The Age of Television by Martin Esslin

Author:Martin Esslin [Esslin, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781351486224
Google: aD4rDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T04:33:32+00:00

American hostages shown being paraded by their militant Iranian captors in Tehran, November 4, 1979. Photo: UPI.

There can be no doubt that those who are unscrupulous enough to resort to violence as a means of getting publicity exploit this state of affairs. The tactics of street demonstrators and protesters are dominated by such considerations: route a Nazi or Ku Klux Klan procession through a predominantly Jewish or black neighborhood and you are certain to arouse well-founded expectations of violence that bring out television cameras in force. A phone call to a television news editor promising fisticuffs and fireworks may well secure air time worth many thousands of dollars in free publicity.

Here, then, the nature of television as an entertainment medium, a purveyor of daydreams that transmutes reality into a kind of fictional drama, actually dictates the development of events in the real world. To a certain extent analogous considerations have always played a part: kings and knights of old may have set out on spectacular exploits in the hope of becoming immortalized in an epic poem or a ballad. But in our world today the deliberate creation of sensational events has become a major factor in the shaping of developments in the real world, a factor not to be ignored, although very difficult to deal with.

It has been argued that television and other news media should simply ignore the actions of terrorists and not report them at all. This is the practice in the totalitarian countries of the Soviet bloc, where anything that might publicize such tactics is severely restricted if not entirely suppressed and where even plane crashes are not reported, though for different reasons (such information would diminish the official picture of state efficiency and technological superiority). But in the West, coverage of events that have actually taken place cannot be suppressed. Somebody will inevitably report them. In a field like TV where there is competition for the best, the most exciting, and the most entertaining, it would clearly be unthinkable to ignore such dramatic events or to relegate them to a low place on the totem pole.

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