As you read along, there is suddenly Pepsi! —then words—then Burger King! then more words and Coming in Metro! etc. You would be annoyed and write me a letter pronto. Yet you, and I, put up with it on television. Here you are watching a program and there appears at the corner of your screen a Disney movie mise-en-scene with twinkling graphics and ding-dong noises announcing upcoming programming. Or, and this is a favorite, the appearance of a frog bouncing around the screen pitching you to be the 100th caller so you can receive a free trip to Aruba.
We all understand that advertising is part of the deal. In Metro, we sell ads and write content, but the two are separate, so you can choose between them. And on TV it works the same way, except you can’t choose to avoid the ads unless you are fast on the clicker. But you understand the concept: Ads pay for programming on commercial TV and most cable channels. But the TV suits have broken the agreement by inserting ads in the programming as if to say, you dumb lout, we don’t care about you anyway and there’s nothing you can do about it because it’s already happened and like everything else in broadcasting, it’s disappeared into the ether. You can can’t clip out what just happened and if you try to call us.., well, good luck.
The recent impetigo of little annoying logos in the middle of programs indicates the depth of the contempt television operators have for their viewers. Over the past 20 years, the number of ads per hour has increased from the formerly Federal Communications Commission-mandated eight minutes to over 16. As cable grew to over 80 percent of households, commercial station owners and their networks screamed for deregulation and the opportunity to run more ads, along with the right to run risqu shows. The result has not been pretty. Parents scramble to click off blatant and gratuitous sex and innuendo. The culmination of this licentiousness on the public airwaves came with the Janet Jackson affair at the 2004 Super Bowl. FCC chairman Michael Powell (yes, son of Colon), who had led the charge to deregulate radio and television, was watching with his family and was not amused. Feeling betrayed for previously allowing new freedoms to broadcasters, Powell came after them with a vengeance born of anger. Fines were imposed across the board for lewd behavior on radio and television. New rules came down as if Pope Powell had become Oliver Cromwell. Even North Carolina Public Television was worried that the documentary on the Impressionist exhibition at the NC Museum of Art now airing would bring fines for showing nudity in art. Chairman Powell, once the friend of deregulation, has made it clear that broadcasters can’t be trusted to act responsibly outside FCC surveillance.
This sorry state of affairs, both the blatant disregard for Powell’s efforts to give stations more latitude—and his over-reaction today, is a far cry from the atmosphere of decency and public service envisioned by the FCC and the public. The idea was that the US, contrary to the rest of the world, would allow the airwaves, considered a precious public trust, to be licensed to private companies rather than be controlled by the state. Local stations owned the license and were held responsible to broadcast in the public interest. (Networks are not licensed as they are merely program sources.) Television and radio were not treated as the print press, that are unlicensed, unregulated and protected by the First Amendment. Broadcasting is regulated and its content monitored. The pivotal event that changed the old equation was the vote in the US Congress in 1978 ruling that cable television content would not fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC. As unregulated cable became the kudzu that covered up the essence of broadcasting oversight, and the commercial stations yelped for deregulation as cable programming eroded their audiences, the demeanor of broadcasting passed from concern for the local community and its standards to trying to do anything to keep viewers. The result is not very pretty.
THE PROMISE OF CABLE
Cable television began as CATV (Community Antenna Television) in communities where VHF and UHF television could not reach. A town where signals were blocked by mountains would put up a big dish to capture area stations and run the data by wire to households. The technology progressed and interest grew in communities that did received area signals when microwave towers were erected that could carry programming from far away. Thus the birth of the “super stations,” most notably Ted Turner’s UHF in Atlanta. As UHF was languishing, Turner saw the chance to extend his reach out of the local market, where it had no network affiliation and hardly made a mark in the VHF-dominated Atlanta market. Later, Microwave towers were replaced with satellite signals creating the environment for the creation of independent cable program sources that did not emanate from an existing television station. Home Box Office was the first and fledgling cable companies in communities that previously could only receive on-air programming had something to sell. And what HBO sold was sex. For the first time Americans could receive uncensored programming, as well as movies and the bonus of no commercial interruption. From the early 1970s to the !990s, cable programming increased in reach from 20 percent of US households to nearly 90 percent today.
With satellite delivery, anything could be sent to the local cable company dish and whisked into awaiting households. Communities mistakenly thought they could control this onslaught. They couldn’t. Cable companies are unregulated and if the town doesn’t like it, tough. The cable firms simply say other cable firms can compete if they like. We are not a monopoly, they say, and we are not regulated—except for the monthly fees, which have to be reviewed by utility commissions and local governments. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. There is a must-carry rule requiring cable firms to broadcast local stations in the market. And this does create some stimulation to the broadcasting menu as a little UHF with not much direct reach (you have a UHF antenna?) is provided audience on the cable system. And new cable networks have popped up offering targeted programming—Travel, Cooking, Music, Comedy, Sports (several, with ESPN the most notable), History, Newschannels (Fox, CNN etc), Weather—you know the line-up—and of course movies. And, while you pay for cable and “premium programming” such as HBO and special events, the channels can also sell ads, so you pay twice: cable fees and suffering with incessant advertising volume.
