TV OR NOT TV:
THAT’S AN IMPORTANT QUESTION

I remember vividly the moment Neil Armstrong took his small step for mankind in 1969. I was driving away from a speaking engagement in Sydney, and the streets were almost deserted. The miracle of television was bringing, live, history as it was being made on the moon.

Television is today’s macro-medium: it is the most common shared experience in almost all countries of the world. World Cup soccer or cricket, a British royal wedding, the Olympic Games, can command audiences of up to a third of the human race. The average TV set in America is on for seven hours a day: research by psychologists Robert Kubey of Rutgers University and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago in a project involving 1200 subjects over 13 years found that, on average, Americans spend nearly half their free time watching television. ‘More Americans now have television sets than have refrigerators or indoor plumbing.’ (Education does not seem to make much difference to viewing habits, except that the study found the more educated people are, the more likely they are to wish they were doing something besides watching TV!). ‘No matter who they are, when people sit down to watch TV, particularly for long periods of time, they tend to be in low moods, the study found. Moreover, the longer they watch, the less able they are to concentrate. They become increasingly drowsy and bored. As time goes on, they grow sadder, lonelier, more irritable and more hostile. Although it is true people are relaxed while their television set is on, when they turn it off, they are even less relaxed than before they began to watch.’ (Anne C. Roark, ‘Should TV carry a health warning?’, Melbourne: The Age green guide, 3 May 1991).

In 1989 the average amount of terrestrial television watched was 25 hours 53 minutes per person per week (25 hours 54 minutes in 1986) (London: The Independent, 19/9/1990, p.15). An average viewer in Britain, watching almost four hours a day from early childhood into old age, will have spent some 10 years in front of a set. In Melbourne, however, the average person watched 76 minutes less TV a week in 1989 than in 1984: but TVs in the average Melbourne household were switched on an average of 31.58 hours a week in 1989. (Paul Daley, ‘TV generation tuning out and turning off’, The Age, 13 May, 1990). Australian adults are watching about 21 hours of TV a week. Incidentally, more than 50% of Australian homes had video-cassette recorders by early 1988: possibly the highest per capita ownership in the world.

Children have watched 15,000 to 25,000 hours of television by the time they finish high school. Children up to the age of seven years cannot distinguish between television and reality. A little boy ran out onto the road and barely missed getting run over by a car. A nurse in a children’s clinic ran out to rescue him and told him off for running onto the road. But he said ‘Mighty Mouse would have saved me!’ He really believed that Mighty Mouse would save him and that’s why he ran out onto the road. He was aged three or four.

I remember interviewing the famous anthropolist Margaret Mead for a Sydney radio station. She said modern Westerners have invented prisons for their children – basinette, bouncinette, playpen, then television. In other cultures (eg. in traditional Chinese families), children spend a lot more time sitting on their parents’ knee. As a result, Western TV kids are more alienated from their parents: in the traditional cultures children are far more loyal to their parents’ values.

Western children watch 18,000 TV commercials a year. And those commercials have a powerful effect: since Mattel launched the Barbie doll in 1959, more than 200 million have been sold – 1.5 for every female in the U.S. and Canada. In one study, almost 70% of children observed in a supermarket asked for or demanded a particular cereal; 60% got their way. A 1982 study found that there was an average of five violent acts per hour on prime time and 18 violent acts per hour on children’s weekend programs.

Australian psychologist John Court in several of his books and articles has shown a strong connection between watching violence on TV and acting violently towards others. Guy Lyon Playfair’s powerful book, The Evil Eye: the unacceptable face of television (Cape, 1990) argues that TV not only makes people less sensitive to violence but induces anti- social behaviour of all kinds: it is a ‘mirror of society’ which society itself reflects in turn, only to be re-reflected in an endless spiral of artificiality. As one of many examples he cites the case of a CBS television reporter who, sent to cover a riot in a New Jersey gaol, found it was all over when he got there and that it had never amounted to much anyway. He managed, however, to get into the prison, where he set up his cameras and, with cooperation from the inmates, filmed a re-run which was a great improvement on the original.

Marshall McLuhan was the first influential commentator on the mass media’s impact on modern culture. He believed (Understanding Media) that we are now victims of electronic impulses that ‘massage’ our minds much more than the rational arguments and linear logic of the past. The world has also become a ‘global village’: we now participate in disasters as they happen.

