I Am Mister Ed

You never heard of a talking horse?

I used to teach a course at NYU called “Television and the Information Explosion”.

I didn’t invent the name of the course, I just inherited it.

It was a stupid name, and to a great extent it reflected much that was wrong with NYU, but that’s for another blog.

Television did not deliver an ‘information explosion’. It delivered a Soviet Union of information.

We decide, you shut up.

The cost of producing and distributing media in the 1950-2000 era was so expensive (newspapers, radio or television, take your pick), and the commercial incentives to create and hold as large an audience as possible militated toward a kind of mass mediocrity.

We lived in a world of limited shelf space – whether that shelf space was on the television dial or the rack space at Tower Records.  Television could only handle so many channels, and it had to be watched in real time when it was broadcast; record stores and book stores only had so much shelf space.

The content that was delivered was uniform, homogenious, and ironically, shared by everyone all at the same time. These became the threads of our culture.

News was delivered at 7PM by three network ‘anchors’ who had vast audiences in the tens of millions, who all watched the same thing at the same time.  That there were three networks made no difference – the content was all the same.

Many years ago, when I was applying for a job at CBS News, I was interviewed by Lane Vernardos, who was at that moment the Executive Producer of The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.

I had an afternoon appointment with Vernardos and just as our interview was getting started, the phones began to ring.

Hostages from a TWA flight that was being held in Beirut (you remember the photos), had been released and were being flown to Cyprus. As my job interview commenced, the plane bearing the hostages was just touching down at Larnaca.

Suddenly, the lights in the CBS News studio came up, Dan was at the news desk and the music began.  On the three monitors over Lane’s desk, (CBS, NBC and ABC), the slates came on the screen. “Breaking News”, then the sonorous voice of the announcer, “we interrupt our regularly scheduled newscast to bring you this special announcement”. And on to the live footage from Cyprus of a plane landing.

Exciting, it was not.

I was looking for a job, so I kept my mouth shut and stared at the screens with Lane.  Lane had a stopwatch, and he clicked it with relish.

He turned to me, all excited.

“3 seconds!” he announced.

I didn’t understand.  This annoyed him.

“3 seconds. We beat them by 3 seconds”.

Now I got it.  CBS had ‘broken’ the story a full 3 seconds ahead of NBC or ABC.

This was supposed to be a big deal, I guess.  As though some manic personalities were sitting at home crazily flipping between the three channels to see who go there first. Well, there were probably one or two.

But more to the point, the footage shown on all three networks was exactly the same.  Exactly. A pool feed, no doubt.

This was not an ‘information explosion’, this was banality brought to a fine art at a massive cost.  The information delivered – pretty much worthless.

The great constraint here, of course, was cost. The cost of producing the news, the cost of the satellite feeds, the cost of the transmitter on top of the World Trade Center, the cost of Lane’s salary and the vast and bloated staff at CBS.  That and television sets that could only receive 9 channels.  It was a different world.

It was a world of the lowest common denominator.

In a world of only 3 networks, and a very high cost to produce content, there isn’t a lot of competition.

So everyone and everything gravitates toward the center.

Oatmeal land.

Nothing too risky.

Just oatmeal and plenty of it.

And because there were no options, no choices, no alternatives, the numbers (with an emphasis on the numb part), bore out the thesis that ‘we are doing a good job’.

A good job is not hard to do in a world of only 3 networks. Any idiot can deliver 30 million households with just about any piece of banal garbage they deicde to air.

So the networks developed the kind of supreme self-confidence that comes from a monopoly (or duopoly or triopoly).  It was a non competitive world. This allowed them to program such masterpieces as Pettycoat Junction or My Mother the Car, and have the supreme chutzpah to refer to this as ‘The Golden Age of Television’.

Ugh.

Today its MSNBC v. FOX v. CNN.

Oatmeal.

Instead of Mister Ed it’s Deal or No Deal.

Oatmeal.

But now, for the first time, the networks are gonna get a run for their money.

But the competition isn’t going to come from Fox or CBS. It’s going to come from someplace else.

The web. The massive 2 billion member world wide web, all linked up and starting to play with video cameras.

The web killed newspapers because they were boring.

No one wanted to read them.

Today only 36 percent of 18-24 year olds read a newspaper at all, down from 73 percent in 1970. (those were the days).

In the past 6 months alone, The Miami Herald has sen its daily circulation drop 8.8 percent, The LA Times 8 percent; The Boston Globe 6.7 percent.  In 1964 81 pecent of Americans read a daily newspaper. By 2006 only 50 percent did, and the numbers just keep dropping.

This doesn’t mean that people are not interested in news.  They are.

It’s just that the fat, safe, noncompetitive world of a very limited media is over.

Print goes first.

Video comes next.

How did the papers respond to the web?

umm…….

Yeah.

How will television respond to what is about to happen to them?

Likewise, I am sure.

Because they fundamentally cannot get past their ‘Soviet’ mentality.

We dictate. You shut up and watch.

When a television network is ready to really be a network and to open up the process the way that Wikipedia or Facebook open up the process, then you will know which network will survive.

And it has nothing to do with stopwatches.