Television and Opinion

Extract

Television is the best medium yet discovered for selling goods. That is the opinion of practical men in the United States, the home of commercial television, and it can be backed up by an array of facts and figures showing how the enormous sums of money spent on television advertising justify themselves in the eyes of those whose business it is to sell mass-produced goods.

The same factors that enable television to sell goods enables it also to sell ideas, provided that, like the goods, they are suitable for a mass public. Television is probably not the best medium for spreading original ideas, any more than it is the best medium for selling first editions or vintage port or thoroughbred sires or any other commodity that can be bought only by the few. But for the sort of vague general ideas that make up most people’s everyday thinking, for the habits of thought and standards of value that influence the ordinary man’s life, television has advantages over and above the other forms of mass-communication—print, cinema, radio—and it has access to people who are rarely touched by the still older influence of platform, stage, and pulpit.

Not so long ago, most people in civilized countries viewed the world through the medium of the popular newspaper and the cheap book. Later, this medium was largely displaced by the radio and the films. Now television is showing its power to replace them all as the universal oracle, the social law-giver, the norm-setter, the mirror in which you can see life as it ought to be and as you come to think it is.