Neil Postman, a New York University professor (Amusing Ourselves to Death, New York: Viking, 1985) goes further: he maintains that television has fundamentally changed our notions of truth and our ideas of intelligence. He isn’t so much concerned about TV’s portrayal of sex and violence, as its purpose to entertain. That’s what TV does best: it offers us ‘junk’ in average doses of 3.5 seconds by presenting all its programs – news, politics, education and religion – as entertainment. Political candidates are packaged telegenically. The TV preachers consciously package their electronic church services as entertainment. The news is presented by attractive people (do you know a bald or overweight newsreader?) who exchange pleasant banter between vivid film footages. The medium, says Postman, shapes the message. Print-educated people therefore will think differently to screen-educated people. Our greatest problem is not totalitarian mind control imposed by an external authority, but our willingness, our eagerness, to be ‘amused to death’. When the whole population is exposed to so much trivia, when cultural life is a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk: when, more seriously, our people are a perpetual audience, cultural death is a real possibility.

Television can perform certain functions quite well (motivating, selling, informing) and perform others poorly or not at all (educating, involving, disciplining etc.). The late Italian film director Roberto Rossellini passionately believed that the medium of television was too powerful to use for any purpose other than education.

More and more people are receiving their information about the world from television. Television brought the Vietnam War to an end: it was the first war fought both on the battlefields of a distant country and in our living rooms.

TV is our main source of news, and of escapism. It’s our main leisure time-filler, our most commonly-chosen source of distraction. It dominates our spare time: or it creates ‘spare time’ which should be more profitably spent doing something better. The TV set is the most common seducer in our age, the major social narcotic of our culture. Television is junk food for the mind. One psychologist has coined the word ‘vidiot’ to describe a recent mental illness.

Television is the slave of the masses: it shows what the masses want. It is the primary channel of popular culture. One recent study of teenage girls showed they relied more on television than school to teach them about life. It is a major topic of conversation among them, and they copy the clothes, the hairstyles and mannerisms of the TV characters they admire. Friendships are determined or reinforced by choice of TV programs, and for the most part they watch these programs uncritically.

Nine out of 10 Americans believe in God, but 45% of television professionals say they have no religion. 93% seldom or never attend religious services, 97% are pro-choice on the abortion issue, 80% see nothing wrong with homosexual relations (v. 30% in the general population).

The village elders in part of Western Samoa changed the time of their lotu, their Sunday worship service. They wanted to stay at home and watch ‘All Star Wrestling.’ Many churches in America adjust their worship-times to those of the home-or-away matches of the local football or baseball team.

In our open society, public figures regularly endure ‘trial by television.’ The TV industry is intensely competitive. There is too much violence on TV. The news gives us gory close-ups, sensational pictures of shootings, riots, and sensational interviews with victims and their families.

Watching television ad after television ad – thousands of them over the years – ensures that we absorb the message that acquisitiveness is right, that consumption is good: we become convinced not only to want something we haven’t got, but to want a better, upgraded version. Television is not only addictive, but the consumption it encourages is also addictive.

Children of high esteem watch less television than children of low self-esteem. Countries in the two-thirds world with low self-esteem are also having their lifestyles moulded by first-world television. Mothers believe bottle-fed babies are healthy because Western ads tell them so: but the milk powder is mixed with contaminated water and hundreds of thousands of babies die. TV tells poor Indians smoking is ‘virile’ – so smokers in the poor world are now outnumbering smokers in the rich nations. Anthropologists are writing about the ‘cowboy culture’ developing in PNG.

We have become victims of the technology we have built. Television fractures families: more children are now possessing their own bedroom set. It also fractures time: a generation ago, one experience was savoured in a full hour: now, with a remote control monitor, there may be hundreds. Pictures are never shown for more than ten seconds: this is regarded as the maximum attention-span of the viewer.

Malcolm Muggeridge in his book Christ and the Media, fantasizes about Jesus, having survived three temptations in the wilderness, is offered a fourth: a contract from Lucifer Inc. to go to Rome and anchor his very own TV network variety show. Jesus, ‘concerned with truth and reality’ rather than ‘fantasy and images’ refuses.

