Print Journalism versus Electronic Journalism

A kind of adversary relationship between print journalism and electronic journalism exists and has existed for many years in the United States. Innumerable newspaper critics seem to insist that broadcast journalism be like their journal­ism and measured by their standards. It cannot be. The two are more complementary than com­petitive, but they are different.

The journalism of sight and sound is the only truly new form of journalism to come along. It is a mass medium, a universal medium [...]. It has serious built-in limitations as well as advantages, compared with print. Broadcast news operates in linear time, newspapers in lateral space. This means that a newspaper or magazine reader can be his own editor in a vital sense. He can glance over it and decide what to read, what to pass by. The TV viewer is a restless prisoner, obliged to sit through what does not interest him to get to what may interest him. While it is being shown, a local bus accident has as much impact, seems as important, as an outbreak of a big war. He can do little about this.

Everyone in America watches television to some degree, including most of those who pretend they don't. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter was right; he said there is no high­brow in any lowbrow, but there is a fair amount of lowbrow in every highbrow. Television is a com­bination mostly of lowbrow and middlebrow, but there is more highbrow offered than highbrows will admit or even seek to know about. They will make plans, go to trouble and expense, when they buy a book or reserve a seat in the theater. They will not study the week's offerings of music or drama or serious documentaries in the radio and TV program pages of their newspaper and then schedule themselves to be present. They want to come home, eat dinner, twist the dial and find something agreeable ready, accommodating to their schedule. [...]

TV programming in America consumes 18 to 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. No other medium of information or entertainment ever tried anything like that. How many good new plays appear in U.S. theaters each year? How many fine new motion pictures? Add it all together and perhaps you could fill 20 evenings out of the 365.

Every new development in mass communica­tions has been opposed by intellectuals of a certain stripe. I am sure that Gutenberg was denounced by the elite of his time - his device would spread dangerous ideas among the God-fearing, obedient masses. The typewriter was denounced by intellectuals of the more elfin variety – its clacking would drive away the muses. The first motion pictures were denounced – they would destroy the legitimate theater. Then the sound motion picture was denounced – it would destroy the true art of the film, which was panto­mime.

To such critics, of course, television is destroy­ing everything.

It is destroying conversation, they tell us. Nonsense. Nonconversing families were always that way. TV has, in fact, stimulated thousands of millions of conversations that otherwise would not have occurred.

It is destroying the habit of reading, they say. This is nonsense. Book sales in the United States during the lifetime of general television have greatly increased and well beyond the increase in population. At the end of a program with Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, we at the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) an­nounced on the air that if viewers wanted one of those little copies of the Constitution such as he had held in his hand, they had only to write to us. We received about 150,000 requests at CBS – mostly, I suspect, from people who didn't know the Constitution was actually down on paper, who thought it was written in the skies or on a bronze tablet somewhere. After my first TV con­versation with Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman and author, his books sold out in nearly every book­store in America - the next day.

TV is debasing the use of the English language, they tell us. Nonsense. Until radio and then TV, tens of millions of people living in sharecropper cabins, in small villages on the plains and in the mountains, in the great city slums, had never heard good English diction in their lives. If anything, this medium has improved the general level of diction.

The print-electronic adversary relationship is a one-way street. Print scrutinizes, analyzes, criti­cizes us on TV every day; we do not return the favor. We have tried now and then, particularly in radio days with "CBS Views the Press," but not enough. On a nationwide network basis, it's almost impossible because we have no real na­tional newspapers – papers read everywhere – to criticize for the benefit of the national audience. Our greatest failure is in not criticizing ourselves, at least through the mechanism of viewers' rebuttals. Here and there, now and then, we have done it. It should have been a regular part of TV from the beginning. The Achilles heel of TV is that people can't talk back to that little box. If they had been able to, over the years, perhaps the gas of resentment could have escaped from the boiler in a normal way.

From “The Case for Television Journalism” by Eric Sevareid, Saturday Review, 1976.