Got the bubbleheaded bleach blond comes on at five
she can tell you ‘bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It’s interesting when people die
give ’em dirty laundry
Don Henley

somaculture

by Clint Lalonde

The image will be replayed over and over and over ad nausea. It will make the top ten list on the major network's year-end newscasts. Some photographer will have been in just the right place at just the right time to catch a still of the moment, but for now that moment belongs to television. And television will keep reminding us of it.

The special custom-made armour covered his body from neck to toe. As the black-clad gunman wandered the street, randomly firing a high powered semi-automatic rifle at Los Angeles police, a city sat transfixed to their televisions, hypnotised by the unreal events unfolding outside their doors. When the LAPD realised that the gunman was covered with body armour, a call to aim for the head was shouted across their 2-way radios. The camera was in the perfect position to catch the shot. The black-clad bank robber firing at will suddenly jerked back, a jet of red exploding from his head. His legs buckled underneath him. His hands dropped the gun, but he was dead before they could reach for the massive wound. He never felt himself hit the ground. A few moments later, the television helicopter landed and began interviewing eyewitnesses. One middle-aged woman looked straight into the camera and deadpanned, "Things like this just don’t happen in America."

In Amusing Ourselves To Death, Neil Postman states that "...The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools of conversation." If that is true, then the tool of conversation in America is television. There are more television sets in American homes than there are homes, and those sets are on for an average of six hours per day, with the average person spending almost a third of their waking time watching. No other country produces more television programming than the United States, and no other country exports as much of their television programming to foreign markets. With up to 3/4 of the world's television audience watching American programming, the tool of American conversation is becoming the tool of the world's conversation, and the topic of conversation is violence.

American television viewers have an insatiable appetite for televised violence, and as they become desensitized to violent images they seek out stronger images. The image providers have discovered a novel way to increase the intensity of the violent images -- move away from entertainment violence and show real violence. In the past few years real "life and death" programming has become more commonplace on television, both as news and entertainment programming. Shows like Cops, Real Life Encounters with Wild Animals, and Real Highway Pursuits have begun to appear on our television screens with an incresing regularity. These programs routinely show acts of real violence, caught on home video. Television news directors have adopted the credo "if it bleeds, it leads" to such an extent that it has almost become cliche. The thrill of watching fake violence is waning and being replaced by the drama of watching real violence. And the higher the body count, the more we watch.

Nothing manufactures violent images on a larger scale than a war and, consequently, American television reaches its zenith of violent images and mass destruction during a war. The more violent the images, the more people watch, and the more people watch, the more profitable a war becomes to a broadcasting company. Witness the ratings bonanza CNN experienced during the Persian Gulf War. On day one of the war, CNN scored not only its largest Nielsen rating at 22.7, but the largest prime time audience in cable history, with 10.8 million households in the U.S. tuning in. Thanks to the Gulf War, Ted Turner and CNN became a global player on the world media stage. The upstart news organisation was suddenly ‘discovered’ by Americans who began to schedule their lives around military press briefings rife with official pictures of smart bombs and dumb drones cleanly, coldly and clinically executing the dirty surgery of war. Americans were glued to the tube, witnessing a docu-war which they could confidently switch off at the end of the day knowing full well that, when they woke the next morning, fresh new pictures would be waiting for them. Once the war ended, CNN compiled and sold video highlight packages of the war, continuing to profit from war long after it had ended. Death and war, it seems, have served CNN well.

American history reads like the memoirs of a battle-hard veteran who has spent 50 years fighting 15 different wars and has seen action in 200 foreign countries. The war effort drives the American economy, with close to 3 million people employed in weapons production. According to the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the U.S. spends 258 Billion dollars a year on its military, more than Russia, Japan, France, the UK, Germany, China, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, South Korea and the Ukraine combined. Today, as more diversified companies take over the American media, a potential time bomb is ticking away south of the 49th - the profiteering from not only the weapons of war, but also the images of war. Imagine a company that not only supplied weapons to the US armed forces, but also had a national television network in its stable of holdings. Imagine the money that company could make if it not only sold the weapons used in a war but could also be the exclusive distributor of the images of that war. Suddenly, that company finds war extremely profitable on two different fronts. If the selling of weapons were not incentive enough for the company to actively promote world conflicts, then certainly the double effect of weapon sales and advertising revenue could be.

This is the position companies like General Electric are in. General Electric is one of the largest producers of military aircraft engines for the United States armed forces. General Electric also owns NBC, one of the four national television networks in the US. And, while GE assures that its media holdings operate autonomously from the parent company, there is evidence which shows the two are far from separate entities, with reports of GE managers attempting to control what is being broadcast on NBC. Former NBC news president Lawrence Grossman was once told by GE chair Jack Welch that NBC reporters should not use the phrase Black Monday on the air because it was a depressing phrase, and that NBC Today show weather forecaster Willard Scott should mention GE lightbulbs on the air. Both those incidents illustrate that GE is far from being `hands off’ when it comes to the operation of its television network, and with American television being driven by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, this scenario is possible and very frightening.

Two contemporary American media critics, Noam Chomsky and Neil Postman, touch upon separate insights that, when juxtaposed, provide a frightening glimpse of where a blind acceptance of violent images could end. In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky speaks of necessary illusions, media distractions designed to divert public attention away from important issues and onto trivial issues such as sports and entertainment. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman uses the example of the classic Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World as a possible example of societal control by the state. In Brave New World, people eagerly use a state-sanctioned hallucinogenic drug called soma as their necessary illusion. It is possible that, by accepting American standards of televised violence, death and war, we are setting ourselves up to accept and even enjoy images of violence to the point where they become our soma, and the most unsettling necessary illusion of all becomes the death of the neighbour next door.

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Works Cited

1. Operation Desert Storm: Outright Disinformation Scheme, David Fingrut
2. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, Penguin Books, 1985, pg. 8
3. Electronic Heroin, Jay Hanson
4. This statistic comes from the United Nations radio program Perspective (no. 96/52). The program was a report on the 1996 UN sponsored World Television Forum.
5. Millions of Viewers Tuned In, But Total Never Will be Known, Mike McDaniel, Houston Chronicle, 10/4/95.
6. Felons On The Air: Does GE’s Ownership of NBC Violate the Law? , Sam Husseini, EXTRA!, 11/12/94

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