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Children were reared on print culture, but now they are reared on a media culture. They are now exposed to images of sex and violence – the secrets of adult life… Before print culture, children probably interacted more with the adult world – and now they are doing it again.

Dr. Ann Knowles, quoted in Louise Bellamy, ‘Inoculate against bad TV’, Melbourne: The Age Green Guide, 21 April, 1988, p.17.

[In the future] we expect people to spend increased amounts of time consuming mass media… Cable television will grow from its current presence in 53% of American households, to about 60% by 2000… Pay- per-view television, enabling viewers to watch recent movies or live special events, will also expand in popularity, increasing its total revenues by as much as seven times over their current volume.

An entirely new approach to broadcasting, high definition television (HDTV) may also be on the market by 2000. Using higher resolution transmission and reception technologies, HDTV will require a total refitting for television… VCRs, now found in about 75% of households, will be in about 80% by 2000… [Another] change that will revolutionalize television is interactive programming. Systems are now being tested which will enable viewers, as they are watching the program, to dictate a TV story’s plot from a group of choices. Others will allow them to participate in game shows as they are being broadcast. These changes will alter our viewing from passive to active involvement, and enable us to exercise greater creativity and control over our entertainment environment.

Churches are [therefore] in a competitive environment. If we hope to include people in the life of the church, we must provide appealing and high quality activities that can successfully compete for people’s time, attention and resources. Church programs should include more entertainment-related activities… Many adults (especially those with children) will depend upon the Church to provide morally acceptable forms of entertainment – something that will be increasingly difficult to find in the 1990s.

There must be a greater attendance and involvement at events and programs, there must be a greater variety in what is offered. The American public has a low tolerance for repetition. Rotating successful programs will be more advantageous than using thsoe programs on a long-term basis. [Our high priority will be] creativity in the development of enw offerings… People are interested in short bursts of activity. Programs that feature teaching, sports, entertainment or other activities that last for hours on end will lose people quickly… Ledt them know you are in touch with their lifestyle, sensitive to their time-needs, and capable of providing relevant and enjoyable leisure experiences.

George Barna, The Frog in the Kettle: what Christians need to know about life in the year 2000, Gospel Light Regal Books, Ventura, California, 1990, pp. 91-94.

The amount of clinical research done on television compared to, say, microwave ovens is miniscule. A TV set produces stronger radiation than a microwave oven, and you don’t stare at a microwave for seven hours a day, do you? TV is the most powerful medium on earth. Every other media criticizes the message… Commercials are the only content that count. A program is only the excuse to watch the commercials.

Stephen Boscutti, quoteA by Jenny Brown, ‘How the World is Mesmerised by TV’, Melbourne: The Age, July 5, 1989, page unknown.

The introduction of increasingly sophisticated information technology has revolutionized [communication]. The net effect is a faster flow of information… beinging sender and receiver close together, or collapsing the information float – the amount of time information spends in the communication channel. It was five days before England heard Lincoln was shot. When President Reagan was shot, England had a re-run of the [event] shortlhy after it occurred… Now with the use of electrons to send money around the world at the speed of light, we have almost completely collapsed the money information float…

We stand at the threshold of a mammoth communication revolution… Scientific and technical information doubles every 5.5 years: the rate will soon jump to perhaps 40 % per year: that means that data will double every twenty months… [And] the generation graduating from high school today is the first generation in American history to graduate less skilled than its parents… [Workers at home offices], alone in their electronic cottages, feel a high-tech isolation.

John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming our Lives, Chapter 1: ‘From an Industrial Society to an Information Society’ New York: Warner, 1982, pp. 11 ff.

George Gerbner and Larry Gross of the University of Pennsylvania had analyzed characteristics of the world of television. For instance, they have observed that compared to the real world, a disproportionate percentage of characters are professionals, athletes, entertainers, and law enforcement people, and that television characters have a greater chance of encountering personal violence than do people in real life.

They found that heavy television viewers have distorted perceptions of the world – in the direction of the television distortions… Heavy viewers see the world as populated by more professional people than it is. They think society is more affluent than it is. They also see the world as more dangerous than it is, and so are more fearful than are light viewers.

Kevin Perrotta, ‘Watching While Life Goes By’, Christianity Today, April 18, 1980, p. 19.

