American Experiment (394 page)

Superfight was indeed a supreme achievement not of the boxing world but of the media world. It was a classic merging of television, advertisers, big money, and headline celebrities. It achieved its supreme goal—almost everyone in the country was talking about it. The fight replaced the
weather as a topic of conversation, but like the lovely morning that everyone remarked on at the checkout counter or the gas station, it was here today and gone tomorrow.

Something that almost everyone in America talked about, even for half a minute, was not to be belittled in a nation so lacking in more serious topics of common concern. Countless Americans watched football who had never felt a jolting tackle, followed basketball who had never sunk a three-pointer, viewed hockey who had never shot a puck into a well-guarded cage, gazed at baseball who had never lofted a homer in the neighborhood sandlot. Perhaps that was why they spent hours in front of the tube watching—because they could never do it. And perhaps also because, having watched a game, they knew that they could enjoy instant empathy with the bus driver, the paper boy, the garage mechanic, the library assistant. “Sportswatching,” Janet Podell wrote, “may well be Americans’ truest expression of democratic feeling: far more people watch sports than vote in national elections.”

A powerful combination of technology and personalism sustained this mass interest. Network television embraced all regions of the country, satellites girdled the globe. VCRs, now in millions of homes, enabled viewers to tape programs and watch them at any hour of the day or night. Cable challenged the preeminence of the three networks. Round-the-clock news and sports programs attracted more and more viewers, especially at times of national crises or scandals. Satellite programming and the promise of optic-fiber communications undermined traditional rationales for federal regulation, posing even greater future threats to the electronic status quo.

Yet the technology was heavily moralized, sensationalized, even fantasized, especially in athletics. Sport was elementary and moral, the bad guys against the good. The conflict was clear-cut and clearly resolvable. Sport was combat, man-to-man, gladiatorial: when Dave Winfield’s six-foot-six-inch frame sped gracefully to meet an arching shot off George Brett’s agile bat, there was nothing on the field except the beauty of one man’s skill against another’s. Sport was simple: it was “wholly intelligible to the lowest common denominators in society.” Above all, sport was fantasy in a harsh, cynical world. It fed, said Richard Lipsky, “depoliticization by creating a world of meaning, a Utopian refuge, within the larger technical life-world.” And there was always escape into the future: “Wait till next year!” Fantasy allowed oddities too. Fans would journey to an airport to greet a conquering home team made up of numerous blacks—but would not want to live on the same block with them. Blacks were video gladiators, welcomed on the screen, not in the neighborhood.

Big sport and spectatorship required big money. In 1873, Cornell president Andrew D. White, responding to a request of his football team to travel to Michigan for a game, had proclaimed, “I will not permit thirty men to travel 400 miles merely to agitate a bag of wind.” Nor would he pay thirty train fares. A century later, in January 1988, over a hundred million people watched professional football’s annual championship; a minute of advertising time during that contest cost $1.3 million. This amounted to more than $30 million for the game, but even so was dwarfed by the sums television and cable contracts fetched for season telecast rights. In 1982, the National Football League received a five-year $2 billion contract from the three networks. Baseball’s 1983 deal with the networks netted more than a billion over six years, and rights sales to local broadcast and cable stations brought in still more. And the 1984 Olympics, which cost $525 million to produce, was hyped as pumping $3.3 billion into southern California’s economy.

Many sports fans questioned the commercialization and industrialization of their games. Large salaries contributed to cleavage between fans and the players with whom they identified; it was easier to picture oneself in a DiMaggio’s shoes when his life off the playing field was not all that unlike one’s own. But when star players made $2 million annually, identification was strained and resentment crept into some fans’ hearts. When Boston Celtics fans were asked whether Larry Bird, the team’s star forward, was worth the $2 million he was paid at the height of his career, the vast majority replied no. Yet the same majority, unwilling to lose him to another team, did not begrudge his demand or the owner’s willingness to meet it.

Television long since had become one of the nation’s biggest industries, taking a huge slice of the $50 billion that American businesses spent on advertising in 1986. Few TV viewers understood the impact of advertising on their programming. “The economics of television, and thus of political communication,” wrote W. Russell Neuman, “is based not on the providing of programs to audiences but rather on the selling of audiences to advertisers.” While producers also had to attract audiences, some complained that spontaneity was lost somewhere along the line. As a new concept was reached, tested, premarketed, polled, and analyzed before release, intuition and innovation and risk appeared to be giving way to spreadsheet analyses inside boardroom and film studio alike.

The press was not only subject to big business pressures; it was big business. Newspaper publishing had become more a business and less a
journalistic calling.
The Wall Street Journal,
its circulation at 1,910,000, was not only the preeminent business newspaper; it was a major business in its own right.
USA Today,
initially designed as a working-class alternative, adopted a TV format of encapsulated news and “factoids,” and was sold in vending machines that looked like television sets.
USA Today
hoped also to capture the market of young, upwardly mobile business and professional people who wanted to enjoy their news, like their food and entertainment, while on the go.

As businesses, the newspapers tended toward concentration. In 1986 ten financial and business corporations controlled the three major television and radio networks and 34 affiliated stations, 201 cable TV systems, 62 radio stations, 20 record companies, 59 magazines including
Time
and
Newsweek,
58 newspapers including
The New York Times,
the Washington
Post, The Wall Street Journal,
and the Los Angeles
Times,
41 book publishers, and sundry motion-picture companies. And banks accounted for 75 percent of the major stockholders of the three networks. “The American press,” wrote journalist David Broder, “is a private business performing a vital public function under a specially protected constitutional status, exempt from regulation by government, immunized against many of the forms of pressure and persuasion to which other institutions are subject in our system of checks and balances.” To whom, readers or stockholders, was the press corps ultimately accountable? Presumably to the readers who made everything possible. But newspaper after newspaper—some of them respected and “responsible”—had seen their customers slip away to worship electronic gods.

