Television and Reality

Ian Mitroff’s column (“False Images Lead Us Back to the Dark Ages,” Op-Ed Page, Oct. 11) is a perfect illustration of how far some have sunk into the benighted unreality fostered by the mind-numbing television industry. While Mitroff, in both his article and his co-authored book, wrings his hands over “media moguls,” “media powers-that-be” and “the odious system that governs the airwaves”--whose cardinal sin has been to make money by entertaining audiences rather than informing or educating them--he fails to analyze properly the reasons for this. Instead, he whines about a “hunger for something better” and does a dance of justification for promoting his book over the airwaves.

The point is that the Mitroff-Warren Bennis book, “The Unreality Industry,” has been done before and it has been done better. In 1973, Herbert I. Schiller published his incisive work, “The Mind Managers.” Schiller, who never aspired to promote his book on television, apparently had no need to pull his punches. The unreality created by television programming has one purpose, according to him. It is designed specifically to prevent social action.

This task is accomplished in several ways. Creating satisfaction by entertaining people is one means. Another is to portray violence as isolated, individualistic and, often, random acts; that is, that there is no underlying social context that might signify our economic and political systems promote violence and, hence, are in need of change. Finally, Schiller argues, the rapid-paced, interrupted pattern of commercial television has been developed to fragment the attention spans of viewers.

The result of entertainment-induced satisfaction, isolation and fragmentation is individual passivity, which assures the status quo.

The fact that a professor from one of California’s top universities has failed to deal with these--or any other--deeper issues is revealing. It isn’t necessary to agree with Schiller to see that 16 years after his indictment, television has eroded the critical capabilities of our university professors. It is not too difficult to figure out how this happened: Television offers Mitroff and other professors the opportunity to make more money.

LUKMAN CLARK

Santa Monica