Going Deeper Than Seductive Surface of Television : Video: A Pomona College professor turns a critical eye on the medium and argues that 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 editorial 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 delineate 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.

He said he 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.”

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.”

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 kiddie products, he says.

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.”