Erik Barnouw spent his life chronicling the media: He taught Pulitzer Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck how to write radio scripts, got Dwight D. Eisenhower's backing for a controversial project on syphilis and saw blacklisting ruin many a career.
Now the 88-year-old retired Columbia University professor, the nation's foremost TV and radio historian, discusses the most important issues confronting TV broadcasters, and much of what he sees he doesn't like:- The state of today's broadcast television industry is "appalling."
- The v-chip is "dubious."
- Violence on TV is a public disservice.
- He "looks with suspicion" upon TV and radio deregulation brought about by a new telecommunications law.
They'll be hot topics at the National Association of Broadcasters convention, which meets this week in Las Vegas.
Barnouw began teaching at Columbia in 1937 and went on to write books about media, film and documentaries as well as an award-winning trilogy, "A History of Broadcasting in the United States" (1966-70), that is still considered the definitive history of broadcasting. He was a Guggenheim and a Fulbright fellow and chief of the Library of Congress' film, television and recordings archive.
During an interview he looks every bit the natty professor, tall and thin in a dark blue suit and argyle sweater.
Although a fan of CBS's "60 Minutes," Barnouw says commercial broadcast television has failed to give viewers provocative, cutting edge entertainment and news programs.
In the beginning, everything was tried - from opera and museum programs to boxing and wrestling matches. But ratings came in the mid-1950s, "one of the worst things that happened," Barnouw says. They standardized programming and killed the spirit of adventure, he says.
Around the same time, TV's switch from live programs to mostly recorded shows had a profound impact, Barnouw says. Action and violence could be portrayed in ways unsuited to live TV.
"So almost immediately it became a cliche - if it was a matter of tracking down some villain . . . it always ended with him making a break for it and you had a chase up and down an unfinished building or in a warehouse with boxes falling on people," Barnouw recalls.
"The implication of that is social problems are solved by catching and killing people. . . . That creates such an infantile, unenlightened mind-set toward the problem of violence," he says.
A recent National Cable Television Association study made the same point about TV shows today.
Although Barnouw believes - as many medical and psychological experts have said for years - that TV violence can lead to aggressive children, he's not sure the v-chip hailed by President Clinton and other politicians is the answer.
A new law requires all new TV sets to contain the chip, which recognizes shows electronically rated for sex and violence. Parents could then block shows from TV sets. For the v-chip to work, the TV industry must rate programs, which it pledges to do by year's end.
"The idea of abdicating your responsibility to a mechanical entity seems a little dubious," Barnouw says.
Barnouw likes the idea of the government requiring TV stations to air at least three hours of educational shows a week for children - something the industry opposes.
TV stations are given a license to serve the public interest, convenience and necessity. "I think the idea of the public interest is shrinking all the time," Barnouw says.
Of broadcasters' conversion to digital technology - expected to be the biggest consumer development since color's advent in 1953 - Barnouw says Congress' decision on how to allocate digital channels should ensure that the public continues to own them and that licensed broadcasters simply lease them.
"Ever since the 1920s broadcasters have been pressing for the channels to be made permanent like private property. Even (Herbert) Hoover, an arch conservative, was against that, and said that was a terrible idea."
As more people turn to computer communications for news and entertainment, TV stations will have to find a place in this new world, Barnouw says.
"Every new medium that has come along has changed the pattern of getting news and made it more complicated, and that's going to continue to happen. But the old forms don't necessarily go out of business, they adapt themselves to new patterns," Barnouw says.
In the 1920s when radio came along, many predicted the phonograph record was doomed. That didn't happen. In fact, some phonograph companies ended up getting into the radio business.
Also with each new medium come wondrous claims about what it can do for education and democracy - as is the case today with the Internet. Sometimes those claims are premature.
A newspaper called the invention of motion pictures a "moving staircase to learning," he recalls. But just a few years later, the same paper advocated censoring nickelodeons because children were flocking to them.