some
females of a different order. There is still a pigpen in my barn, and it
recalled to my mind certain delicious nights when I had sat up with a sow,
receiving each tiny pig as it came slithering into the lantern gleam and
placing it in a fairly sterile whiskey carton until such time as its mother was
ready to receive it. I could not help comparing the scenes I remembered with
the progressive scene I had just watched on television. And I could not help
feeling pleased that among the females with whom I was at the moment engaged
every uterus was in place.
The effects of television on our culture and on our
tone are probably even greater than we suspect from the events of the last few
years. TV’s effect on political campaigning was great, and, as Richard Rovere
recently pointed out in these pages, not entirely healthy. The debates were not
conducive to reflection and sobriety; they encouraged quick, cagey answers
delivered in headlong style to beat the clock. TV has kept the farmer up late
at night, has lured the unwary candidate to offshore islands, and has drawn
quiz contestants first into chicanery, then into perjury. It has given liver
bile and perspiration a permanent place in the living room—the world’s most
honored secretions. Take the world of journalism, which is the one I am
most familiar with. If you open a copy of the Times to a page that has in
one column a Macy ad displaying a set of china and in an adjoining column a
news story about China itself, your eye makes a choice; you read about Macy’s
china or about Mao’s China, according to your whim. It is a free selection. But
if you turn your TV set to a channel, only one image appears, and after you
have watched for a few moments, an advertiser buttonholes you and says his piece
in a loud voice while you listen or try not to listen, as the case may be.
Thus, your attention is not just invited by the commercial, it is to a large
extent preëmpted. Preëmption of this sort does not occur in periodicals. It
cannot occur. There, advertising matter competes with
editorial matter for the reader’s attention, and it is fair competition. Another structural difference between television and publishing is that in the case of magazines each article or poem or story is supported by the whole body of advertising, lumped, and not by an individual advertiser. In television it’s the other way round, a TV show is usually identified with a sponsor and his product. The sponsor not only backs the show, he gets it up—with the help, of course, of his Madison Avenue outriders. Thus, Chevrolet has Dinah Shore for its girl, Kraft Cheese has Perry Como for its boy. Suppose this passionate arrangement obtained in the world of periodicals; you’d have Walter Kerr reviewing the theatre for Hart, Schaffner & Marx, and you’d have Walter Lippmann cleaning up the political scene for Fab. Such an arrangement would be unnerving
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