Television & Elections: Has the One Destroyed the Other?

It's election time in both Canada and the U.S. and that means attacks ads, political commercials and televised debates. I have heard so much discussion lately around Harper's knit-sweaters, Dion's glasses (not to mention Palin's), and how the TV hurts and helps both candidates in the U.S. Every night when my wife turns on Showbiz Tonight there is a segment, a long segment, called the Palin Factor--which talks about her latest clothes, hair-do and glass. When I hear the discourse of our culture revolving around such things it makes me laugh, and then it makes me kind of sad, and then scared pitless. During these times I always think back to a book I read years ago, which though published in 1984, before the invention of the Internet, still carries with it a great reminder to our culture about the ramifications of having our public discourse--whether it be about politics, religion or news--centered around such trivial things.

The book is Neil Postman's (1931-2003) celebrated and oft-quoted book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business wherein he argues that political philosophy cannot (and thus should not) be done on television. "Its form" he says "works against the content." Here are four points he makes. And I do not make these points in regard to one candidate over another (in either country)--because one could argue that television has helped and hurt all candidates.

First he says "Because we live in an image-centered culture it would appear that fat people are now effectively excluded from running for high profile office. Probably bald people as well. Indeed we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control... Someone like our twenty-seventh President, the multi-chinned, three-hundred pound William Howard Taft, couldn't be put forward as a presidential candidate in today's world. In reality the shape of a mans body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas. But it is quite relevant on television. Television gives us a conversation in images not words."

Secondly he says "Public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory. It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents of the United States would not have been recognizable had they passed by the average citizen in the street... To think about these men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge. Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham or Albert Einstein what will likely come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face. Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture."

Thirdly, he says in our move away from a print-based epistemology to an image-based epistemology much has been lost: "Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was generally coherent, serious and rational; but under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.... This shift in epistemology has had grave consequences for public life; we are getting sillier by the minute."

Postman believed that this leads to a kind of cultural death: "When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when a people become an audience, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."

Fourthly, he makes a suggestion about political commercials: "I am particularly fond of John Lindsay's suggestions that political commercials be banned from television as we now ban cigarette and liquor commercials. I would gladly testify before the Federal Communications Commission as to the manifold merits of this excellent idea. To those who would say such a ban is a clear violation of the First Amendment I would offer a compromise: Require all political commercials to be preceded by a short statement to the effect that common sense has determined that watching political commercials is hazardous to the intellectual health of the community...Television serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse--new, politics, science, education, religion--and turns them into entertainments packages. We would all be better off if television got worse not better. "The A-Team" and "Cheers" are no threat to our public health. "60 Minutes," "Eye-Witness News" and "Sesame Street" are."

The reality is that we are an image-driven culture at every level -- the question is: has this helped us or hurt us in regard to the most important parts of our civilization?