The usual Martin Mayer goodness.

It’s from 1972 and, as you’d expect, has aged rather more than his book on schools, given the changes in technology and the regulatory environment since then. Even so he does a good job of explaining something of the nature of the TV system in the US, and of commenting on those who keep bemoaning the various supposedly corrosive influences of TV on modern life. I think the only real item he didn’t catch, and note as a genuine pending problem, is the line from using TV for political ads to campaigns becoming more expensive to lobbyists and wealthy individuals plus corporations having more control over politics.

To give you a flavor of his writing, and why I find myself usually agreeing with him, let’s quote a half page or so:

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Moreover, the audiences drawn by both news and documentaries tend to be slightly below average in both education and income, a fact that always shocks people who have not thought much about television.
It is hard to see how matters could be otherwise. Leland Johnson of the RAND Corporation, who did studies for the Ford and Markle Foundations on the prospects for cable television, was apologetic about his failure to watch the medium at all. “My problem is,” he said, “that television is a very low-rate data transmission system, and I just don’t have time for that.” Despite much assertion to the contrary, television for most reasonably well-educated people is an extremely inefficient way to learn about anything. People really do learn at their own rate, and television is the most hopeless of lockstep classrooms, insisting that everyone in the audience work on the same time scale. As Wilbur Schramm and his associates put it in their book Television in the Lives of Our Children, “Watching television, the viewer cannot set his own pace. . . . This quality, of course, makes for good storytelling, good fantasy, because in those forms the storyteller should be in charge, and the viewer should surrender himself. But it makes learning harder. That is why the child, after he learns to read well . . . tends to seek information more often from print. With print be is in greater control.”
None of this is to deny that documentaries have been artistically among the most satisfying and socially among the most important contributions of television, or to accept the idea that the poor ratings and minimal audience quality of documentaries give networks an excuse not to make and air them. But it does suggest that among those who insist Middle America is very stupid there are some who may not be so bright themselves.

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A nice summary, much more eloquent than I’m capable of, of my general contempt for TV, radio and film documentaries.

The only thing I’d add is the dishonesty common to such documentaries, ranging from not bothering to learn the full truth of a subject, through careful omission of certain items through the fake even-handedness of giving two speakers equal air-time without pointing out that one represents the views of 100% of all scientists while the other is a whore paid to say whatever some corporation tells him to, all the way to deliberately doctoring video or audio footage. (He does give some examples of this sort of doctoring of the evidence in the context of political documentaries later in the book.) ( )