Medium Misses the Message in ’50 Years of TV’

As always, the very look of Walter Cronkite and the sound of his voice impart the wisdom and credibility of a modern Moses leading his flock from a wasteland of ignorance to a promised land of enlightenment.

“And that’s the way it is,” America’s anchorman emeritus and icon of trust assures us, like old times, near the end of Sunday night’s “Fifty Years of Television: A Golden Celebration” on CBS.

Increasingly, however, that’s not the way it is.

For this, we can mostly thank TV’s partiality not only for fact-twisting docudramas, but also, now, for re-created contemporary news events that fuzz truth and speculation.

In fact, “Fifty Years of Television” itself--an entertainment special airing at 9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8--is not the way it is, or was. Not entirely, anyway.

For one thing, it frames the medium narrowly and uncritically, omitting such prominent recent footnotes, for example, as those controversial dramatic re-creations favored by some syndicated tabloids and such network offerings as “Saturday Night With Connie Chung” on CBS, and NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow.”

Even when properly labeled, these truth-like simulations of actual events rank among the most dangerous and destructive booby traps of modern TV, invariably exploding in our faces and bringing blindness instead of clarity.

NBC News seemed to be acknowledging that when it announced this week that simulation-laden “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow”--a news magazine that aired three times last summer--was being transfered to the network’s entertainment division. The news division earlier produced a fourth episode that will air next week.

Said NBC News president Michael Gartner about re-creations: “We have determined that the practice can result in confusion to the viewer. Our primary responsibility at NBC News is to convey information clearly. If viewers are confused, the solution is simple: abandon re-creations in news programming.”

Uh . . . wait a minute. Confusion is not for NBC News, but it’s acceptable for NBC’s entertainment division to confuse viewers? What else can you infer from Gartner’s statement?

Will re-creations on “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow” be much less confusing merely because the show is switching bosses and no longer will be fronted by news anchors? Gartner is right about a news division’s responsibility to “convey information clearly.” Yet doesn’t an entertainment division have the same obligation?

You wouldn’t think so judging by the CBS entertainment division’s “golden celebration” of TV on Sunday.

Oh, it’s entertaining all right, essentially a merry-go-round of archival clips--many of them quite wonderful--bridged by commentary from TV stars ranging from Cronkite to Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, a fusion somehow epitomizing TV’s merging realms of news and entertainment.

The program is fun, among its treasures being excerpts from such ancient TV productions as “Marty,” with Rod Steiger as the story’s self-deprecating pudgy hero who isn’t interested in making a fashion statement: “The blue suit, the gray suit, I’m a fat little man.”

But understand “Fifty Years of Television” for what it is, two euphemistic hours that distort through narrowness. In a sense, the show is its own re-creation, flowing from Cronkite’s misleading assertion that TV “was introduced at the New York World’s Fair” in 1939, when in fact the British were already regularly telecasting by that time.

Even more fundamentally, a program that celebrates TV by excluding much of TV--and while also leaving out the warts--is a celebration of ignorance.

Despite Cronkite’s presence, “Fifty Years of Television” sort of slips TV news in through the back door. Much worse, it doesn’t even mention sports programs, daytime programs, children’s programs or syndicated programs. Also missing, incredibly, are not only local TV and public TV, but also the blazing technologies of cable, VCRs and videos that have helped alter the TV landscape. The cable omission is especially ironic because the show’s executive producers, John Moffitt and Pat Tourk Lee, have had their greatest recent success in creating HBO’s “Not Necessarily the News.”

Now comes Not Necessarily Television.

Covering half a century of TV in two hours minus commercials just barely beats trying to squeeze an 800-pound gorilla into a matchbox. Thus, “Fifty Years of Television” offers hardly any reflection or interpretation, no Geiger counter to locate the medium’s common denominators, both positive and negative.

It’s as selective as our own memories, a highlight reel of prime-time clips not from TV’s vast transparent ooze, but from mostly impact shows, making TV look far more exhilarating--and bold--than it was or is.

We see Edward R. Murrow’s famous denunciation of notorious Red-hunting demagogue Joseph McCarthy, for example, but nothing about the cowardly networks cooperating in censoring programs and going along with the black-listing of allegedly Communist-leaning writers, producers, directors and actors.

“Productions have continued to address the vital issues of our times,” Jane Seymour says Sunday. Yes, such as those wall-to-wall rape stories that have cluttered the November ratings sweeps.

As if hauling out a token black member of an otherwise all-white country club, Seymour dutifully cites the classic “Roots” as an example of TV’s greatness in drama. Fair enough. Yet unmentioned is that the expected post-”Roots” flowering of black dramatic opportunities never materialized.

Surely something more cosmic is demanded of a retrospective of American TV. No, you can’t get enough of Sid Caesar’s genius, or of “I Love Lucy,” Mary Tyler Moore, Jack Benny, Ernie Kovacs and clips of those primitive early days, when, in contrast to today, TV’s talent was more advanced than its technology.

When you think of what TV has recently imprinted on our minds, however--pictures of the eroding Berlin Wall, of 200,000 Czechs demonstrating for reform in Prague, of terrified Salvadorans caught in a crossfire of bullets and politics--it’s evident just how weak and soft Sunday’s program is.

This is television, not a fat little man.