hour!

The United States is hardly unique in this matter. French TV movies depict explicit sexual sadism. Striptease acts appear on Italian TV. Late-night Spanish TV features violent and erotic films. The list goes on and on.

Violence is another type of TV immorality. In the United States, a TV critic for Time magazine recently praised the grisly good humor in a batch of horror programs. The series featured scenes of decapitation, mutilation, impalement, and demonic possession. Of course, much TV violence is less gruesome—and more easily taken for granted. When Western television was demonstrated recently in a remote village in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, one bewildered old man could only ask: Why are whites always stabbing, shooting and punching one another?

The answer, of course, is that television producers and sponsors want to give viewers what viewers want to see. Violence draws viewers. Sex does too. So TV serves up ample portions of both of them—but not too much too soon, or the viewers will be repelled. As Donna McCrohan put it in Prime Time, Our Time: Most top shows go as far as they can with language, sex, violence, or subject matter then, having gone to the edge, they take the edge off. Subsequently, the public is ready for a new edge.

For example, the subject of homosexuality was once considered beyond the edge of good taste for television. But once viewers got used to it, they were ready to accept more. A French journalist asserted: No producer would ever dare present homosexuality as a deviation today . . . Rather it is society and its intolerance that are odd. On American cable television, a ‘gay soap opera’ premiered in 11 cities in 1990. The program featured scenes of males in bed together. The show’s producer told Newsweek magazine that such scenes were designed by gays to desensitize the audience so that people will realize we’re like everybody else.

Flor Ayag
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