and instead subjecting them to this kind of alternate reality, which is a reality in which nothing is difficult, there is no thought, there is no analysis. Everything is done by scripts, squealing automobile tires, and you have to say to yourself, look at a generation that's gone, grown up watching nothing but television.
00:00. The book points out, and I point out to you Miss Fuldheim, that TV is highly stereotypical, homogeneous, and ideological, and . . . what the results of that will be, I'm not quite sure. I do think that it is worth noting that the most powerful medium in the history of the world is controlled by a very small, idiosyncratic, homogeneous group of people. I mean I think if . . . the people who write and produce for TV. What I notice on television is that there are certain characteristics that certain people, certain stereotypical people, have on television. For instance all businessmen if it's an adventure show are evil murderous hypocritical cheating scoundrels if it's a situation on television . . .
She wants to know if you know a businessman who is not a murderer . . . . (Laughter)
That it seems to me is not a true delineation of them. And similarly on television all small towns are evil, vicious places where the big city innocent goes, his car breaks down, and it gets caught in a web of murder and kidnapping, extortion.
And all military men are if it's an adventure show are planning for a Neo-Nazi takeover and if it's a sitcom there buffoons.
On crime shows, the criminal is almost always a middle class well to do personally of the majority group. There are almost no poor people portrayed as committing crimes. The criminals, even if a poor person has committed a crime, he has been forced into doing it by a businessman or some other middle-class seeming person.
There are no useful or vital religious figures on television. They're all either buffoons or helpless fuddy-duddys. There is this kind of overwhelming stereotyping of certain power centers and power groups in the society as either bad or foolish. Let me just say that even the people who make television, even the Gary Marshalls and Norman Lears of Hollywood, do not really dispute that this stereotyping goes on. The point is just that there is an enormous amount kind of background noise on these TV shows which is a full alternate reality, a fully alternate reality, or alternative reality of American life. People watch TV so much that it's like a second life for them. And in this second life, conditions are very different from what they are in real life, that is, in real life one occasionally finds a businessman who is not plotting to murder his go-go dancer girlfriend on TV. If a standard episode of stars on TV a standard episode of Barnaby Jones or Starsky and Hutch will be that a go-go dancer has been murdered and there are three suspects. One is her boyfriend, who has just gotten out of jail after serving 20 years for murder, and the other one will be the janitor he cleans up the club and he is a heroin addict and the other one will be the head of the local utility company who stops in there for a drink on his way to the train. Now invariably the killer will be the head of the local utility company and this is a reality which it seems to me on TV which it seems to me tends to screw up most people's perceptions of real life.
I watch M.A.S.H., I watch Barney Miller. Dorothy Fuldheim, 1893-1989, TV Commentator.
Well, M.A.S.H. is a perfect example of what I or what the book is about because one of the parts of the book is that in on television military men are in two different categories if they are enlisted men or draftees they're saintly virtuous people if they are professional Military Officers they are killers their whole aim in life is to kill.
That's not true of M.A.S.H.
Oh, it is absolutely true of M.A.S.H. In M.A.S.H., the people who are the heroes . . .
No it isn't the officer in charge is a very nice guy. He writes his wife every week.
But he is a draftee. All the people in the mobile surgical hospital are draftees. The people who come over from headquarters are only concerned with bombing civilians. M.A.S.H. is the absolutely pluperfect example of how on television a professional Army man is one inch away from being an S.S. Officer. I think to whatever extent public television or these infrequent high culture events on commercial television occur there is an enormous backlash going in the other direction which is a television tends to lower the standard of national culture by taking time that people might otherwise spend reading or doing almost anything and instead subjecting them to this kind of alternate reality which is a reality in which nothing is difficult, there is no thought, there is no analysis, everything is done by squealing automobile tires. And you have to say to yourself, look at a generation that's grown up, watching nothing but television, what must they think of people who are businessmen? What must they think of professional Military Officers? What must they think of bureaucrats? What must they think of clergyman after being exposed? Almost exclusively . . .
Of anybody who voted for Nixon would be another example. Buckley, douche.
I don't think that television has done it at all.
One must not forget also that in these poles that are taken about the standings of their and their respect respectability of various occupational groups the groups that are demeaned by the television consistently get lower and lower ratings and I don't know whether there's cause and effect or not
