TV: Goodbye Analog--Hello To What?

Nearly a week has passd since television went digital. I’ve heard no despairing cries from someone who can’t find his favorite channel. There are hints that the digital age may alter the relationship between the four Nets and their cable competition, but it’s too soon to have an idea.
In any case, analog TV, which started out as a blur of snow on black and white screens and showed movies for most of the day is gone accept for a tiny, remote part of the nation. Before we push it aside and move on to internet news and “Hulu”, let’s look back at how it changed us.
The 1951 Kefauver Crime Commission Hearings suddenly made television something more than an outlet for old movies. It was our first shared national viewing experience. About a year later all of my favorite radio shows either went over to Television or ended.
Drag Net, Gunsmoke and Ozzie and Harriet became something to watch, not just listen to. Instead of putting a radio outside and letting the baseball game drone on (“He checks first base and the runner gets back … .”), you had to sit down and look at it. A single Monday Night television show made professional football the nation’s favorite sport.
Television quickly began to impact who we were and what we lived for. Radio’s “Breakfast Club” became TV’s “Today Show”. “American Bandstand” introduced generations of American teens to the next new thing/person/band in music. It altered and created our culture in a way I’m not sure anything in radio ever did.
Then there was Ed Sulllivan. Who was he; what did he do? He ran a Sunday night variety show that gave us, among many others, Elvis Presley and The Beatles. It’s hard to imagine rock music becoming so dominant without Sullivan. Talk about creating culture.
Jack Paar’s neuroses ruled night time television through the 1950s until 1962 when he finally morphed into Johnny Carson—who with a word (or a refusal to Invite) could make or break an entertainer’s career. Will anyone else in Hollywood ever have such power again?
But it was more than just popular culture—in 1960 analog television became the deciding factor in politics. We elected a president PRIMARILY because he looked and sounded better on television. Not even radio or the press had ever had quite that kind of power.
Your make-up, more than your policies, decided how you ran in the polls. Your entire campaign was reduced to 30 second sound bites. And suddenly the cost of buying television spots became the most important factor in the race.
Before television, sitting presidents and senators could hide their defects. No more. We watched LBJ pick up his Beagle by its ears. He showed us his surgery scar. (We would have seen FDR’s wheel chair.) We saw Kennedy shot, then Oswald. Then Bobby. We watched an entire presidency crash and burn on the televised hearings to impeach Nixon.
(When McCarthy destroyed himself taking on the Army in 1954, I listened to the hearings on radio. The impeachment hearings—1974 and 1999—were watched. And the presidency will never be the same.)
Television made our presidents less godlike, more fallible. The kind of trust people had in Franklin Roosevelt, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson will never come again. Televised hearings that showed all their warts and failures helped destroy that forever.
Much of the trust most of us had in our government is lost. Television certainly played a part in that. A certain mystique is necessary to govern well. Television destroys mystique. Only a trained actor like Reagan could master the medium effectively enough to really use it to his advantage.
It did the same thing to war. During World War II the War Department dithered for years over whether to risk showing the American public a single totally non-gory photo of dead GIs floating in the surf at Guadalcanal. Would it be too shocking? Would it hurt civilian morale?
Vietnam came in on the six o’clock news. Body bags, wounded boys, flames and sounds of gunfire. It changed to whole political calculation in trying to keep the civilian population behind a war effort. There is something about seeing it that makes it more real—and terrible.
And Civil Rights. Would there have been an effective Civil Rights movement without television? It was an all seeing eye that made southern sheriffs who might unhesitatingly have killed an uppity Negro like Martin Luther King more cautious.
We watched as Bull Conner turned his dogs and his fire hoses loose on kids, old women and students. A sense of outrage swept the nation. We saw the well-behaved marchers who flooded the Mall in 1963; we watched Martin Luther King talk about the “top of the mountain”.
It is not entirely a coincidence that a year later, Republicans swung into line behind the Civil Rights Act of 1864—uniting with liberal northern Democrats—when their Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, intoned that it finally was “an idea whose time had come”.
There were all the rest of the personalities who affected us during the days when network television ruled the analog airwaves. Newscasters like Huntley-Brinkley, Uncle Walter and John Chancellor. Religious voices like Fulton Sheen, Billy Graham and Robert Schuller. Remember how presidential Ronald Reagan looked and sounded as he hosted, “Death Valley Days”?
Who will ever forget Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” (“While Jim wrestles the alligator, let’s go back to the truck … .”)? Remember when what seemed like all of America watched Luke and Laura? Or when “MASH” and “All in the Family” forever changed the substance of what we watched?
It changed us. Was it, is it, a “vast wasteland”? Did it jade us? Did it better inform us? Are we more cynical because of it? Whatever or whichever—it did change us as a nation.
Analog or digital, it is today a different medium. The networks have lost place to a plethora of cable outlets. Internet news threatens to bury them both. Advertisers are beginning to question the usefulness of television spots (we are armed with “mute” buttons now—and in my house they get used!)
The six o’clock news is no longer “must see”. Less costly reality shows increasingly crowd out dramas and comedies on the network channels. No one has ever replaced Ed Sullivan or Johnny Carson, let alone Dick Clark.
As it goes away, I remember that for a few short analog decades—for entertainment, news and music, the cultural life of all of us--network television was a kind of Camelot. It united us, informed us, changed the way we thought and viewed the world and now it too “changes and passes away lest one good custom should corrupt all the world.”
The switch to digital broadcasting is symbolic of a deeper and greater change.