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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 25, 19 June 1950, pp. 4–5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Television’s Peril to Culture, an Editorial
by R.W. Emerson, sec.
American Scholar, Spring 1950
“Television may not be as dangerous to culture as the atomic bomb is to our civilization,” says the editorialist, but he is not optimistic about it. “Each new development in the art of communication seems to have broadened the base of culture on the one hand and to have vulgarized the arts on the other ...”
Such a dim view, he notes, could lead to an aristocratic and anti-democratic view of the relation between culture and the masses, but he puts the finger rather on a different line of thought.
“It is possible that some of the cultural defects of the mass media, revealed in the movies and radio and accentuated in television, can be cured if there is a less immediate relation between commercial and cultural interests. Americans are rather too uncritically proud of the advantages of the ‘free enterprise system,’ including the advantages of competition in radio and television programs. There are indeed some advantages if comparison is made with the programs of the British Broadcasting Corporation, for instance. But on the other hand there is nothing in American radio so consistently mature as the ‘Third-Program’ of the BBC, which is frankly designed for the more thoughtful tenth of the population. There is increasing evidence that a public service corporation of the type of the BBC will have a similar advantage in television, in furnishing adult entertainment for adults and mature discussions for mature minds ...
“In any event, television can no more be left under the control of the special interest of advertisers than atomic energy can finally be left under the control of single nation-states. The anarchy of conflicting national interests threatens the life of our civilization in the one case; and the anarchy of competing commercial interests threatens the integrity of our culture in the other.”
This conclusion would seem to counterpose government-ownership to private enterprise, but by so doing it raises another problem: Can control of an important means of communication and education be left in the hands of a government which cannot be trusted with control of atomic energy? Certainly the case of Russia shows that corporative government ownership is no bargain per se! All of which raises the question of who (what class and what political ideology) controls the state, and it is this vital aspect which conditions the otherwise liberal thought of the editorial.
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