I love watching old clips of news and talk shows from the early days of television. They lay out the evidence of just how much we've changed as a nation in high contrast. In my opinon, the most consistently entertaining of the early TV pioneers is the eponymous star of The Mike Wallace Interviews. He interviewed people like Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvador Dali (amazing clip – see note below), Aldous Huxley, Erich Fromm, and Ayn Rand. Today we have 60 Minutes episodes about Tom Brady. If the fact that they don't talk to anyone interesting anymore isn't sad enough, the change in the level of discourse is flat-out depressing. Watch this clip of Wallace's Rand interview.
(Side note: Straight from the horse's mouth, Rand's philosophy sounds every bit as dumb as it sounds coming from her followers. Amazing. You'd think it would sound slightly less retarded.)
Note the depth of the discussion they're having. Neither is dumbing it down because they think that home viewers are too stupid to follow it. And Wallace's shows were popular. People watched this.
This recalls an anecdote I like to use when talking about the public capacity to follow politics. We've all heard about the great Lincoln-Douglas debates, right? During the 1858 Illinois Senate race (not, as is commonly assumed, the 1860 Presidential race) the two men staged debates around the state of Illinois. The format was three hours long – 90 minutes per candidate, plus opening remarks from other speakers. They attracted crowds in excess of 20,000. Now think about that for a minute. People travelled long distances to sit outside in August heat listening to candidates engage in a debate that lasted well over three hours. Today the debates compile 90 second sound bites, and even that is unable to capture the attention of many Americans.
Why did people turn out in droves for the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Why did Mike Wallace's slow, methodical interviews with people like Erich Fromm attract big audiences? Education can't be the answer. Many of the people at the Lincoln-Douglas debates were barely literate if at all. High school graduation rates and college attendance are higher today than ever. We're smarter, on paper, than all of our American forefathers. No, they weren't smarter than us. They paid attention because they were forced to.
When there were three TV networks, people who wanted to relax in front of the tube after work had to watch what was on. If that was the evening news or a news talk show, then that's what you watched. In 1858, people were starved for both information and entertainment, hence the allure of a big spectacle like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Let's not fool ourselves – if Mike Wallace's or Stephen Douglas's audiences had the opportunity to watch Survivor or the Food Network, many of them would have done so. But they didn't. So they watched something that was good for them, and people like Wallace didn't need to sex up their formats to compete for viewers with entertainment programming.
This is, in my opinion, the single greatest example of market failure in American history. The 'democratization' of the airwaves and the proliferation of media outlets have made it so that no one needs to watch Mike Wallace talk to Frank Lloyd Wright anymore. Even though we are much smarter we sound dumber because we are never forced to listen to two intelligent adults talk about something interesting for an hour uninterrupted. No one makes us take our castor oil. We have been given limitless choice and we use it to avoid thinking, which is hard, at all costs. Nine hundred channels of satellite TV are the ultimate enabler. We know what we should do (eat carrots, read books, and watch Jim Lehrer) but we're bombarded with the opportunity to do what we want to do (eat Doritos, read nothing, and watch VH1 I Love the 80s!). Television didn't ruin us, but the changes in its content and format may have.
(Dali note: In one of his late-career retrospectives, Wallace called the Dali interview his favorite, noting that at the end of the interview he concluded that Dali "walked among humanity but was not one of us.")
dbsmall says:
1) Mike Wallace's son needs a beatdown. You watch how the elder behaved, and you cry at the thought of the kid.
2) I looked at snippets (don't blame me, don't blame social convention…I just have limited time before work), and thought Ayn Rand sounded quite intelligent.
3) Your main point is that people would always choose the "easiest" form of entertainment, and now it's available to them. My gut tells me that theater, parades, etc. were available to compete with the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
I suspect something else is at work, here.
– Mike Wallace had few competitors, so he was able to consistently get the more interesting guests.
– With the filter of time, some of these guests appear to have been profoundly more interesting.
– At the time, perhaps some (Dali, Rand) were seen as more of a freak show. Sort of like a Michael Jackson interview 10 years ago.
– I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I can't think of who is today's Dali, Rand, Wright, Callas. I wonder if the increase in population and ease of distribution has meant more competition, better promotion, and thus made it harder for some to stand out.
Tosh says:
Eric Sevareid did these types of interviews in the 70's and 80's. Remember Eric Hoffer?
Bill Moyers stands out in this field and Charlie Rose (to a lesser extent as he can be frustratingly interruptive).
Great guests on both shows though Moyers seeks out those whom you almost never hear on the mainstream networks.
Another Luke says:
"I'm Mike Wallace and this… is a Parliament!"
fantastic.
