Learning to Live with TV

Or, if you can't beat 'em, at least try to join 'em

I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. --E.B. White, 1938

At least as measured by its range, today TV is certainly of age. It captivates an audience that runs to a nightly third of all the men, women and children in America. Images flow out over the population to be absorbed, statisticians insist, at the appalling average rate of 29 hours per week per citizen. The cash flows in. A minute of network prime-time advertising can sell for up to $140,000, or enough to pay the salary of seven or eight high school English teachers for a whole year.

But there is not much saving radiance in the sky. Instead, the air is alive with the sound of lamentation. At various times from various quarters, TV has been accused of raising the crime rate, dropping students' test scores, crippling the imagination, undermining national literacy, and layering American homes with an attention-numbing narcotic. The charges go way back. They were first raised by long-suffering parents and teachers who simply watched the TV viewing of children under their care and came to what they felt were grim, self-evident conclusions. Then the argument shifted a bit to the amount of violence on TV and its cumulative effects on society. To both counts the TV networks reacted as they still do: Life is complex. There is no proof. It's a free country, and people get what they want, as the networks' brutal rating games demonstrate. Besides, haven't those worrywarts heard of such a thing as healthy dramatic catharsis?

When the issue comes to public conflict it is customarily fought out in the wrong terms: an attempt to link one specific act of real-life violence to one specific act of TV violence. About the best documented instance, from the viewpoint of anti-TV forces, occurred in 1966 when NBC screened Doomsday Flight, ignoring pleas by airline pilots not to do so. A made-for-TV special, it presented a fictional extortion attempt by bomb threat against an airliner in flight. After the show the Federal Aviation Agency recorded a dramatic increase in phone-in bomb threats to airlines. More horrifying was the lawsuit against the same network by a mother who asked for $11 million after her nine-year-old daughter was gang-raped with a beer bottle by three teen-age girls and a boy. The assailants had seen a similar rape of a girl by girls on a TV movie only a few days earlier, though the instrument was the handle of a plumber's helper.

The First Amendment, as interpreted at the time, protects TV networks from responsibility unless act is intentional involved, so "incite the case was thrown out of court. And the argument goes on. Psychological and medical research teams have joined parents and educators in studying the problem, much of their work financed by organizations publicly concerned about the damage TV may be doing. Among the latter: the National Institute of Mental Health, the House Subcommittee on Communications. Even the American Medical Association, not noticeably alarmist, announced a series of research projects and dedicated itself to a long-term effort to reduce the amount of violence on TV.

Violence on TV, despite protests, does not seem to be declining. Last month Professors George Gerbner and Larry Gross of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications came out with their tenth annual Violence Profile. On the basis of a prime-time and a weekend sampling, they report that crooks still make up 17% of all television characters (vs. 1% or less in real life), and that 65% of them are involved in violence. The damage, Gross argues, does not lie in rare incitements to acts of violence, but in the attitudes and views of the world engendered by what they call "heavy" TV watching. In-depth testing of a sample of 600 proved heavy viewers are more fearful, anxious and suspicious of the world than "light" viewers. Significantly more of them replied "almost always" when asked, "How often is it all right to hit someone if you're mad at them?" As to reading, Gross says, "except occasionally for the lowest IQ group who do a little better if they watch TV --because they see some printed words at least--for most children the more television the worse they do in school."

Other studies seem to support Gross's finding. Leonard Eron, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, conducted a ten-year investigation, ending in 1970, on 875 third-grade children in a semirural part of New York State. Eron started with the conviction that the impact of television on people was no greater than that of movies, fairy tales or comic strips. He now believes that a "direct, positive relation" exists between TV viewing by small boys and aggressive behavior. Little girls, significantly, did not show any increase in such aggressive behavior. But a new project Eron has since begun indicates that they do now. His explanation: today TV has more violent female role models--including those in Wonder Woman and Charlie's Angels--than it had before.

Another study linking TV watching with aggression was funded by CBS. In 1972 the network commissioned William Belson, a sociologist at the London School of Economies' Survey Research Center, to run a six-year, $290,000 study of 1,565 London teen-age boys. Belson's conclusion: long exposure to television noticeably increased the degree to which they engaged in serious acts of violence (smashing cars and phone booths, setting shopping bags on fire).

CBS dismissed Belson's finding as adding "nothing of consequence" to the continuing debate on the issue. In response to Federal Trade Commission pressure and nationwide lobbying by groups like Action for Children's Television (ACT), the networks have launched a series of special dramas for children and reduced the number of week end ads by more than 40%. (Yachtsman and Atlanta Braves Owner Ted Turner has offered to subsidize Saturday children's programs on his own cable station, WTCG; they would run with no ads at all.)