What does television offer [for children] other than peace and quiet for their parents? It provides a totally artificial experience with which children cannot interact except by pressing a button and switching to another equally artificial experience. It presents a world in which value judgment is impossibled since everything and everybody in it are dished up in exactly the same shape and size, adding yet more isolated images to the child’s mental store of unprocessed information. It also teaches instant gratification, which children learn to expect in the real world.

Ian McDougall, review of Guy Lyon Playfair, The Evil Eye: the unacceptable face of television, London: Cape, 1990, in The Tablet, 7 April 1990, p. 452.

Television develops the right side of the brain rather than the left… Thinking people… are left-brained. But TV… appeals mainly to the right hemisphere of the brain, which controls non-analytic thought… So far as Christianity is concerned, the mind is very important, and anything that is ultimately detrimental to the use of our minds must be avoided… If you are watching television hour after hour, day after day, you are sick. And if you are letting your children do that, you are poisoning them. Surely an hour a day should be plenty for anyone, unless there is something special on. Much more than that could be hazardous for your health. Be selective: is the program worth your while because it is something that is excellent and true and beautiful? If it is horrifying, mindless, trashy emptiness, you owe it to yourself to avoid it like the plague.

Joel Nederhood, ‘A Cure for Television’, Back to God Hour Sermon, Reformed Churches of Australia and New Zealand, n.d. pp. 3ff.

[British ITV addresses] not a single audience, but a patchwork of distinctive, sometimes contentious minorities, Christian and non-Christian. Though [the BBC] gets practically no letters complaining of bias and neglect of other faiths, there are accusations of denominational bias from Christians. [Says one spokesman): ‘If we broadcast a Church of England service, I will get letters from Roman Catholics deploring it, and vice-versa – no denomination has a monopoly on sectarianism.’

Robin Buss, ‘Goodbye to the God Slot?, London: The Independent, 28 September 1988, p.15.

[What] has become insidious on Australian television is the disproportionate amount of time television news spends reporting violence, crime, court cases, natural disaster, famine, war and revolution… In most newspapers, at least, [reporting on these matters] is offset by a whole array of other reports about a much wider range of human experience. In a half-hour news bulletin, however, after deducting time for sport, commercials, weather, opening and closing waffle, half of the 12-15 items will, quite often, deal with violence or disaster.

Sam Lipski, ‘TV news: what a good idea’, Sydney: The Bulletin, November 1,1988, p. 110.

This, perhaps, is the greatest sin of TV news: it has conditined people to believe that what we have shown and told them is The News. It isn’t, and everyone writing, reporting, editing, directing, producing and anchoring shows knows it isn’t. We are in the headline business. We are in the tip-of-the-iceberg business… Most of you are content to listen to a half-hour of TV news and then pretend that you are adequately, if not well, informed… We in TV news entertain while we inform. Sometimes we entertain more than we inform. Our advisers tell us you viewers have an attention span of no more than a minute to a minute and a half. That’s why we race from story to story… If we don’t tell you our stories quickly, and necessarily briefly, we might lose you to some more frivolous activity like reading a book…

Don Bresnahan (producer of TV documentaries for KABC, Los Angeles), ‘Is TV News All You Want?’, Newsweek, April 19, 1982, p.23.

In 1967, four out of five American first-year college students nominated ‘developing a meaningful philosophy of life’ as a top goal. In 1987, a record three in four said ‘being very well off financially’ was most important. This is indicative of the revision of Western social values… If the ’80s mark materialism’s victory over morality, perhaps the cause has been there for all those years, blinking away inside 98 out of every 100 homes… I believe much of the blame for this dramatic transformation lies with television, and television does lie… Each commercial break is a door-to-door salesman who refuses to pack his bags and go… The potency of commercials has grown in intensity and sophistication… pulling at every emotion, tugging at the heart-strings to loosen the purse-strings… A recent trend to display children as mini-adults… has created a precocious interest in sex among children who in some cases are barely of school age.

Alan Morison, ‘The Trouble with Television’, Melbourne: The Age, 27 August 1988, p.5

The electronic church is not a church. There is no such thing as individual invisible religion. The electronic church may have all the ingredients of worship in the local congregation: it has proclamation, scripture, fellowship, teaching, announcements. But it does not have the interaction of person to person within a community, not even with ‘reach out and touch my hand on the screen.’

