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By Root 1423 0

which controls the statesmen,” and in that he is right.28 But to think that because states have lost control of television, the “people” have acquired it is a dangerous illusion. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi came to power through control of a media monopoly through which he could sell “dreams and miracles” and pretend to be a populist.29 But the lines were clear: the people did not control Berlusconi, Berlusconi controlled the people; and Berlusconi did not control television, television controlled Berlusconi. Indeed, it finally brought him down as disinterestedly as it had raised him up. In America, it is often television that makes policy. A single picture of the abused body of an American soldier in Somalia provoked American withdrawal there, and the Pentagon is loath to take casualties nowadays not only because of the ongoing trauma of Vietnam but because of fear of the media. There is no abstract doctrine, not containment, not democracy, not anticommunism, not even imperialism, that can hold out against a video snapshot of a dying American boy.

Some might argue this is a good thing for peace or at least for ordinary people since it is their perspective that television purveys. Television, however, purveys no images but its own. If, as Gore Vidal wrote in his brilliant odyssey through film, “he who screens the history makes the history,” it is not those whose history is up on the screen but those screening it who will be in the drivers’ seat.30 The medium has its own program driven by Hollyworld’s videology and McWorld’s corporate balance sheets and it displays American corpses neither in order to influence history nor to condition American foreign policy but to sell advertising and keep viewers glued to their sofas. “TV’s basic purpose,” writes media critic Mark Crispin Miller, “is to keep you watching,” and so the medium moves to “box in” viewers, in and out of the home, displacing their reality with its own.31 Television spreads a modest flood tide on a flat plain: its waters are everywhere, and though it makes a shallow-bedded sea, and though there are traditional landmarks—newspaper trees and book steeples and many a beckoning print rooftop—millions lose their way and slip under the shimmering images without anyone quite noticing, least of all they themselves. Children have been known to drown in just a few inches of water: television’s shallows are more perilous still.

States once did recognize the significance of television as an instrument of propaganda, socialization, and civic education. (The Berlusconis and Murdochs and Turners of McWorld still do.) In the early days, legislators spoke about the “public airwaves” and essayed to regulate “public broadcasting.” Television was a state monopoly not only in Communist countries, but in many Western democracies as well, where its potential influence, educational or corrupting, was deemed too important to leave to the private sector—which has displayed little other than a monomaniacal concern for profits and an abysmally bad taste that it passes off as responsiveness to popular will. In the United States, a Federal Communications Act was passed in 1934 establishing the Federal Communications Commission and developing doctrines of fairness, access, and social responsibility (mandatory news programming, for example). The legislation called for the F.C.C. to “study new uses for radio, provide for experimental uses of frequencies, and generally encourage the larger and more effective uses of radio in the public interest.”

Today there are few signs that anyone, least of all the federal government, is looking to encourage the larger and more effective civic uses of cable, satellites, fiber optics, computers, and data banks in the public interest. The supposed explosion of media outlets via cable and fiber optics has created an incentive for government to excuse itself from the messy business of regulation. Although Vice President Gore has tried to focus civic attention on the new technologies, new media monopolies (described below) are coming into existence without so