An increasing number of studies suggest that the main danger of television may not be the message, but the medium itself, just looking at TV. In Bedford, Mass., Psychophysiologist Thomas Mulholland and Peter Crown, a professor of television and psychology at Hampshire College, have attached electrodes to the heads of children and adults as they watched TV. Mulholland thought that kids watching exciting shows would show high attention. To his surprise, the reverse proved true. While viewing TV, the subjects' output of alpha waves increased, indicating they were in a passive state, as if they were "just sitting quietly in the dark." The implication: TV may be a training course in the art of inattention.

Professors Jerome and Dorothy Singer, who head Yale University's Family Television Research Center, have been studying groups of several hundred three-and four-year-olds as they watch TV at home and in nursery school. They feel that heavy TV viewing stunts the growth of the imagination in the crucial ages between three and five. Such children make up fewer games and imaginary playmates.

In education, at least, some useful efforts are being made to live with the electronic menace, and even turn its endless noise, repetition, violence, materialism and banality to some advantage. All last year in Lansing, Mich., for example, High School Senior Eric Pretzlaff has been filling out his home "viewing log." His assignment is to take notes on the prime-time shows he sees with a view to improving his understanding of economics. After watching CBS's Alice, he noted that Alice's high standard of living is not consistent with her job as a waitress in a small restaurant. In Eric's class, Economics Teacher Rudy Johnson asks, "How much job security does a small restaurant owner like Mel (Alice's Boss) have?"And a student responds,"Not much, because small places like that go broke a lot." Smoothly, Johnson moves the discussion to the subject of extra risks that face small businesses throughout the business cycle.

Johnson's educational use of TV is based on something called Prime Time School Television (PTST), a Chicago-based, nonprofit organization that prepares TV-related study guides. And PTST illustrates the general principle of prime-time teaching: use the screen to get students' attention, then engage their intelligence with questions, study guides and sometimes scripts read as homework. Thereafter, Archie Bunker's layoff from his job on the loading dock can be used to prompt a class discussion of unemployment. An arrest by Starsky and Hutch helps illustrate constitutional guarantees like that of a suspect's right to counsel. The approach is being applied by different companies in slightly different ways. The CBS Television Reading Program helps student TV watchers to sharpen their logic and their language skills by providing "enrichment guides" (script and discussion questions) for special shows. It is now used by more than 4 million students. The New York-based publisher of a booklet series, Teachers Guides to Television, does not offer scripts but presents detailed assignments. (For Battlestar Galactica suggested reading is Jules Verne, and studying the astronomy of Ptolemy and Kepler.) The same company also prepares outlines for parent-child discussions of TV shows. "A fictional story offers a family the chance to discuss matters that are otherwise difficult to bring up," observes Guides Editor Gloria Kirshner.

PTST, which distributes 200,000 monthly study guides to such serious TV productions as Eleanor and Franklin, Masterpiece Theater and Between the Wars, set out two years ago to transmute even the most mindless network shows into learning aids. The first piece of alchemy was making cops-and-robbers shows the cornerstone of a curriculum package. Columbo episodes serve as lessons on literary elements: dramatic character, plot development, conflict and resolution. Students taking law and criminal-justice courses use a "constitutional-awareness chart" to determine whether Baretta has illegally roughed up a suspect. Armed with their study guides, students quickly become sensitive to the way television can distort reality. "All big-city cops are not as glamorous as Kojak," says Lori Kaufman, 14, of Lucas, Kans.

Proponents of prime-time teaching say familiar television examples make schoolwork less imposing and more interesting. "Reading becomes exciting," asserts Melinda Douglas, assistant to the general manager at KNXT-TV, CBS'S Los Angeles affiliate, "because students can imagine those words being spoken by an actor or actress on television." Opponents point out that the minimal degree of reading skill and concentration required by TV teaching is not adequate training for serious study of literature or history, or for the effort necessary to master subjects that cannot be easily popularized, like math and chemistry. They also fear that television teaching may stimulate excessive viewing among a generation that watches too much TV as it is. The prospect of ten-year-old tube junkies using TV Guide as a syllabus is unsettling to parents who believe that serious learning comes from books. Teachers who have used one form or another of prime-time education, however, regard TV not as a "vast wasteland," in the memorable epithet of former Federal Communications Commissioner Newton Minow, but as a vast resource waiting to be tapped. One TV watcher who agrees is Minow himself, who now sits on the PTST board. Says he: "The most important educational institution in the country is not Harvard or Yale or Caltech--it's television." For better or for worse, it is difficult not to agree with him.

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