Its huge reach and alleged cannibalistic tendencies made television the cardinal concern to those worried about balance among the media. In 1974, 46 percent of those interviewed in national polls reported television as their favorite pastime. “Television expanded its audience at the expense of reading, which dropped from 21% to 14%, of movies, from 19% to 9%, and of radio, from 9% to 5%,”wrote Morris Janowitz on the basis of annual reports by the Roper Organization. “Even dancing suffered; from 9% to 5%. Only playing cards held its own.” Americans as a whole were watching television an average of about three hours a day by 1974; the college-educated and the affluent were watching almost as much, about two hours and a half. White-collar and blue-collar workers could not escape the intrusions of television even on the job; increasingly headquarters executives were transmitting via satellite sales information, company news, and pep talks to captive groups of employees.

Politicians eagerly seized on the changing media technology. Ready-to-print stories were transmitted by computer directly to news organs back home, and, in at least one case, messages were beamed directly to constituents with personal computers. Some congressmen produced and distributed their own cable television productions, for complete broadcast or for excerpt by news organizations. Diana Winthrop, vice president of the Washington-based midwestern radio news service GAP Communications, said of the trend, “It is irresponsible and unethical for members of Congress to present canned radio and television programs as news—and just as irresponsible for the industry to accept them.”

When the networks offered original coverage they tended to concentrate more on the horse race and superficial aspects of political campaigns than on substance. Commenting on the 1976 campaign, Malcolm MacDougall observed: “I saw President Ford bump his head leaving an airplane.… I saw Carter playing softball in Plains, Georgia. I saw Carter kissing Amy, I saw Carter hugging Lillian. …I saw Ford misstate the problems of Eastern Europe—and a week of people commenting about his misstatement. I saw Ford bump his head again.… But in all the hours of high anxiety that I spent watching the network news, never did I hear what the candidates had to say about the campaign issues. That was not news.” It was simpler to report who was leading in the New Hampshire polls than to analyze a twenty-page position paper, and more interesting too.

Was television simply the fall guy? Some media experts doubted the existence of massive video influence. They noted first of all that analysis of media influence in general was now much more sophisticated than in earlier days, when some investigators tended to equate stimulus with response. Most Americans, no matter how poorly educated, were not clean slates on which the communicators could imprint their messages. The formation of opinion was an exceedingly complex process, with “shapers” shaping themselves in anticipation of the attitudes and reactions of their targets, raising the question of just who was influencing whom. Moreover, people had grown wary of advertisers, candidates, promoters. Then too, research in the 1940s had emphasized the role of local opinion leaders— ministers, bartenders, party precinct leaders, friends with “inside information”—as brokers between the mass media and the local citizenry, while in the television age, mediation of this sort had lost its significance. Nor did it appear that TV, incapable of reducing viewers to obedient zombies, was able to make them cynics. Though a major study suggested that reliance on television news helped to foster political cynicism and distrust, television “believability” remained relatively high—especially for individual network “anchors” like Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan
Rather—and it could be argued that it was not the way news was reported but the news itself that produced cynicism in viewers.

And if television did have an all-pervasive influence, what political effect did it have? It was often contended that the advertisers, network owners and bosses who were also propertied capitalists, and the affluent, college-educated, upper-middle-class managers who controlled programming had produced a strong right-wing bias in television. On the other hand, the right charged that television as well as major newspapers such as
The New York Times
and the Washington
Post
slanted the news to the left. The working reporters were in fact relatively more liberal Democratic than the public as a whole.

The prime corrective to massive media influence, however, was the enormous number and variety of newspapers and journals in a nation that still liked to read. Around the beginning of the 1970s celebrated magazines folded—
The Saturday Evening Post
after almost a century and a half of continuous publication,
Look
with its circulation of seven million, the world-famous
Life.
But during the sixties and seventies other journals appeared with powerful appeals to more specialized audiences. Among these were
Psychology Today, Ms., New York.
“Underground” journals— notably the
Berkeley Barb,
the
L.A. Free Press,
modeled on New York’s successful
Village Voice,
and
Rat,
published by a group of women—along with such famous environmental publications as
The Whole Earth Catalog,
did not always attain longevity but they added zest and variety to the political and social debate of the day.

All told, the media of the late 1980s were ominously bifurcated. Reaching across the nation were the huge television establishments, newspaper chains, record and cassette producers, mass-appeal comic strips. In search of the widest common denominator, no matter how synthetic, the mass media concentrated on celebrities, sports, entertainment, disasters, scandals, and the like. Appealing to the specialized interests, on the other hand, were thousands of periodicals. A kind of vacuum lay between the extremely general and the extremely particular. This vacuum had once been filled in part by hundreds of regional or local newspapers with strong editorial views, such as William Allen White’s Emporia
Gazette
or the New York
Herald Tribune,
by farm and labor publications, by outspokenly partisan organs. Many of these had declined into routine publications on whose editorial pages one could find the same canned opinions as one traveled from city to city. Radio, once so promising, had become a national media tragedy, with its incessant pop music, commercials, and occasional insipid commentary.

Both nationalized and pluralized, both commercialized and trivialized,
the huge communications and entertainment industries were no longer under exclusive East and West Coast control. Within a few square miles of New York City, however, were clustered the editorial offices of magazines big and small, the three networks, most of the important book publishing houses, the big art galleries, the make-or-break legitimate theaters. New York was also still the center of “serious” painting, writing, performing. How creative could these arts remain amid the pressures and temptations of mass communication, electronic commercialization, marketplace competition? Would they too become part of an ever more rapidly shifting kaleidoscope?