Between the Lines: What TV Does to People (1987)

The Between the Lines Column from the November 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

What TV Does to People

The Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, has of late undertaken a course of ritual pontification about the effects of sex and violence on TV screens. Are these images corrupting the impressionable workers? Might Michael Ryan not have gone around shooting the inhabitants of Hungerford if TV had not given him a model to imitate? Did the rape scene in Sins create new rapists? Is all of the anti-social nastiness of daily life under capitalism but a re-enactment of the corrupting imagery of TV make-believe?

Socialists are not out to tell the bosses how to run their system. They will run it, if they can, in whatever way it will be most profitable and stable for them — and they will regulate their media accordingly. Of course, the Tories are in a bit of a fix. On the one hand they never tire of telling us that human nature dictates our anti-social behaviour: we are all born sinners and the best we can do is repent for being the murderous, evil little swines that we are. If that theory was true, then TV images would not make people anti-social, for we already would be. If the government accepts the view that the social environment moulds people’s behaviour (which is clearly what they are saying when they seek to limit the influence of TV) they are taking dangerous steps in the direction of the Marxist recognition that it is our social being which determines our consciousness. So, if Hurd and his colleagues advance to the recognition that we are what society makes us, then they must give up their traditional claims that murderers, rapists and other anti-social beings were born that way: if they were, then it would not matter how "clean" TV was, they would still commit their crimes.

Once the Tories accept the view that TV might affect the way people behave it becomes necessary for them to place the state in the role of censors, ensuring that we, the viewers, are not allowed to see what is bad for us. Needless to say. such censorship would not be unpolitical. We do not expect governments to act unpolitically. The state censors might decide to ban TV films which glorify violence, but so too might they decide to ban documentaries which undermine national morale. As soon as a censorship body exists it will be used to perform more than simply ethical functions. The pro-censorship lobby invariably couples sex and violence as the pernicious double-act of modern TV. But sex and violence are different images. Why ban sexual images from TV? Miserable Christians insist that nude bodies corrupt children. That tells us more about screwed-up Christians' self-repression than anything else. Of course, there is a massive difference between the televised depiction of sensitive love-making and the TV blockbuster which needs to kick off with a brutal rape scene because it will pull in the punters who read The Sun and who constitute an audience big enough to please the advertisers. If "sex on TV" is to be "banned" (to use the absurd terminology of the censorship brigade), are we no longer to see drama which includes the realities of sexual behaviour? The sex imagery which TV is far more culpable of exploiting is that related to gender roles — images which show women as flawed if they are not purchaseable commodities of femininity and which teach female viewers which character models to copy if they want to be like real TV women. It is that sort of "sex on TV” which is far more repressive and destructive than the scenes which Mary Whitehouse never seems to miss, and then always seems to want to ensure that the rest of us are banned from seeing.

As for violence, what kind of a society is capitalism which has armaments capable of blowing up the world several times over, research establishments plotting ways of creating biological weapons that can kill people by newer, more painful methods; which settles its international rivalries in pursuit of profits by the use of well-organised thuggery — which does all of these things openly and with pride —and then blames TV shoot-outs for creating social violence? The simple fact is that if we were not living in a social system based upon competition the incentive to be socially violent would not be there.

The Bloody Tragedy of it All

We do not know whether violent or pornographic pictures on TV make viewers behave differently. Different research provides contradicting conclusions. What TV does do to many, many workers is make us sad. Watching The News At Ten (ITV) night after night after night is a process which ends in feeling bloody miserable about the tragedy of it all. For millions of workers this tragedy is blotted out by booze or tranquillisers; in others it creates apathy; for some the bad news (which is almost everything) is blocked out and they wait for the bit at the end where ITN digs up a "happy story" to send the wage slaves to bed with a bit of hope.

Few documentaries conveyed this sense of overwhelming tragedy as well as the recent Channel Four series, The Politics of Food (Tuesdays, 9pm). The programme about Brazil (7 October) showed scene after scene of dying, starving children, many of them little more than babies. There was the interview with a mother who told the story of saving up enough money to take her malnourished son to the doctor. She brought him back in a coffin, now she has two more children both suffering from the same symptoms of malnutrition. Then there was the Brazilian man who worked producing cocoa for export so that his capitalist bosses could help pay off their $100 billion debt to the bankers. (This is the tragedy of capitalism: cocoa is grown for export and land producing crops which could feed starving peasants is converted to export production because the empty-bellied are also those with empty wallets.) The man, who earns a wage of £8 a week, says. "It used to be bad. but now it's worse. The harder I work the worse it gets." Another worker looks into the camera and states that the only thing left to wait for is death.

Of course, no solution is offered by the programme. A few reformists are wheeled on to advocate land reform, but, as the speaker for the Brazilian government quite openly explained, 1 per cent of the Brazilian population own 50 per cent of all land in Brazil and that is the most profitable land; these capitalists spend £7 million each year on private armies to uphold their ownership. In the last two years 500 Brazilian workers and peasants have been murdered by the landowners because they have been prominent in advocating land reform. Who says that there is no class war going on? These are our fellow workers being murdered in it. But land reform offers no solution; nor do increased loans to peasants from the World Bank or Cuban-style state ownership. The solution is socialism — a worldwide system in which all human beings will have free access to the goods and services of our abundant planet. Seeing children die and human lives wasted in despair and women bury their families — seeing all of that not as fiction, but as the real depiction of the society we inhabit —, that is the real obscenity on our TV screens. No. don't censor it, Mr Hurd; don't protect us from seeing the sickness of the system which you and those like you uphold. Let us see. and let us do more than just see.

Update

As The People newspaper has failed to correct its crass distortion of the ideas printed in this column in the August Socialist Standard (see October's "Between The Lines" for details), a complaint has now been sent to the Press Council. Readers will be informed

(a) whether the Press Council upholds the indisputable validity of our complaint, and

(b) whether The People, if censured for its distortion, will provide equal space in its newspaper to publicise such censure as it did to convey its original distortion.

Steve Coleman

Blogger's Notes:

• The October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard carried an article on Michael Ryan and the Hungerford massacre written by Janie Percy-Smith.
• There was a book tie in with the Channel 4/Yorkshire Television series The Politics of Food. The hunger machine : the politics of food by Jon Bennett and Susan George was published in 1987 by Polity Press, and is available over at Archive.org
• There was a sneering review of the PBS/Channel 13 version of The Politics of Food by the New York Times' TV critic, John Corry, that appeared in that paper on January 6th, 1988.