7.
 In
its place that is fine. Who can quarrel with
a medium that
so brilliantly
packages escapist
entertainment
as a mass-marketing tool? But
I see its values now pervading
this nation and its life. It has become fashionable
to think that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way
to get to a fast-moving, impatient public.
8.
In the case of news, this practice, in my view, results
in inefficient communication. I question how much of
television's nightly news effort is really absorbable
and understandable. Much of it is what has been aptly
described as "machine-gunning with scraps."
I think the technique fights coherence.
I think it tends to make things ultimately boring and
dismissable
(unless they are accompanied by horrifying pictures)
because almost anything is boring and dismissable if
you know almost nothing about it.
9.
I believe that TV's appeal to the short
attention span is not only inefficient communication
but decivilizing
as well. Consider the casual assumptions
that television tends to
cultivate: that complexity must be avoided, that
visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, that
verbal precision is an anachronism.
It may be old-fashioned, but I was taught that thought
is words, arranged in grammatically precise ways.
|
