The Great Imponderable

"We are," says NBC News Vice President Reuven Frank, "the most nervous and guilty industry in the country."

If Frank sounds slightly beleaguered, it is only understandable. All winter long, he and other TV newsmen have been warding off a chilly gale of complaints from Senators, Congressmen, city officials, policemen and viewers in general. The most frequent charge leveled by the critics is that television, with its vast reach and visual impact, is in a sense the germ carrier that spreads the plague of riots across the U.S. The question, in short, is whether the sight of a Harlem youth hurling a brick through a store window and shouting "Black Power!" induces a ghetto teen ager in Detroit to do the same.

TV newsmen say no, yet their generally restrained coverage of the "disturbances" following the King assassination, compared with the full-blast coverage of last summer's riots, proves that television need not err on the side of sensationalism. Though the President's riot commission report tends to discount TV's role as an inciter it guardedly adds that "the question is far-reaching and a sure answer is beyond the range of presently available scientific techniques."

McLuhcmalysis. That qualifier suggests what is really the great imponderable of all TV news: picture power. It bears not only on the question of riots but on every news event in which TV with live coverage (in color), turns reaction into action. To what extent have strikers, angrily airing their grievances on TV, caused other union men to hit the picket lines? Have scenes of racist mobs screaming insults at Negroes in spired white viewers to march for civil rights? What would Stokely Carmichael's influence be without his exposure on TV?* And how many suburbanites, after seeing a white housewife firing her new rifle at a target in her basement, bought guns to protect themselves against rioters?

No amount of McLuhanalysis can give the complete answer, but there is a growing appreciation, as well as apprehension, of TV's power. Last week, in an address at Tulane's law school' U.S. Solicitor General Erwin Griswold said: "There may be real room to question whether we have psychologically caught up with the developments in communications speed and distribution, whether we are capable of absorbing and evaluating all of the materials which are now communicated daily to hundreds of millions of people."

Party Line. For TV newsmen, the problem is to satisfy viewers who have come to expect the news to match the action of other programs. Too many "talking heads," regardless of their message, can be deadly, and thus, as one newsman admits, "we're still basically in show business." That fact has led some newsmen to overstep their charter. Recently, Los Angeles' KNBC sent a film team to Claremont Men's College to shoot a debate on Viet Nam, and caused a ruckus when the students' spotted the newsmen unpacking half a dozen posters with pro and con war slogans. Later, a spokesman for KNBC admitted that the posters were intended as "colorful additions to the set." On other occasions, a TV cameraman induced protesters to burn a city bus, while another persuaded two hippies to attempt to block President Johnson's entrance into a Washington club.

The TV camera, in fact, is omnipresent. Plugged into the nation's living rooms, it has created a kind of instant party line. For politicians, exposure on TV is crucial. And the smell of the crowd has led to the roar of the grease paint. Candidates have learned that the important thing is not so much what they say but that they say something that will get them on the evening news. "Our leaders," says Columbia University President Grayson Kirk, "are expected to appear almost on call before the television cameras, to hold innumerable press conferences, and to share their thoughts, even if they may be fragmentary and half-formed, with everyone in the country. No leader can long survive such ordeals and emerge from them unscathed."

Heeded Lesson. Not even Lyndon Johnson. Last month, the day after he announced that he was not going to run for reelection, he suggested in a speech before the National Association of Broadcasters that TV had played a role in that decision: "I understand far better than some of my severe and intolerant critics will admit, my own shortcomings as a communicator." Then, hinting that the gore on the home screen was a major cause of the public opposition to his Viet Nam policy, he said that TV seemed "better suited to convey the actions of conflict than to dramatizing the words that the leaders use in trying to end the conflict."

The networks, of course, disagree. ABC, for one, had an excellent weekly series called ABC Scope, which dealt largely with nonmilitary aspects of the war. Trouble was, Viet Nam battle scenes were on TV every night, while in many cities local stations aired Scope in the off hours of Sunday morning or not at all. The affiliates were not wholly to blame. Even when the show was run in prime time, so few people watched that it was eventually dumped. Such lessons have not gone unheeded. Says one Miami newsman: "We are going to use the best pictures--which means those with the most action."

Myopic Eye. The danger of such a credo, of course, is that the camera gives a distorted view that no amount of voice narration can dispel. A few hours after the King assassination, one Manhattan station showed a film jump ing with sirens, flashing lights and wrestling figures, which made it seem as if Times Square was a battleground. Lost in the scuffle was the announcer's voice-over saying that the damage consisted of two broken windows.

To guard against such abuses, the networks sent out memos after last summer's riots ordering reporters to "tell it like it is." As for the charge of overexposure of the black militants, CBS News President Richard Salant says: "Our test is not whether we approve of the event or agree with the individual, but whether it is legitimate news." But one man's "legitimate news" may be another's sensationalism--and vice versa.

Mindful that the camera is often myopic, newscasters have been adding commentary to frame the picture in proper perspective. But the crush of hme leaves little time for reflection. "As journalists," says CBS's Eric Sevareid, "we are not keeping pace with realities; we report them but we do not truly understand them, so we do not really explain. Our problem is to find the techniques that will balance the spot news and the spot picture and put them in proportion." Until then, viewers must make their own judgments based on the realization that the news in pictures is not the whole picture.

* Very little, according to National Urban League Director Whitney Young, who said that Carmichael's following amounts to "about ) Negroes and about 5,000 white newsmen "

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