Media O.D.

Todd Gitlin talks about media overload, the cluelessness of the TV networks, the Washington Post's love for Ken Starr and why conservative viewpoints thrive on TV and radio.

By Suzy Hansen

Apr 15, 2002 | Many Americans love their televisions, their speedy Internet connections, the high they get from an Instant Messenger pop-up, the sense of gratification that washes over them when they open up their in box and watch the e-mails roll in. They have their beloved news programs and TV dramas, the Web sites they're addicted to and the talking head experts they trust. And yet these same connected people can often be heard complaining about The Media -- that simultaneously shadowy and invasive conglomerate of sounds, images and information -- as if it's responsible for much of the evil in the world. We crave information like candy, gobble it up all day and then grumble about it when our bellies ache later.

The observation that media outlets overwhelm us isn't new, but the very nature of this seemingly all-encompassing entity makes it pretty hard to bring into focus. Todd Gitlin, a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University, has spent years trying to sort out the media's influence. His book "The Whole World Is Watching" dissected the New York Times' and CBS' coverage of the New Left. "Inside Prime Time" was a rigorous study of the network television industry, and Gitlin has written many other essays on everything from sound bites to MTV.

In his latest book, "Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives," Gitlin attempts to break down the fast and furious influx of news, music, TV and other mediums. Gitlin recently spoke with Salon from his home in New York about the cluelessness of the TV networks, the Washington Post's love for Ken Starr and why conservative viewpoints thrive on TV and radio.

In general it seems as if network television is really on the decline. It seems as though, in terms of quality, there's HBO and then everything else. Network TV has increasingly bad reality shows, like "The Bachelor," and then HBO is holding up this very high standard of programming.

HBO has the advantage of financing itself by subscriptions. Any enterprise that's subscription-based has some latitude. That's true of sex channels or high-end sports events, and it's evidently true of a commercial entity like HBO. I don't know how well they're doing financially, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there is principle at work. Certainly, large attention-getting industries are not manned or womanned solely by corrupt people without principle.

The networks, on the other hand, are obviously thrashing around in a state of panic. The Koppel-Letterman debacle, for which they were excoriated rightly, was not only terrible public relations but also a sign of their rudderlessness. There are many such signs -- the quiz show binge and reality shows and so on. I don't know how they can stop their erosion. They had a long way to come down; at the peak in prime time the three networks were able to garner some 92 percent of the viewers. They're now down to the 50s. That's still not insubstantial. They well may be able to hold out at that level or slightly below, but what's striking to me is that tendencies which were already at work there -- toward a kind of nihilistic whatever-goes attitude -- just got more room to come into play.

"Nihilistic" is a strong word.

What I mean by nihilism -- and what I learned by studying that industry 20 years ago -- is that there aren't a lot of ideas or convictions on the part of people who make these decisions. The economic rationale of their imitativeness -- including their self-imitativeness -- is, "Well, we don't really know what works, so let's repeat what worked and let's throw money at the studio or the star or the producers who gave us hits." When there was no competition or hardly any, this was good enough.

I actually tried to see how good they were as businessmen. I looked at a couple of seasons in the early '80s and asked the question, "Of all the new shows that went on the air this year, after a very elaborate selection process that narrows down from thousands of ideas to tens of programs, how well did they do by strictly business criteria?" I looked at how many were renewed for the next year -- straightforward success criterion. Two-thirds of them were not. That was at a time of oligopoly. The aggregate market share was 84 percent. That was when they could do anything they liked.

No surprise. There's a culture of indiscriminateness. Generally, they don't have very good reasons for doing what they do. And then, of course, if something succeeds, there's a retroactive, backpatting and genius-anointing operation. But that's the culture of the television-entertainment industry. Sometimes they'll get lucky and strike "Survivor" for a while.

There could be some downsizing, and it's certainly conceivable that one of the news organizations will suffer that fate. Or be so continuously downsized as to make it more of a fagade, using few bureaus, more purchase footage, having a small stable of reporters who run around narrating voice-overs for other people's reporting.

Is there an oversaturation point in place with the news, so that we no longer care about the real issues at hand?

Definitely. Most Americans still think violent crime is increasing, when it isn't. The local news and the cop shows cultivate this fancy. Some of these binges have more staying power than others, but they suck all of the oxygen out of the mental room. So they contribute to a national attention deficit disorder. While we're doing OJ, OJ is the biggest character in the national news, and then we're onto, briefly, Marv Albert, or Kathy Lee and Frank Gifford. Other stories have more legs. I've been realizing that during the year 1998, when bin Laden walked into national life by organizing the massacre at the two embassies in Africa, obviously that was a news story, but it pretty much came and went, while of course, the big story was Monica and Bill.

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