Is the Sky Really Falling? : Two USC Professors Claim Complexity of Life Drives Us to the Boob Tube

Go ahead. Sit there in front of that tube and flick the remote control for as long as you like. This is one news bite that is not likely to come at you: We’re in bad shape and getting worse fast because American society cannot deal with the “complexity from without” and the “rot from within”--the rot being in large part television.

The medium for that message is a new book by two professors from USC’s Graduate School of Business--Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis. “The Unreality Industry,” subtitled “the Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives,” is just out, published by Birch Lane Press.

Bennis and Mitroff contend that the complexity and rot are related. The postwar world, they say, is increasingly complex and chaotic, with a highly interdependent global economy and society. Meanwhile, the “systems age,” or “electronics age”--with its proliferation of information and high-speed communications--has connected everything and everybody, so much so that any event can potentially affect anything anywhere. Witness the buzzwords: Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon, the October 1987 crash.

Overwhelmed and increasingly unable to deal with the complex issues and new realities, we are escaping from them and turning to entertainment--television especially.

Entertainment, they say, has intruded into everything, blurring the boundaries between it, public relations and news; between reality and unreality. They argue that entertainment, and the American preoccupation with celebrities, has debased public discourse and debate, affecting politics, religion, education. Celebrities are manufactured, consumed and replaced, and celebrity itself often replaces leadership as a standard: “We have developed a fascination with celebrities that borders on the sociopathic,” they say.

And so on. It’s dire stuff. And Bennis and Mitroff offer little in the way of solutions or a way out, beyond a few, rather vague recommendations. Their primary aim, they say in their introduction, is to contribute to “an informed moral outrage.”

Ian Mitroff does not look like a prophet of doom. Sitting in his corner office on the USC campus, dressed casually, exchanging friendly greetings with a student or two, he does not even look morally outraged. But two seconds into the subject and he sounds outraged, impassioned in fact, letting his passion take him all over the board as he rushes after his observations.

People need to be challenged to meet the realities of the age, he said. They need to face the fact that America is now a second-rate power, that the quality of its goods and services have declined and are losing to the competition, that business needs to be redesigned, that the education system is a disaster and one that is not capable of producing an able work force, that there needs to be, once again, a sense of the public good.

It is serious business, and it will require hard work and difficult, complicated thinking to meet the challenges.

Instead, he said, there seems to be a collective flight from reality. “We’re being given soothing pablum” by the media. Intoning the rhetoric that he deplores, he rattled off a few bromides: “We’re in charge. What’s the problem with being entertained?”

We’re Over the Edge

The problem is, he said, that “we’ve gone over the edge with entertainment. It’s not a component (of life) but a primary element,” and it is steadily contributing to the production of a society whose people not only are unable to differentiate between reality and unreality but “don’t care that they can’t differentiate.”

Mitroff, who has doctorates in engineering and the philosophy of social science, wrote most of “The Unreality Industry,” with the exception of Bennis’ chapter on leadership and his editorial advice. Bennis has a doctorate in economics, teaches business administration and has written extensively on leadership.

“His passion is just formidable,” Warren Bennis said of his colleague and co-author. Bennis was on the phone from New York, where he is lecturing on another new book he has written, “On Becoming a Leader.”

“As the world becomes more complex,” Bennis said, “the world problems need a holistic, kaleidoscopic, ecumenical vision. You can’t have a segmented view.” The Brazilian rain forest, the Third World debt, acid rain, pollution of the Rhine, the loosening up of Eastern Europe--none of these is going to be solved by one country alone, he said, or one narrow approach.

He sees the increasing specialization of knowledge in the professions as part of the problem. He recalled a remark made to him once by the dean of a medical school: “It was so profound. He said to me, ‘The only generalist left in the hospital is the patient.’ ”

Who’s to Blame?

The problems are undeniable, but all this blame-placing on television? Would not American society be in essentially the same trouble with or without television?

“I think if we look back,” Mitroff said, “we’d probably place a great deal of the blame on television, but, (specifically) on how our society developed television. . . . I don’t think TV is inherently this or that. It’s images into the home. But a program like “Rescue 911” is institutionalized peeping Tomism. Everybody is a lesser version of Zsa Zsa. If it were just one program, there’d be no problem. But there’s a critical-mass effect. Yeah, I do think something terrible was really unleashed.”

Bennis and Mitroff eschew any conspiracy theory. Neither believe television executives have plotted the confusion of reality and unreality, the substitution of public relations for news. “But,” Mitroff said, “they have effected it anyhow.”

