TV REVIEW : Unethical Behavior--Before and After TV

To reverse the common saying: Television taketh away, and television giveth. An example of this odd logic is ABC News’ latest edition in its “Burning Questions” series, “Lying, Cheating and Stealing in America” (tonight at 10 on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

Item upon item is served up by Sam Donaldson and crew to provide evidence of “the epidemic” of unethical behavior in contemporary America. With each bit of evidence, though, there’s a curiously similar culprit.

Sports is getting corrupted, and it’s largely due, we’re told, to the big ad revenue bucks that TV brings in to the NCAA and the pro teams. The nuclear family is splitting, and it’s TV that’s the baby sitter now. Worse, TV is telling our kids, through the dreck of prime time, that lying, cheating and stealing are fine--if you can get away with it. Even government corruption is bred, or so ethicist Michael Josephson insists, by the constant coverage of it by the news media. “The more you see of this kind of behavior,” he opines, “the more you begin to believe that it’s acceptable for you to do as well.” TV is stealing our soul.

Which is, when you think about it, nonsense. Were the press to ignore Abscam, Watergate, Bradleygate, not to mention the latest alleged forays in sleaze by Congressmen Tony Coelho and Jim Wright, unethical antics would continue--behind closed doors.

Having laid so much of the blame at TV’s doorstep (albeit with the admission that lying, cheating et. al. begins and ends with each of us), the report then frames the issue as a new kind of national crisis, on the level of drug abuse. Now, TV is to give us the Truth.

More nonsense. Donaldson himself takes us through an American history of sleaze, dramatized by Boss Tweed, the Teapot Dome scandal and the stealing of Indian land, all to show that none of this is new. The ‘80s are hardly the golden era for ethics. But when Arthur Miller wrote “All My Sons” and “Death of a Salesman” after World War II, he was responding to a morally bankrupt society. Before television.

“Lying, Cheating and Stealing,” in its breathless surge to inject moralism back into network news reporting, loses track of its own subject.