Covering Events--and Shaping the Agenda

It is not uncommon for people to write in saying that they don’t watch television or even own one, dismissing the medium as a trifle, an opiate, a waste of time.

Television, after all, has done much to reinforce its image as the idiot box, a mind-numbing device that transforms functional people into what are colloquially known as couch potatoes. The industry churns out local news that offers more self-promotion than information, banal sitcoms, shrill talking heads, inane commercials, overwrought dramas and so-called “reality” shows that insult the intelligence.

To others, TV is not merely an object of derision but a harmful social force--a factor that helps explain why our children are overweight, our society is so violent, even why so many baby boomers see the world through thick corrective lenses.

While any and all of these charges may be true in varying degrees, one cannot overlook that television, as a communications medium, also occupies an utterly unique role in human history--a point driven home again this week, as people across the country and indeed the world sat transfixed, watching the astonishing pictures that darted across the screen from New York City.

Although there are parallels as well as significant differences between the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the bombing of Pearl Harbor 60 years ago, one defining element of the more recent event has been the interaction with television--providing the opportunity to watch those images unfold live in surreal detail.

This is hardly new, of course. For decades, the pictures we saw on television became our touchstone connecting us to memorable moments, tragic or otherwise. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. The shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. The Vietnam War.

The change since the 1970s, however, hinges on what satellites and new technology have brought us--an evolution from Vietnam, dubbed the living-room war, to the Persian Gulf, which, with its night-vision bombings, might accurately have been called the video-game war.

Much of this is not to our benefit. Television dabbles so freely in imagined and fabricated drama, in made-for-TV tragedies, it can easily trivialize such matters. For all the yeoman work done on television during the last few days, networks are still packaging coverage in slick slogans and graphics--a tendency that, in less tumultuous times at least, risks reducing everything to entertainment, simply more fodder for pundits to chew over.

The net result can be a numbing blur that can, at times, seemingly stunt our national sense of empathy. And while it’s hard to not be moved by the personal stories currently being told, the thudding assault of images and saturation coverage can produce their own kind of fatigue--until the impulse to absorb what has happened becomes a guilty desire to escape from it.

“You have an hour’s worth of coverage, and two seconds of new information. [But] for many people, that’s really needed,” said Stuart Fischoff, a professor of media psychology at Cal State Los Angeles.

Yet for all of that, no still picture can rival television’s ability to convey the gravity of these events, with an immediacy that was not long ago unimaginable.

Often, in fact, the impact of television has contributed not only to how major stories are only perceived, but to how they develop, becoming an important part of the news itself.

Think of the role television played in the Nixon-Kennedy debates. The Watergate hearings. The Challenger explosion. The Rodney King beating by police officers, whose continual exposure after being captured on video doubtless helped spur the anger and unrest that followed. O.J. Simpson’s slow-speed Bronco chase and subsequent media circus of a trial. Even Rep. Gary Condit’s recent Connie Chung interview, which helped shape the discussion of that story for days afterward.

In this respect, television defines events and fundamentally changes them in the public consciousness as no other medium can. For good or ill, the attack on Pearl Harbor would have been experienced differently had Americans seen it live in their living rooms, as they did when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.

A medium with such power can be examined, contemplated, criticized and even ridiculed where appropriate. But given how television frames the national debate and participates in shaping the course of news, it is hard to fathom how anyone can simply ignore it.

The only solace in considering television in this context, perhaps, is that if TV can transmit horror and even feed hysteria, it can also indicate in subtle ways when life begins returning to normal. Seeing familiar staples such as sitcoms and game shows creeping back onto the dial, as they have and will, will serve as a tacit reminder that life goes on.

“Some people will think, ‘If television is back to normal, life is back to normal,”’ Fischoff said.

As for networks wrestling with the proper timetable for making the adjustment back to a world of silly sitcom dads, blaring commercials and misnamed “reality” shows that look even more ashen against the harsh reality on display this week, as Fischoff put it, “It’ll either be ‘Television is getting back to normal’ or ‘Television is obscene.”’

Television is certainly no stranger to obscenity, to crassness, to exploitation and sheer excess, and for all there has been to laud, these attributes surely will ooze back into the picture--if some haven’t already--as the torrent of coverage continues.

Nevertheless, as much as any speech by President Bush or other public officials, television will in an odd way set the nation’s agenda--and facilitate and influence its transition to life after Sept. 11, 2001--in the weeks ahead.

It is, to borrow an old saying, a great power--one the medium’s gatekeepers should never forget brings with it an even greater responsibility.

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Brian Lowry’s column usually appears on Wednesdays. He can be contacted at brian.lowry@latimes.com.