Stop the World! I Want to Think! : TV News: If the ‘80s retrospectives take your breath away, stay tuned--for the milennium.

I looked up from my coffee and newspaper the other morning and noticed that television’s recap of the last decade was in full stride. There rolling across the screen from the “Today” program were rapidly changing images from the 1980s-- Nancy Reagan dressed in red as her husband takes the oath of office, smoke spiraling from the Challenger, a homeless man dragging a torn blanket.

Just as I started to think about the man with the torn blanket, his image was supplanted by another-- Secret Service men crouching over someone on the ground. Oh, yes, I recalled; that was when President Reagan was shot. In the time it took me to have that thought, pictures from two other events flashed on the screen without my registering what they were. This weekend, we will continue to be inundated with quick-cut pastiches of events, not just from the last year but from the entire decade-- Michael Dukakis riding in a tank, a woman freebasing, a finger tracing a name engraved on the Vietnam Memorial-- and some eager beavers, in print as well as broadcast, are starting to recall the millennium. Probably rapid retrospectives of the bi-millennium-- a Babe in a manger, the rock from which Mohammad ascended to heaven --are not far behind.

To study history is a joy. That is why anyone who loves history must find television’s treatment of it jarring, to say the least. By their very nature, telescoped images-- George Bush stroking a White House puppy, Israeli soldiers firing tear gas at Palestinians --foreclose reflection. They feed the eyes but starve the mind. Over time, they tend to numb us and eventually alienate us from the political process.

In their whirling speed and lack of context-- blood pouring from a black man’s head in South Africa, Geraldine Ferraro jubilantly raising her arms from the podium of the 1984 Democratic Convention --these quick-cut images reduce human experience to spectacle. Spectacle discourages response. It can titillate, but not teach. It can excite, but not empower.

Thomas Jefferson’s thought about a free press was that citizens needed information if they were to act on their own behalf. Today we are overwhelmed by information, but in a form that tends to turn us into audiences rather than participants.

It’s not the technology that is at fault. Bill Moyers sits and talks with one person about his or her ideas for as long as an hour at a time. Mr. Rogers still speaks quietly and slowly to children about their interests and fears. MacNeil and Lehrer dare to give us daily discussions of the news instead of just videotaped capsules.

These examples, of course, come from public television. The tendency in commerical television is to speed up. The idea is to snatch the attention of the viewer who, remote control in hand, “grazes” through the competing channels. Advertisers attempt to do this with vertigo-producing commercials that flip through images in milliseconds. This reductionism applies to news-related programming as well. A researcher at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Barone Center recently found that the average network “sound bite” from presidential campaigns dropped from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to 9.8 seconds last year. Even the few commercial interview programs such as “Nightline” and the morning talk shows have a hurried, anxious tone as interviewers interrupt the speakers to inform them that “we’re out of time.”

Television can give us so much, except the time to think.

It may be that the best way to comprehend the events of this extraordinary year-- a solitary Chinese man standing in front of a tank, demonstrators dancing on the Berlin Wall, American helicopters swooping in formation over a Panamanian beach-- is to turn off the television set.