A New War, but the Same Old Tube

In the teeming marketplace of ideas, common wisdom is what everyone “knows” to be true.

Today’s common wisdom is that America and Americans “will never be the same.” That’s a given, in a sense, for both individuals and nations are the sums of many experiences and influences, a life residue thickening like waxy yellow buildup on kitchen linoleum. That old refrain about “the same-old same-old” notwithstanding, today is never quite like yesterday.

By implication, though, “never . . . the same” means change that is neither slow-building nor fleeting, but dramatic and lasting--as in, U.S. air travel will never be the same. True. Families and friends of victims of the terrorist strikes will never be the same. True. Survivors who experienced hijacked airliners slamming into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center will never be the same. True. Visitors to the smoking rubble, beneath which are unknown numbers of anonymous bodies, will never be the same. True.

Here’s more common wisdom: U.S. television, which beamed those terrorist acts and their aftermath to the world, also will never be the same. Yes, forever transformed, eternally sensitized, responding now to a public whose TV tastes are governed by fresh perceptions arising from one of the most traumatic events of our time.

Talk about a cosmic impact. Television, after all, is just about everyone’s extended family. It’s the electronic campfire around which we all gather into the wee hours to hear and witness tales of life that shape how we see ourselves and the world. Watching TV, it’s been said, is what Americans do more than anything but work and sleep.

But, alas, the terrorism-triggered revolution of TV is vastly overstated. Short-term changes, yes. Long-term, no. New Yorkers are estimating that their cleanup will take six months to a year. In returning to normalcy, TV’s own cleanup will end much sooner.

From picture tube inventor Philo T. Farnsworth to the present, in fact, lasting change in TV has flowed not from outside events, however extreme or cataclysmic, but from new technologies, economic forces and regulatory shifts.

Videotape changed TV permanently. Color did. Cable did. Satellites in the heavens did. Portable lightweight cameras did. Digital signals did.

There are overlaps. The Vietnam conflict changed TV indelibly, for example, but only because of technology that allowed newscasts to cover the war as they did, with the military’s cooperation, thereby nourishing doubts about the conflict’s wisdom.

For the roots of today’s coarsened TV, look not to sliding moral values but to another fluidity that came into play in the mid-1980s. It was there, at this crossroads of burgeoning cable and a softening economy, that an ever-expanding number of TV entities found themselves competing for a shrinking advertising dollar. And the major networks, fearful of not holding viewers, began turning increasingly to violence, raunchspeak and sex to keep pace with their relatively unregulated non-broadcast competitors.

Of even greater importance is the present loosening of federal regulations governing media ownership, which threatens to further stunt TV diversity. The concentration of influence narrows TV’s voices to the very few.

The recent terrorist holocaust won’t equal any of this in leaving a permanent stamp on TV. Mark down as a wonderful oddity the highly competitive TV industry’s recent love fest in airing a star-laden telethon to raise money for the New York relief effort. It recalled World War I, when pockets of U.S. and British troops briefly celebrated with German soldiers on Christmas Eve, after which both sides returned to their trenches and resumed slaughtering each other.

One can predict, of course, that viewers shaken by the recent real-life calamity may now be less inclined to fret about indulged adventurers playing to TV while facing small hardships in pursuit of big paydays. In other words, ratings may slip irrevocably for faux reality trifles along the lines of “Survivor” and its offspring.

Yet who’s to say, if that happens, that such shows wouldn’t have vanished during this period anyway through attrition? History teaches us that prime-time genres, from quiz shows to westerns, have natural life cycles, and that frequently what goes and comes around on this carousel at some point goes around again.

What of other TV neighborhoods?

We can expect late-night comics Jay Leno, David Letterman and others, whose monologues usually take no political prisoners, to continue shying away from their customary presidential slams--those merciless jokes about a thudding President Bush, for example, remaining patriotically on the spike. No “Saturday Night Live” digs at the president either, or gags about airlines or New York, which has been elevated by catastrophe to icon status.

The sensitivity bar also has been lowered in other regions of TV entertainment. Wiped immediately from TV’s skyline were New York shots of the twin towers and stories about terrorist violence, Arabs, Muslims and other subjects even indirectly related to last month’s events, the single exception to date being a special episode of NBC’s “The West Wing.”

Yet all of this is temporary. Americans may never be the same, but they want their television to be, their mixed messages about the medium’s extreme violence aside. Recent strong ratings for escapist prime-time fare suggest that time, the great healer, is already at work, and that viewers are craving a return to the structure and routine of their lives.

In TV’s news arena, the networks and 24-hour news channels have been hemorrhaging dollars to finance their expanded coverage of the New York story and its lingering ache, a financial outpouring that may cripple their ability to cover future major stories, especially abroad. The networks, however, have been closing bureaus and curtailing coverage for years, and have been obsessed with celebrities. How could they possibly do worse?

On another front, the downside of the temporary grounding of private choppers was the shrinking of traffic reports, and the blessing was an absence of gratuitously televised freeway chases that bump important stories from the air. Those restrictions have been eased, however, and expect the choppers to be up and whirring everywhere soon.

Echoing Bush about the U.S. fight against terrorism, CNN at one point called its coverage “A New Kind of War.” The common wisdom here, however, is that America won’t have a new kind of television. Not for much longer, anyway.