Back in the 1980s, the great communications scholar George Gerbner once said that he wasn’t sure that you could govern a large industrial nation with television, but he was certain you couldn’t govern one without it. That sounds like a joke, but it wasn’t.
Television long ago became our collective campfire, in terms of news consumption, the place we go to and huddle around when times are bad and scary.
There are millions who watch Fox or MSNBC, but when disaster strikes, they go to CNN, which does seem to be, as their ad intones, the most trusted name in news.
But television today is not the same social phenomenon baby boomers and Gen Xers grew up with. From the 1950 through the 1980s, television defined American culture, and you could be pretty sure that even if you didn’t know the person in the cubicle next to you at work, that she or he knew who shot JR, and watched the last episode of MASH, or wish they had.
Back in the 1950s, everyone knew who Ralph Kramden was, just as everyone in the 190s knew that Fred was married to Ethel on I Love Lucy but to Wilma on the Flintstones.
Anybody of pretty much any social class knew that if someone said Adam and Hoss, the name Little Joe was needed to complete the trio. I don’t think there are any iconic, culturally binding shows like that today. Personally, the only TV series I watch is what I suppose you’d call a sitcom from New Zealand called 800 words, which is about a fellow columnist.
Ever hear of it? I didn’t think so. But what’s more important, and what I think very few people realize, is the extent that our society and culture have been shaped and changed by TV.
Here’s an interesting trivia factoid for you: Any idea what year saw the greatest sale of movie tickets in this country? The answer is 1946. Nearly all the men were back from the war, jobs were plentiful, and most people went to the movies at least once a week.
The next year, television began to come on the market, the baby boom babies started arriving by the millions, and pretty soon many of us preferred to watch those grainy, black and white early TV images from the comfort of our own homes.
The fifties were, indeed, the decade in which TV conquered America. Ten percent of all households had TV in 195o. Ten years later, almost ninety percent did.
Soon, you could make the case that our national leaders, those who told us not what to think but what to think about, were not named Eisenhower and Kennedy but Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, the first great generation of TV news “anchormen.”
For decades after, television, more than anything else, united us as a culture. Starting with the day President Kennedy was assassinated, television was where America went for news, and when Walter Cronkite told us we couldn’t win in Vietnam, the President at the time knew he’d lost the country, and any chance to rally his citizens behind that war.
These days, I worry about whether even television can unite us any longer, in this age when the right and left have their own networks. This thing called American Democracy has been renewed for nearly two hundred and fifty seasons.
I would hate to see a bad actor cause it to be canceled, any time soon.
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