Television and democracy.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne

When I was a student at the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, that notorious free-market ideologue, was fond of insisting that capitalism was "a wonderful idea that had never been tried." He meant, of course, Government interventions and tamperings of one kind or another had, from the start, prevented the "invisible hand" of free-market competition, the utopian magic he so devoutly believed in.

My skepticism about his theories--and the right-wing policies they have always justified--have only deepened with age. But over my years of watching and analyzing the media, I have come to empathize with his frustration at seeing what he considered a miraculous mechanism for furthering the public welfare exploited and derailed from its potentially progressive path by a bunch of self-serving, shortsighted opportunists and hacks.

That's how I feel about television--a miraculous invention whose potential for furthering and enriching the democratic process has not only never been tapped but has, from its institutionalization in the 1950s, been systematically perverted and short-circuited to fit the callous needs of commerce and established power.

While pundits on the Left and Right continue to cross swords over the whys and wherefores of the sorry state of mass media and popular culture, there is rarely any disagreement about a common premise: that television is the enemy of civilization--whether because it is controlled by capital (according to the Left) or an agent of the culturally debasing forces of "mass society," hellbent on destroying the "true" culture of the old aristocracies (according to the Right).

I am increasingly puzzled about the political thrust of these attacks. Most people, educated and illiterate, young and old, wealthy and impoverished, are fully aware of the bad news about the media. Most even know what the problem is: corporate profiteering and, in one way or another, government control of speech.

They are not stupid; they are cynical. They are not passive and unconcerned; they are in despair about what to do about the problem. They don't want or need more horror stories of media stupidity, greed, and prostitution to the powerful.

They need-are in fact screaming forchange. They want someone to convince them that it is possible to make the media serve the public good and to give them a few ideas and examples of how it might be done.

Which brings me back to Milton Friedman and his mourning for a good idea never tried. It has often occurred to me over the years that among the naysayers and doom-mongers of the Right and Left, there is nary a voice to be heard asking the constructive question: How might this amazing technology--capable of bringing continuous information, discourse, culture, and public ritual to the entire world, in myriad forms and for many purposes, for the first time in human history--be mobilized to serve democratic ends?

I am moved to raise this idealistic, to many perhaps naive and addle-brained question now because it is what people all over the country are suddenly, angrily, demanding to know. Among other welcome public rumblings, audiences have begun to talk back in irate voices to the guys on the little screen, yelling, in unanimous roars, "Get real or shut up!"

The responses have been confusing and contradictory. Most immediately and obviously, last year's Presidential campaign shifted from traditional "serious" media venues to more popular, less respectable ones:

[paragraph] We got Ross Perot's big-bucks infomercials and egomaniacally manipulative "town meetings"--out of Frank Capra by way of George Orwell. (Ominous.)

[paragraph] We got Bill Clinton debating his parental-consent policies with teenagers on MTV and running the sensation-craving Phil Donahue off his own show, with the help of a rebellious audience bored with salacious tales of sexual fiddling while the country burned. (Encouraging.)

[paragraph] And we got Jesse Jackson and Catherine Crier hosting talk shows on CNN in which all-black and all-female panels debated the big issues from gender-and race-oriented perspectives. (I don't quibble with affirmative action.)

While all this went on, the Nielsen people (not to mention a bewildered George Bush and the cast of Saturday Night Live) paid tribute to another strange phenomenon: the growing, almost cult-like popularity of The McLaughlin Group, a Sunday morning "unrehearsed," thirty-minute free-for-all on current events, featuring a gaggle of journalists freed up to flaunt their true political biases and identities. Which...