Broadcast Historian Turned Off Retired Columbia Professor Sees TV Going Down The Tube
Erik Barnouw spent his life chronicling the media: He taught Pulitzer Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck how to write radio scripts, got Dwight D. Eisenhower’s backing for a controversial project on syphilis and saw blacklisting ruin many careers.
Now the 88-year-old retired Columbia University professor, the nation’s foremost TV and radio historian, discusses the most important issues confronting TV broadcasters, and much of what he sees he doesn’t like:
The state of today’s broadcast television industry is “appalling.”
The V-chip is “dubious.”
Violence on TV is a public disservice.
Although a fan of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Barnouw says commercial television has failed to give viewers provocative, cutting edge entertainment and news programs.
In the beginning, everything was tried - from opera and museum programs to boxing and wrestling matches. But ratings came in the mid-1950s, “one of the worst things that happened,” Barnouw says. They standardized programming and killed the spirit of adventure, he says.
Around the same time, TV’s switch from live programs to mostly recorded shows had a profound impact, Barnouw says. Action and violence could be portrayed in ways unsuited to live TV.
“So almost immediately it became a cliche - if it was a matter of tracking down some villain … it always ended with him making a break for it and you had a chase up and down an unfinished building or in a warehouse with boxes falling on people,” Barnouw recalls.
“The implication of that is social problems are solved by catching and killing people. … That creates such an infantile, unenlightened mind set toward the problem of violence,” he says.
A recent National Cable Television Association study made the same point about TV shows today.
Although Barnouw believes that TV violence can lead to aggressive children, he’s not sure the V-chip hailed by President Clinton and other politicians is the answer.
“The idea of abdicating your responsibility to a mechanical entity seems a little dubious,” he says.
Barnouw likes the idea of the government requiring TV stations to air at least three hours of educational shows a week for children - something the industry opposes.