COUNTERPUNCH LETTERS : The Mirror of Television in America

Most of what Steve Allen bemoans about the state of American culture as exhibited on television is, of course, all too sadly correct (“TV Humor: Barbarians Are Storming the Gates . . . ,” Counterpunch, Sept. 17).

However, the problem is not simply caused by influences of the marketplace and consumerism. Television’s journey has been historical. Its position in society today is quite different from the 1950s.

When television first came around, it was an upper-middle-class instrument that commanded respect, not just because it instructed its audience and converted Norman Rockwellism into daily moving images, but because all levels of society welcomed television’s advent into society.

The crass, crude and vile language used on television’s entertainment programs now is aired because TV executives are telling the world that the audience has changed since the early 1950s.

First, today’s television attracts the uneducated and uninformed viewers, and then it makes them feel wanted. The result is that television is no longer capable of challenging its subject matter or viewers. Indeed, the need for knowledge is external to television’s justification today.

Television is now a substitute for the low-life and lower-rung profiles of existence. (The corruption extends to commercials that advertise the type of buyers of products and not the actual products.)

The viewer is always on the screen, and thus television is a mirror. For new immigrants, television creates new slang to compensate for their lack of English. In its old age, television has become obstinate, as well as the opium of the lower classes, the illiterate, the house-bound and the homeless.

Years ago when it was plain that television had become a self-worshiping business, educated Americans deserted it for their first editions, university press books, professional journals and an occasional letter to the editor.

JOHN ALAN WALKER

Big Pine