Parrotlover77 says:
It should be noted that there are still shows that use this simple, but effective, format. Watch PBS sometime. Just about anything on Biography channel is similar to this. Even 'Inside The Actor's Studio' is similar in format to Wallace and is actually very successful, despite being on a very obscure cable channel (Bravo).
Remember that we have a much larger teevee audience now than we did back then. So maybe this format doesn't work on ABC anymore? So what.
BK says:
I'm no philospphy scholar, and I know this is off topic, but man I can't help but think living as an Randian would have to be about the least happy life imagineable.
If morality is designed to lead one in their life on a quest for happiness, I think you can look at some extremes on the spectrum here and take a pretty well-educated guess as to which one is a better set of guide posts in how to reach that end…
So if you look at a group of buddhists and compare them to a group Randians (cuz I ain't using the term objectivists) which do you think is truly happier on the whole…. maybe object…. Randianism isn't such a good idea.
Dustin says:
This Wallace dude is boring as shit brah… I'd rather listen to tom brady any day dude.
Michael says:
Mmmm. . . Dali . . . I use Dali pretty extensively in my Modern Europe class's lecture on the 1920s (starting by showing a clip from _Un Chien Andalou_ will get ANY student to sit upright and pay attention). The guy was freaking crazy, and the students LOVE him – also because they're familiar with a lot of his paintings, much more so than say Max Ernst or Otto Dix or Marcel Duchamp. They especially love some of his selections from _The Maniac Eyeball_ which is a bloody riot.
The point is not so much, I think, that there is "too much" choice, or too many options (though I would certainly agree that there is/are), and as you say, it's not about stupidity. Rather, it seems to be a combination of relevance and complexity. You mention the Lincoln/Douglas debates, recalling I'm sure that abolitionist meetings in the north featuring, say, Frederick Douglass et al, would run for hours too. But slavery was an IMMEDIATE, timely, relevant issue. But it could also be boiled down to relatively simple, totally comprehensible terms: slavery is either good (in one person's opinion), or bad (in another person's opinion). Look at the 2000 election – the large minority didn't want to hear about complex issues and intricate policies that Gore wanted to talk about. They wanted the redneck cowboy they could sit down and get drunk and do coke with.
I think if you look at the more "successful" talk shows now (folks have mentioned Moyers and Rose) – those shows are "successful" (as I imagine Wallace's was) because they investigated complexity more fully, and maybe didn't worry so much about the immediate relevancy. But they're not "popular" for that same reason – average people don't really care about a MacNamara retrospective or an appreciation of Francis Bacon (recent subjects on Rose). Now does this flattening of complexity also entail some type of journalistic abnegation of public responsibility? Maybe. One could argue perhaps either way.
Tom Brady is more "relevant" because he's on TV every Sunday kickin' ass like he learned at the great Big Blue. Tom Brady's appeal is superficial, it's simple – athletic, handsome, successful do-gooder. MacNamara – much more difficult to distill in simple terms.
(sorry for the super-post.)
ladiesbane says:
We don't have Omnibus anymore, either, or even Playhouse 90. MTV used to play all kinds of music…and then came VH1, country / soul / rap / oldies / etc. channels…it's the same in fiction, fashion, and food. It's all about market specialization rather than breadth of knowledge or cultivation of broad interest.
There may be a Renaissance-guy revolt brewing, but I doubt it. I stopped seeing men reading Steinbeck in the break room shortly after Ben Affleck made Jersey Girl. Throwing in the towel was understandable at that point.
j says:
I've never seen a person as ugly in both mind and body as Ayn Rand.
Desargues says:
j is right. Too bad people don't take Nietzsche seriously any more. He knew that often, the key to assessing someone's ideas is not internal coherence or the strength of their evidence, but the kind of people they are — what motivations they may have, how comfortable in their skin they look, what frustrations or anxieties they seem to be prone to, how kindly fate and the gods have treated them — in short, how much Lebenskraft they have in themselves.
Now look at that woman and tell me she doesn't fail on all these counts.
(Don't anybody try to tell me Britney Spears would meet Nietzsche's criteria. He wasn't a moron.)
ladiesbane says:
Don't you think the idea must defend itself? Don't look at the pitchman, look at the logic. To do otherwise is pro hominem, isn't it? Vital, serene, otherwise reasonable people have spoken confidently on topics about which they knew little, and were horribly wrong.
kiki says:
Rand's philosophy sounds strikingly similar to today's GOP mantra. Distilled to its simplest form, it says "It's all about me."
Keith says:
The ironies of Rand with the modern GOP are rich. They adore Objectivism, but have no use for objective reality (deny science, deny history, deny social problems, fantasize about Obama's birth certificate, etc.). If today's conservatives truly valued reason, then empathy for their fellow citizens or concern about future generations wouldn't be so scary.
Ed says:
Ayn Rand may have SOUNDED intelligent, yet if you read my comment that was not the point.