since today is Pangea Day.
in: New Challenges for Documentary
edited by Alan Rosenthal
Orwell wrote in 1946, “a mass of Latin words fall upon the facts like soft snow”; that snow doesn’t stick on television, which always homes in on the dead, allowing no excuses.
Edmund Wilson points out, combined to simplify American prose, demanding “lucidity, precision, terseness”; wars honed down still more the language of those many writers – journalists as well as novelists and poets – who have struggled to convey the horror, paradoxically, by understating it, rendering it with photographic coolness and exactitude. Through such unflinching reporting, it might be argued, the best war correspondents, and writers like Hemingway, Remarque, Cèline, and Mailer, have aspired, avan l’image, to replicate in words the bleak and graphic vision of TV.
It is, in fact, the great myth of television that the medium somehow gives us an immediate impression, conveying not images, but actualities; and its coverage of war is supposedly the most compelling example of such supreme truthfulness. This pretense of objectivity makes TV’smany actualdistortions – whether inherent or imposed – all the more insidious, because their camouflage is perfect, fooling not only the viewer, but even most of thosewho work within the medium, naively claiming to reveal “the way it is.”
The TV newsman comforts us as John Wayne comforted our grandparents, by seeming to have the whole affair in hand. This hero functions as the guardian of our enclosed spectatorship. Therefore, when we see a newsman shot to death, as happened in Guyana and El Salvador, we react with an especial horror, because we realize that TV is not, in fact, immune to the events which it observes, but that the protective apparatus can be shattered; and if the medium does not confer invincibility on those who manage it, it surely can’t safeguard its helpless viewers.
But that camera can’T record “realtragedy,” because death has no finality, no poignancy, on television. Because the medium cancels out the living presence of its figures, homogenizing all identity, whether individualal or collective, it can’t restore the impact of a single loss, or express the decimation of a people. Since no one seems to live on television, no one seems to die there. And the medium’s temporal facility deprives all terminal moments of their weight.
But let’s set aside all these distortions – the shrinkage, the implicit distancing, the illusory containment, the imperceptible cloud of ideology – and grant that TV does tend to present, as Goodman puts it “intrinsically antiwar” ? There is no reason to think so; and this belief in television’s salutary bias is not only unfounded, but intolerant, positing only one morally acceptable response. To assert, with Ellen Goodman, that on TV “the sides are not divided into good guys and bad guys, but into aggressors and victims,” is to say that the viewer, when he sits down to watch TV, is suddenly cleansed of all personal identity, all preconception, and can now apprehend the conflicts of the world from an exalted, unimpeachable standpoint, seeing reality through God’s own eyes, or Ellen Goodman’s. Far from conducing to a world of peace, such “objective” certainty is probably more dangerous than any archaic faith, because it reflects, and has at its disposal, the most enormous system of technology that has ever choked the world.
For not even the most sophisticated Sony has a perfect moral faculty built into it. We usually see what we want to see on television – and TV complicates this tendency by helping to determine that original desire. If it thinks that we want war, it sells us war. The medium can easily circumvent the pacific influence (if any) or its graphic images. Like radio or the yellow press, TV, too, can beat the drum. “Granted, television helped get us out of Vietnam,” writes Michael Arlen, “but it also helped march us in.” And even if the medium weren’t influential, the images per se dictate no automatic pacifism. Confronted with those pictures of the slaughtered Palestinians, a Phalangist viewer would surely smile at seeing all those dead “aggressors”;
Truth is indeed the first casualty in any war, and our journalists have never been less honest in this sentimental era.
In a TV Guide in 2000, Dan Rather, asked what event he’d most like to report, came up with this: “Good evening, from CBS News. Peace and good will toward all living things prevails [sic] everywhere on earth and throughout the cosmos.”
Now what would Dan Rather do, deprived of war and ill will in the cosmos ? His utopian pronouncement, as frightening as it is disingenuous, does not reflect the sentiments of a living human being, but rather the contradictory longings of the medium that has consumed him. TV has us automatically deplore or ridicule all anger, fear, political commitment, deep belief, keen pleasure, exalted self-esteem, tremendous love; and yet, while making all these passions seem unnatural, the medium persistently dwells on their darkest consequences, teasing the house-bound spectator with hints of that intensity that it has helped to kill. In fact, despite its pleas for universal calm, what TV depends upon is something else; brutal wars abroad, and an anxious peace in every living room.