The electronic church moved into a vacuum created by the failure of the local church to reach people outside the church, to provide true fellowship, and to overcome loneliness…

The electronic church brings a wonderful challenge and opportunity to the local congregation. [It] is part of the succession of methods through which God fulfills his mission to the whole world. It is not in competition with other forms of proclamation… It is now possible to reach the billions and fulfill the command to evangelize in our life- time.

Gordon Moyes, ‘Communicating the Word through the Electric Church’, Sydney: The Australian Baptist, September 2, 1981, p.6.

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Some issues for discussion:

1. Effective communication means getting inside the ‘frame of reference’ or ‘field of experience’ of the receivers. Why are mainline churches predominantly getting older and female?

2. ‘The more important the subject is to the consumer, the more likely it is that the consumer’s opinion will be changed by indirection rather than by direction, by impression rather than by preaching… The appearances of Martin Luther King on television [helped change racial prejudices] but Bill Cosby, in his heroic and sympathetic roles [will do more].’ (Kyle Haselden, Morality and the Mass Media, Broadman 1968, from a review in Christianity Today, September 27, 1968, pp. 23-24).

3. TV does seven things better than most churches. It portrays great spectacles, organizes programing brilliantly, communicates through charismatic figures, gets us involved in fast-moving action, exposes us to excellently-produced music, is controversial, and has a hallmark of polished informality. People watch twenty hours a week of this, and then come to church. How can we compete? What can we offer they will never get from the tube?

4. All television is educational: the key question is ‘what is it teaching?’ Something to think about: what is a Christian not doing for 2-4 hours a day (on average) while watching television? How differently would I be thinking if I didn’t watch TV – or watched it less?

5. Some years ago 1000 churches across the U.S. organized a ‘turn off TV week’ in protest at TV violence. What else would you suggest to draw attention to unwholesome TV trends?

6. ‘Televiso, ergo sum – I am televised, therefore I am.’ TV and the media confer a ‘halo effect’ on mass communicators, sometimes giving them an authority beyond their deserving. So?

7. TV has made every modern issue a subject for discussion and debate, including some of the more dramatic religious issues (TV evangelists’ sex scandals, the women’s ordination issue, Greek Orthodox factions fighting over ownership of church building etc.). Most churches don’t readily debate contentious issues, and most preachers don’t welcome questions after their preaching. Comment?

8. Gavin Reid, writing about twenty years ago in The Gagging of God suggested that the three kinds of religious programmes on BBC TV – worship services, hymn-sings, and highbrow discussions – (they are now called Morning Service, Songs of Praise, and the documentary/discussion programmes Everyman or Heart of the Matter) are all boring or irrelevant (or both) for most people. How would you change the style or format of religious programs on TV to make them appealing to non church-goers?

9. Television is ‘slick’ – so do we copy this style for church services – particularly youth services?

10. TV offers us a pluralistic world. We are taken into Buddhist temples, Hindu ashrams, American fundamentalist churches, Amish or animist villages… What does this do to our ideas about the exclusive truth of Christianity?

11. Television concentrates on what moves, not on what is still. How do we compensate in our corporate worship?

12. Aside from the moral failures of some TV evangelists, why did they command such a large audience? ‘1. The TV preachers speak a language [the unchurched] understand…”The times are all messed up. You are a sinner. God will forgive you.” They speak in absolutes. Americans have always been able to understand absolutes, never symbols. 2. They are… exciting. Their church is on a mission, whereas most of the mainline churches are not on a mission… 3. We live in a marketing society… they are marketing their product very personally. They say “write me and I will write you.” The personal touch is a sound way to market any product. 4. We live in a cafeteria society… Many feel their fellowship needs can be met at work… and religion from the tube [without] being involved in the hassles of a local church. 5. They ask for money for a specific purpose… not as the mainline churches do to support a budget or denominational program.’ (Raymond F. Allen, ‘What I Learned from Missing Church Eight Sundays’, Church Administration, Southern Baptist Convention, January 1982, pp. 3 ff.)

13. ‘The mass media gives the public its information and forms its judgments on toothpaste, cars, politics, society, other cultures, the global village – or just about everything in God’s world but God.’

Rowland Croucher