A Need to ‘Watch Out for What We Watch’ : Television: Pomona College professor argues that in order to separate the good from the bad, viewers must become “visually literate.”

An image consultant told some worried members of Parliament last year, just before the first live televised proceedings of the British House of Commons, that 55% of their impact on viewers would come from the way they dressed and 38% from the way they acted in front of the cameras.

Only 7% depended on what they said, the image consultant contended.

It just goes to show what a complex instrument television has become, says Brian Stonehill. In 50 years, that novel little electronic receiver that could miraculously capture transmitted pictures in the home has become “a great truth teller and a powerful distorter of the truth,” says the Pomona College professor of English and media studies.

Television has penetrated far into space to bring us pictures of Jupiter and Neptune, and it has cluttered the airwaves with images of slogan-spouting politicians with chiseled profiles. It has given us stunning live pictures of historic moments, and it has manipulated young minds with seductive commercials pitching toys and candy.

To separate the good from the bad in the Babel of pictures that rushes into our homes every day, Stonehill says, we have to be “visually literate.”

“We have to watch out for what we watch,” says Stonehill, 36, a boyish looking, sharp-featured man with a tangle of dun-colored hair.

Stonehill is one of a small but growing group of academicians who have turned a critical eye on video--”the language in which our culture speaks to itself,” as he puts it.

He teaches a course at Pomona called “Arts of Persuasion,” in which students analyze television programs and commercials from the perspective of the principles of rhetoric. In the fall, he’ll teach a new course in visual literacy and oversee a program for majors in media studies.

He has dabbled in television himself, notably as the script developer of the PBS show “French in Action” and as a host of a talk show for the Claremont public access channel.

And Stonehill, who contributes commentaries to newspaper Op-Ed pages, is one of commercial television’s most persistent critics.

“People forget that commercial TV’s main function is to deliver the largest possible audience to the advertiser,” Stonehill says. “Everything it does is to hold your attention for the commercials. That’s what its function is. You have to recognize the devices it’s using to get you to watch the commercials.”

To look beneath video’s seductive surface, Stonehill takes his students all the way back to Aristotle and his principles of rhetoric. “Aristotle identifies three main ingredients in any persuasive situation,” says Stonehill, who has been teaching at Pomona College for 11 years. “They’re ethos, pathos and logos”--or personal character, emotion and intellect.

Television has translated those qualities, says Stonehill, into “sparkle, hearts and smarts,” which can be seen in varying quantities during a day of commercial programing.

“On the morning talk show, with the celebrities promoting their movies and so forth--that’s ethos or sparkle,” he says. “Then the soap operas and game shows, they’re big on hearts . . . pathos. The biggest intellectual demands of the day are the evening news shows, where you get smarts or logos.”

But the most powerful tool in the Aristotelian persuader’s arsenal, Stonehill says, is something called “antithesis,” or the practice of reducing issues to sharply delineated pros and cons.

“TV uses antithesis constantly, forcing issues through a filter that enhances conflict,” says Stonehill. “You get a view of the world as one team pitted against another. It may not be true to the world, but it gets ratings.”

Politics, the abortion issue, cops and robbers, race--all tend to be fitted into “a Monday-night-football view of the world,” he says.

Stonehill, a graduate of Haverford College with a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago, says he got interested in media studies during the early stages of the Ronald Reagan presidency.

“I started trying to understand why it was so easy to believe (Reagan), when, if you read the text of his speech in the next morning’s newspaper, he was clearly saying mostly nothing,” Stonehill says.

He thinks the Great Communicator was extraordinarily adept at using both the television camera and his most powerful natural attribute--his voice. “He has an amazing voice,” says Stonehill. “When you listen to the tapes, he seems young and old at the same time. George Bush is having a harder time because he has nothing like the vocal instrument.”

As a child, Stonehill was exposed to the usual baby-boomer’s allotment of TV time. “My parents tell about the time I fell out of my high chair and hit my head,” says the professor. “They were worried that I might have injured myself, so the doctor told them: ‘Keep him up tonight. Don’t let him go to sleep.’ They propped me up between them in the bed and left the TV on until they fell asleep. Much later, they found me sitting there, watching the snow on the screen. I was already interested in what was behind the screen.”

He’s much more discriminating nowadays, rarely even allowing himself the luxury of “channel surfing,” or using the remote control device to wander through the array of nightly offerings on his television. He keeps a blank calendar on the set, with entries for news and cultural shows that interest him.

The illiterates of video, Stonehill says, are viewers who haven’t developed the sophistication to “find out about the puppet show they’re watching.” They’re people who “think that celebrities on TV really use the products they’re endorsing” or who “don’t read behind the political commercials.”

But the medium’s real victims tend to be children, who are targets of commercials for kiddy products, he says. “They’re very easily misled,” he says.

In the classroom, Stonehill is a cool analyst, leading the class past the obvious, digging into a subject like an archeologist dismantling a Pharoah’s tomb.

At a recent session of “Contemporary Fiction and Film,” which Stonehill teaches with Jack Coogan, professor of communication arts at the School of Theology at Claremont, the two talked about the 1967 Arthur Penn movie “Bonnie and Clyde.”

Coogan placed the movie in a historical context, as one of the first examples of “a renaissance in American film,” and Stonehill led a discussion of its controversial uses of violence, with its vivid shooting scenes. Modern tragedy or sleazy view of human nature?

Then Stonehill brought it back to one of his favorite subject: violence on the screen. It’s a great way to “grab an audience,” he said.

“Compare in your mind how little time it takes to deliver that jolt of seeing somebody shot or stabbed,” he said, “with how long it takes to set up an act of compassion. There’s something structural about television’s need for violence.”

The unceasing rush of sensation that is being directed at viewers has made us an unfeeling society, says Stonehill. “I have a sense of the global telecommunications network as a kind of nervous system that’s wired for the planet,” he says. “It’s very effective at transmitting pain. Disasters, assassination, wars--they can be felt around the world instantaneously. But the system doesn’t know very well how to transmit knowledge or beauty or wisdom.”

Nevertheless, Stonehill sees a lot of good in television. “A persuasive argument could be made that the events that are astonishing us in Eastern Europe right now are to a large extent the gift of TV,” he says. “People there just could not resist what they were seeing on their TV screens regarding life on the other side.”

Dictators have fallen or changed their ways for the same reasons, he contends. “The camera puts them on their best behavior.”

For good or bad, television is obviously here to stay, Stonehill says. “It used to be a kind of dirty little secret, and you didn’t make it the centerpiece of your living room if you could avoid it,” he says. “Now, people are much more hospitable to the TV.”

And viewers are becoming more literate. Even unsophisticated viewers are getting turned off by gratuitous violence nowadays, Stonehill says. “If the box does only that--gives you a kind of electrical stimulus across the optical nerves--people get tired of it,” he says.

Just a lot of people getting tired of something can have an enormous impact, Stonehill says. “TV responds quickly to what people want.”