COMM 150: TV, print, pictures and 'The War'

Recently we've been reading excerpts from Neil Postman, late media critic at New York University, suggesting television dumbs down the news -- and therefore the quality of public debate in America -- largely because it is a visual medium that doesn't lend itself to sustained, rational discourse. Hence all the stories on things like Britney Spears' and Lindsay Lohan's drug, alcohol and marital problems, the reemergence of O.J. Simpson as a celebrity defendant (on charges that don't sound like they amount to very much) and George Clooney's weekend motorcycle accident.

But that's too easy. It's almost like shooting fish in a barrel.

Postman has a point, and it's important. One of the best discussions I've seen of it is in, of all places, an article in a fanzine dedicated to Pink Floyd songwriter Roger Waters. Written by John Ackermann, it has one of those says-it-all titles, "Now.........This; or (I've got Thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from)." Ackermann says we get our information about the world from TV. But we're ill served by it:

The thing is, TV is not really a medium well suited to exposition. TV was conceived of , and is, a medium for the conveyance of amusement, or entertainment. TV is a series of programmed visual images and an endless string of pictures. Hence the subtitle of this book, "Public Discourse In The Age of Show Business." Unlike a book, or the printed page, one does not have to really concentrate too long or hard to get the meaning of a picture. A picture is not so much worth a thousand words, more than it renders a thousand words superfluous and useless, although a thousand words would convey far more information and meaning than a single picture.

Very true. But what Ackerman is saying here cuts both ways.

Pictures don't have to lie, and TV doesn't have to dumb it down. This week we have as good an example as we're likely to see in years of what a powerful medium TV can be, as the Public Broadcasting System airs Ken Burns' series on World War II.

Rick Atkinson, critic for The Washington Post, says in his review of Burns' series "The War," it is a "compelling, flawed gem of a documentary, which enriches our emotional comprehension of an event second only to the Civil War in its enduring resonance in the national character."

Atkinson's onto somthing there. Pictures show emotion, and a 15-hour series like Burns' can connect the pictures in a sustained narrative that I believe matches the level of discourse you find in the print media. "War and Peace," after all, is a novel ... but it's basically a story, a narrative. (It also made not one but two great movies, a Hollywood version starring Audrey Hepburn and a Soviet version starring, literally, the Red Army.) It's also the longest book I've ever sat down and read all the way through.

In class today, we will watch the Public Broadcasting Service's extended preview of "The War," the 15-hour series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that is airing on PBS stations nationwide this week. It's available on YouTube if you want to see it again at home. We'll read Atkinson's review in The Post before watching it.

Of the reviews I've read of "The War," Atkinson's impressed me for its awareness of its visual impact:

Watch for the images, not for the history. There is little substantive analysis, about the war or its many subplots. The story of Midway, among the signal battles of modern times, is dispatched in 2 minutes 13 seconds; available footage, or the lack thereof, presumably determines this summary treatment. Scholars will find occasional annoyances ...

Moreover, the largest figures of the war remain rather inconsequential, as though no one above the rank of captain had much to do with events. "Generals make plans, plans go wrong and young men die," the narrator, Keith David, informs us gravely. Just so, but plans also go right and young men still die. And it is the making of those plans that gives war its intellectual coherence, that lifts it above simply chaps biffing about.

These are more than quibbles. But "The War" achieves a cumulative power derived from those thousands of images -- many of them unseen by even the most devoted History Channel viewers -- and by those survivors chosen to bear witness.

Like any good reviewer, Atkinson points out the show's good points and its bad points. Read it and decide for yourself, but I think on balance he finds more good points and the good points are visual. Toward the end he says:

Perhaps "The War" is best viewed as one views an art exhibition, focusing on the pictures and not on the captions or the curator's exegesis. The narrative is just scaffolding for the images, many of which linger long after an episode ends: the vivid color footage of flamethrowers on Saipan; the photo of pedestrians strolling past a smoking body next to a burning city bus; the group portrait of butchered soldiers in the dead of winter, their frozen eyes open and lightly dusted with snow, like macabre Jack Frosts.

Here, too, are enduring brush strokes: women climbing on their knees up the steps of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Waterbury, grateful to God for the Japanese surrender; or the Jewish GI who kept his dog tags with the little "H" stamped on them -- for "Hebrew" -- inside his glove so he could quickly toss them away if captured by the Germans; or the Marine on Peleliu using his bayonet to extract gold teeth from a Japanese soldier not yet dead. A woman from Mobile, recalling the sight of caskets lining a train platform in St. Louis, asks, "How could you not cry?" How not, indeed.

If "The War" is occasionally turgid, so is "Beowulf." Such is the risk of epic. ...

As you watch the preview, see if you agree with what Atkinson says in the review, especially about the visuals. See if you think Posttman's comments about TV as a visual medium fit the the handling of pictures and their emotional impact in this show. How is it the same as what you see on the evening news? How is it different? Post a paragraph or two in response as comments to this post.