Media Marvels Haven’t Made Us Better

Several years ago I began to quietly protest in the bosom of my family the crushing embrace of the “media.” A vote was taken, and I was denounced as a crank, biting the hand that has fed me all these years. But consider the facts:

A daily stack of newspapers and magazines, television sets and radios springing to life at dawn to inform, entertain and bedevil us till midnight or beyond, books piling up on floors, window seats and windowsills, video games, rented movies, computers and other electronic marvels to fill any empty spaces in the day. In the automobile, there is no escape; the radio or cassette player is close at hand. A Walkman attends communions with nature.

These influences have been quantified by the Census Bureau and Veronis, Suhler, the great New York communications investment house. The results are pretty horrifying unless you happen to be in the media business, which has become one of the 12 largest industries in the United States.

The ordinary American spends 3,400 hours a year consuming the output of the “media” - reading materials, the babble and entertainment of broadcasting, films, recorded music, electronic games and the bottomless collectibles of the Internet. That is nearly 40 percent of the hours in a year, 40 percent of the hours in our lives. It is more time than we spend sleeping (2,900 hours) and far more than we spend working (about 2,000 hours, assuming a 40-hour week and two weeks’ vacation). So what’s left? Barely time enough for bodily functions and paying the bills.

Our immersion in the media might lead a Martian to conclude that we are a studious society, enriching our minds and perfecting our behavior with the wisdom of the ages and the possibilities of the future. But that is not obviously the case. Most of our media hours - 80 percent - are invested in television and radio. Our reading averages about an hour a day - half of it for the newspaper, the rest for books and magazines that are not uniformly heavyweight stuff. We average two minutes a day on the Internet and related services.

Veronis, Suhler (and the Census people) confidently predict that by 2000 we will be spending each year an additional 119 hours of our precious time with the media - the equivalent of three work weeks. We’ll be reading a little less, watching a little more television, and spending more hours with home video games and the Internet.

One reason for this growth is that the media “product” is basically cheap, leaving aside the initial cost of the TV set, the radio, the VCR and so on. Once you’ve got this stuff, you can get everything on the networks and local stations free. The same with radio. Cable costs $133 this year for the average consumer, who will also spend $175 for newspapers, books and magazines, $83 for home videos and $25 going to the movies. For the whole package, including the Internet, our annual media outlays average a little over $500.

Consumers obviously consider the time and money well spent, since they invest more of each every year. The media make out very well, too. Operating margins in the industry are high-ranging from 5.4 percent for the infant “interactive digital media” (the Internet etc.) to more than 16 percent for broadcasters. Several of the big newspaper companies do even better: Gannett’s margins are consistently above 20 percent; margins at the Buffalo Evening News, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Co., have averaged over 30 percent during the past five years. The Washington Post has done well; its margins from 1991 through 1995 ranged from 13.9 to 18.7 percent.

Even more palmy days lie ahead for the industry, according to Veronis, Suhler. The banking house expects the growth rate of newspaper revenues to double in the period from 1995 to 2000. Other media will do almost as well.

But as a society, what have we gotten that we can be proud of from the fact that we are exposed to the media for 40 percent of the hours of our lives? Are we more civilized, kind, unified, generous, moral, tolerant, polite, responsible and wise than previous generations? It doesn’t seem so. We have the highest murder and violent crime rates among industrialized nations. Our divorce and illegitimacy rates, our levels of drug dependence, of sexually transmitted diseases, income disparities and the educational deficiencies of our children - and ourselves - are scandalous.

We are as divided racially, in many ways, as we were before “integration,” despite the editorial ministrations of the press, which are frequently offset by the divisive effects of our news coverage. The level of popular civic involvement, political awareness and participation in the processes of democracy constitutes another disgrace, exemplified this year by the lowest voter turnout in 72 years.

Our freedoms to publish and broadcast expand with our profits every decade, and with our insistence that untethered media are essential to a free and healthy society. That is one of those inarguable platitudes that would be greatly strengthened if evidence of our beneficial influence was as readily at hand as the evidence of our popularity and financial success.

In the bosom of my family I’m being told to clam up. It’s time for Letterman or Leno or Ollie North if we’re lucky. xxxx