Center’s Aim: Just Say No to TV Habit

The problem with television is that not enough people acknowledge that it is a problem. If this were substance abuse, we’d call that denial.

On the other hand, if the typical American family’s practice of keeping TV on more than seven hours a day isn’t substance abuse--or addiction--what is?

“Television, like drugs, dominates the lives of its addicts,” Pete Hamill wrote in Esquire last year. “Viewers can’t work or play while watching television; they can’t read; they can’t be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial. So are drug addicts.”

Hamill carried the drug analogy further, labeling TV a “consciousness-altering instrument” and likening the instant mood changes it brings to those resulting from popping pills.

His article is reprinted in the current issue of Media&Values;, which devotes 31 pages to addiction as a culture and the media’s role in it. The issue is titled “Fatal Attraction: The Selling of Addiction.”

This valuable quarterly is put out by the Los Angeles-based Center for Media and Values, whose crusade to spread media literacy is aimed at giving us the critical tools we need to understand and fight addiction to all media, but especially TV.

The not-for-profit center is on the cutting edge of a growing media literacy movement that, says executive director Elizabeth Thoman, seeks to “unmask the claims and strategies of advertisers, by uncovering the magic of the story telling and special effects that can so easily manipulate us if we are passive and uncritical.”

In other words, adds Thoman, we all should “reclaim the right to shape the myths and values that so subtly influence our daily lives--and those of our children.”

Retrieve the seemingly unretrievable? This is a heavy agenda, but one that Thoman and her colleagues have the vision and knowledge to tackle.

The center is not simply a resource for materials on media literacy; it’s also now hitting the road by holding workshops designed to give community leaders and ordinary citizens the X-ray vision they need to critically analyze the media and be more intelligent consumers.

One seminar I attended recently--part of a five-part series at Immaculate Heart College titled “Media Literacy for the Global Age”--was a knockout.

There’s a lot of harmful gobbledygook on television to get through.

As Hamill notes, the unspoken message of TV is that life should be easy and uncomplicated. News is summarized in fleeting bites, with complex stories that don’t offer conflict or dramatic pictures tending to go uncovered. Feelings and experiences are abbreviated, problems resolved by the end of the hour. Good guys win, bad guys lose. For the most part, the only people who work are cops, lawyers, doctors and hookers. It’s a simplistic world.

Hamill: “For years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.”

The only thing that television promotes more than easy answers--through the programs it airs and the feelgood commercials it beams into our homes--is itself. This is the drug pushing itself on the junkie, telling you that it’s indispensable, that you can’t live without snorting it.

Sloganeering is part of the process.

Jerry Dunphy is on the screen these days performing a promo for the newscasts he co-anchors on KCAL-TV Channel 9. He assures viewers that Channel 9 is working for them, that they should watch Channel 9 because “We’re in this together!” In what together? Never mind. The message is that the lines of separation are erased. The substance is in our bloodstream. We’re them, they’re us.

And here comes a KABC-TV Channel 7 promo using the “Eyewitness News” van to sell the news. As the blue van speeds by, smiling, euphoric citizens rush into the street to wave at it. We’re them, they’re us.

The networks annually used catchy slogans to publicize their fall schedules, and one being carried over from last season is this: “NBC--The Place to Be!”

The network’s fall promotion strategy was outlined last week at a meeting of NBC affiliates and advertisers in New York and summarized in a press release put out by the network. There will be no “rah-rah watch NBC” campaign, the network promised. Instead, the pitch will be subtler:

“We are promoting our day parts (daytime, prime time, late night) as product lines and our new shows as brands.”

Think of a new series titled “The Adventures of Mark and Brian” as Brand X, for example, and the entire schedule as an adventure in advertising.

Moreover, NBC is again using advertising tie-ins for some of its shows, just as it did last season in using product cross-promotions in publicizing its kids shows and making Domino’s Pizza, for example, a “promotional partner” of “Dark Shadows.”

Here’s a little bit of a new wrinkle, though. The network used the Memorial Day weekend to kick off in San Francisco its “Trident and Certs FreshFruit Presents: The NBC Comedy Tour Featuring Jerry Seinfield.” This is an 18-city extravaganza designed to promote “Seinfield” and other NBC series along with products manufactured by the tour’s corporate sponsor, Warner Lambert.

Meanwhile, the network in July will launch its yearlong campaign to make the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics “the most extensively marketed event in NBC’s history.” The plan includes a 36-city mall tour.

And on the news imagery front, Tim Miller, NBC’s vice president for advertising and promotion, outlined plans for on-air spots emphasizing the “camaraderie” between “Today” co-hosts Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric. Miller also told the affiliates and advertisers that research indicates that “Daily Difference”--those soft features run each evening on “NBC Nightly News”--”is giving us a point of difference that’s working.”

Well, as long as it works promotionally.

Daily difference, daily drug. Just say no.