He did not have to look far for examples. While he spoke, America and much of the rest of the world was receiving the “news” that singer Michael Jackson was going to promote the products of a sportswear company, L.A. Gear.

To Mitroff, this was a full-circle example--the commercials might feature excerpts from Jackson’s videos; his videos might feature Jackson wearing L.A. Gear. All for very big bucks, $20 million of them. It was “news” considered important enough that the press conference announcing it, with 100 in attendance, was broadcast live to Munich. Public relations, Mitroff said, had become news and, since everything is interconnected, had wide-reaching effects. Since the day before the press conference, L.A. Gear stock has risen 10 points.

L.A. Gear Ads

“A global pseudo news event,” he marveled. “All ages have had unreality, but it’s not been on this scale before. No age has had such great technology. It’s accepted that it’s not harmful, and that’s true, not one thing by itself. But it’s part of an overload. That is what news is up against.”

Lest anyone think a dullard from academe is out to spoil the party, he hastened to add: “I am a Michael Jackson fan. I listen to his music. Ian likes a lot of these things. I don’t watch much commercial TV, but I watch junk movies. It’s not that I go only to the opera. Baloney. I’m just as hooked as everyone else.”

Nor, he said, is the answer a return to some golden age in the past. He is not against technology, he said, and in fact one of the few recommendations in the book, other than more studies of the influence and ethics of television, is a proposal to turn the medium on itself: to use the technology to do a program on the unreality industry and what it is doing to us.

The book also calls, cautiously, for a reexamination and possible restructuring of the way the United States regulates television versus the way other nations do. Mitroff acknowledged this was dangerous ground for anyone who believes, as he does, in the first amendment.

Jeff Greenfield, ABC’s media critic on Nightline, said he has not yet read “The Unreality Industry” and could not comment on it specifically. Nevertheless, he has, he said by telephone from New York, “a general, very minority, much ridiculed theory that television is not nearly as powerful as people think it is. I’m afraid the obsession with the impact of media often obscures our analysis of what actually is happening and overlooks far more powerful factors.”

Crime a Big Factor

For example, he offered, crime in the inner cities. If you match the influence of television against the effect of “broken homes, babies having babies, the collapse of entry-level jobs . . . it’s not hard for me to figure out” the more powerful influence, Greenfield said.

It is particularly with politics, he said, that television is overestimated. People do not vote based on what they see on television, he said, but on the same things they have always voted: “a high unemployment rate, inflation, a mindless war, a major scandal--the patterns in American politics are not that different” now, he said, nor do political campaigns stoop any lower than they did in the time of Andrew Jackson.

Not that television doesn’t need improving, he said, running through the litany: “It’s simplistic, too quick . . . But (the problem) is getting overstated.”

Edwin Diamond also tended to think such problems generally overstated, calling them “more Chicken Little. I’m not a member of the ‘sky is falling down’ club.”

What he is is professor of journalism at New York University and media columnist for New York magazine.

Fault Is in Us

Diamond also has not read the book, but did say of the Chicken Little tendencies of books he has read: “These guys are part of the problem, not the solution, but catastrophe always sells. It’s the fear industry.”

The fault with television, he said, lies in ourselves.

“Television particularly reflects American society,” he said, “and it is very slow and reactive. TV takes up themes after everybody else has--small journals, magazines, newspapers. In general, the bigger they are, the slower they move and the more cautious they are.”

Also he said, he did not think the public was “a bunch of neo-tranquilized boobs.” People who have grown up with television . . . have abilities to distinguish. I’m sure some people are fooled when they see a TV political commercial, or watch things with half a brain and confuse a reenactment for the real thing,” he conceded, “but by and large I think people make intelligent choices.”

He himself writes of media shortcomings all the time, Diamond said, and of Mitroff and Bennis, “I’m glad they’re writing, alerting people to how they’re getting screwed over.”

If Mitroff and Bennis are Chickens Little, they are perhaps a new breed. They really do seem to be saying the sky is falling, but appear to see their announcement as sounding reveille, not taps.

If ever society needed real leaders in business, government and television who can handle complexity it is now, Bennis said. “There’s a bright future for complexity.”

Mitroff isn’t throwing in the towel either. He’d rather be dealing with these problems of a capitalistic society than the reverse problem of socialism, he said. “It’s a booming buzzing world,” Mitroff said. “It’s so exciting.”