In The Kingdom of Television

By LANCE MORROW

The gods of the Greeks walked in and out of the lives of ordinary people. The gods would materialize out of thin air. Sometimes they quarreled -- often petty, brainless quarrels -- but the earth shook.

Television now and then manages that sort of effect, metaphysical and banal at the same time. It can make demigods of the weightless, and bring the hallucination of their fighting into the bright box in the corner of the room. / Warriors come luminously out of the night air and perform pageants in the brain.

So there before the mortal audience was the collision of George Bush and Dan Rather. The two hurled angry clumps of words, and their clumps broke and powdered against each other's gleaming indignation. Not a molecule of coherent information emerged from the encounter -- except the encounter itself. The medium is the message, in Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum. Bush afterward compared the exchange to combat, but if so, it was the combat of Saturday morning cartoons: Bang! -- Poof! Boom! -- Poof! Language disintegrated on impact. When Bush slugged Rather with the line about Rather's once walking off the set of the CBS Evening News, the anchorman looked for an instant like Wile E. Coyote when, gimlet-eyed, he understands he is about to plummet into the abyss.

In the kingdom of television, there are a thousand different styles, rituals, protocols. Every Sunday, for example, ABC-TV's David Brinkley welcomes a guest with not one, not two but three ceremonial expressions of welcome, a bouquet of courtesy that is positively Japanese: "Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here . . . Delighted you could come . . . a pleasure to have you . . ." One expects it, waits for it. ABC-TV's White House correspondent Sam Donaldson forever shouts at the President above the noise of the waiting helicopter, and the President forever turns and cups his hand quizzically. The ceremony almost never yields any news, only the ritual impression that l) Donaldson is a loud, obnoxious reporter; and 2) the President is a nice guy with a crinkling smile who would be happy to oblige even the cretins of the press, if it weren't for that darned helicopter. The tableau is as inevitable as Hamlet contemplating Yorick's skull in the final act.

Other conventions: an anchorman is expected to sit behind a desk and to hold in his hands a stack of papers, even though he is actually reading from a TelePrompTer beside the camera. NBC's Willard Scott does not dispense the weather until he has showed snapshots of 100-year-old people and wished them a happy birthday. If Scott omits the birthdays, the net of expectation thrums a little oddly.

Television is not necessarily the enemy of rational thought. Sometimes the medium serves brilliantly, not only to display events but also to analyze them. Ted Koppel's Nightline on ABC is intelligent and penetrating. The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour on public television has a clear, steady eye and the time to explore issues thoroughly, without the headlong rush against the clock that was, in part, Dan Rather's problem with George Bush. With Firing Line, William F. Buckley Jr. has done a pioneer's work in civilizing discussion on television. But the temptations of television -- spectacle, flash, the short attention span, the sensationalism of the irrational -- are hard to resist. At its worst, television journalism is a form of cartooning, and lately the cartoon style has become more popular.

The dark side of William Buckley may be Morton Downey Jr., a sneering mud wrestler who runs a nightly talk show out of New Jersey. That, of course, is not journalism. But otherwise respectable reporters and commentators come close sometimes to the circus form of opinion slinging. Consider the McLaughlin Group, presided over by the amiably thunder-browed ex-Jesuit John McLaughlin, who once worked as a speechwriter in Richard Nixon's White House. The McLaughlin Group is great fun, but brawly -- alive with spitballs, hoots of derision, melodramatic postures, overshouts.

Obviously, the printed page, the linear medium, divorces information from time: one can go back and reread and think more and read again, because the words are frozen upon the page and therefore have a sort of timeless status. TV rushes headlong through real time, and given the constrictions of schedule, it is often a second-rate instrument with which to pursue the truth. The written word can commit the profoundest treacheries with the truth, but the hope of writing is at least to preserve the active integrity of the brain that is receiving the words. Television, flowing into an inherently passive mind, sometimes has darker ambitions.

In part, the drama of the Bush-Rather match (otherwise the merest blip in the history of a presidential campaign) derived from Rather's departure from the ritual expectations: the network news star addressing the Vice President of the U.S. is expected to be earnest and anchormanly but not nerved up for a duel, an affair of honor. People do not expect the anchorman to behave like a samurai.

The encounter last week dramatized a disconcerting truth: not only has television become the controlling factor in the selection of an American President, it also has a life of its own. Television is not a counterreality, exactly, but it is no true mirror either, or mere observer. Sometimes television seems a form of insanity.

The eye of television has presided in an eerily total way over the presidential campaign. Although the televised debates have been often numbing, they have allowed voters to get to know the candidates, some of whom were utterly obscure before. Unblinking news channels like CNN and C-SPAN have relentlessly tracked the field.

Somehow, with all the electronic attention, the presidential race has been odd, difficult to grasp, even obscurely depressing. Bush and Rather last week enacted a dispiriting shadow play that made one nostalgic for some other time when, one imagines, presidential candidates had more size, and the waters of intelligence ran clearer, and words had meaning.