And all of this programming is indeed wonderful in many ways. But most of the cable networks are owned by the same corporations. ESPN is owned by ABC, NBC and others. Sumner Redstone’s Viacom owns the USA Network, MTV, Nick at Night and others. HBO owns most of the other movie channels and while there is more programming, it is more and more bland and predictable. The handful of program source owners don’t want high quality programming competing with their own content and they own the others anyway. A case in point is the sad demise of the Arts & Entertainment channel. A&E came to cable as the PBS of commercial programming. The content line-up was a steady menu of middle and high brow programming, mostly British stuff that first appeared on PBS or in UK. But it was a pleasing thing that the power of cable brought this specialized programming to subscribers who enjoyed it, just as other viewers enjoyed NASCAR. The neat niche programming on cable was working.
Then, like most things, the suits took over. Look at A&E today. The owners said this format isn’t selling enough ads so let’s mongrelize and trivialize the programming and make it cheap. So the once venerable A&E is now a series of sorry low-budget crime programs and trashy specials. Growing Up Gotti has replaced Morse, Poirot and Hornblower (although they do turn up at odd times) and the comfort of consistent quality programming is gone. Same with the HBO/Showtime/Movie Channel packages so touted by cable firms. It is wearing and depressing to flip through the 30 or so channels only to see one bad movie after another, only occasionally interspersed with a quality film. No wonder Blockbuster still does a banner business even with dozens of films available on cable TV. Oh, I forgot, Blockbuster is owned by Sumner Redstone too—as is CBS, where Janet Jackson made her debut as a stripper in front of a billion people, and where the disgraced Dan Rather has turned news into an agenda...See what I mean?
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
...ACT (American College Testing), the competitor to SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Testing) came out and told the truth recently that high school students are no better prepared for college than they were 10 years ago, saying only 22 percent of the 1.2 million students who take their tests are prepared for college level work. If you dig underneath the propaganda put out by teacher associations and state education officials that things are just rosy, ACT is correct. In North Carolina, after the state ranked 51st (even behind the District of Columbia) in SAT scores in 1990, huge expenditures and a new focus on performance have indeed improved performance, but only over the dismal state of affairs a decade ago. The solution is simple: Start school at 9 a.m. and keep students until 4 p.m. If kids are doing well, they can play sports and attend club meetings. Those behind go straight to tutors who drill lessons into them. And all students will finish their homework during the day. Staggered openings and closing times for schools created by the busing schedule must stop. It is an arbitrary and cruel ordeal for parents who may have one child in elementary school that opens at 9 a.m. and closes at 3 p.m., and another in a middle or high school that opens at 7:30 a.m. and lets out before 2 p.m. Kids let out early are roaming the streets and malls for most of the workday. Parents (by the way, in 95 percent of families with school-aged children, both parents work) are left to cope and manage. Evenings are filled with busy work called homework so family life evaporates, especially when sports and dance lessons are involved. As former NC Senator Fern Shubert says, it is child abuse to do what we are doing today to kids in school. We are depriving them of the most valuable thing we can offer them: a complete and valid education.
…Of course, once they get to University, things can get worse. The post-modern radical scholars have stripped what used to be a “liberal arts” education down to a Marxist parody, devoid of the useful information and knowledge we used to prize and pass down the generations. In its place is a politically charged menu of vacant doctrines and useless theories. A college degree on a resume today can be a negative. This was driven home to me as I passed by a segment of CBS 60 Minutes on how many young college graduates are useless in the work force due to “group think,” the education theory that took over in the 1970s as part of the shift from actually teaching to teaching kids to think, which led to the end of the core curriculum and ushered in the age of “self-esteem” in the classroom. In the ensuing years, the damage seems permanent as new graduates join a company ready for caring for others and “enabling” the group. Problem is, they are incapable to perform the work. The failure in education goes beyond the scandal of testing. It has altered the child.
…And sure enough, the numbing failures of education continue in the world of academic plagiarism with the announcement that the venerated legal scholar Laurence Tribe of Harvard has been caught publishing the works of others. He joins a growing list of once respected scholars and writers (Doris Kearns, Stephen Ambrose among others) who demonstrate that the lassitude of Leftist theory in education has eroded standards to a new level of embarrassment.