The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind.

The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind by Jeffrey Scheuer Four Walls Eight Windows. 280 pages. $23.95.

Pretend it's Sunday morning. You're sitting there with the remote, hoping to find a political talk show that does not feature rightwing blondes, the projectile verbiage of Chris Matthews wannabes, or David Gergen as jack-of-all-topics. Then you find it: The Progressive Week in Review with Barbara Ehrenreich, Salim Muwakkil, David Corn, Norm Solomon, and Katha Pollitt. Guests include community activists, labor organizers, and academic experts who actually know something about the issue under discussion. At the end of the show, you feel like you've gotten beyond the headlines and the sound-bites.

Then you wake up. It was only a dream. You'd fallen asleep in front of the tube, etherized by the output of Ariana Huffington, Laura Ingraham, and Fred Barnes.

For years now, those of us on the left have been concerned, even furious, about how television shrinks the spectrum of political thought. What was once a moderate to conservative Republican position is now presented as the center. What was once liberal is now left or "far left." What was once the loony bin, let's-bomb-them-to-hell branch of the Republican Party is now the right, not the "far right." In the process, what it is possible to say on news shows and political talk television, and who gets invited to say it, has been severely limited.

But even folks not on the left, millions of them, are fed up with the news media's sensationalism and superficiality. Many believe that the media are fueling a major crisis in American democracy.

Most media scholars shun explanations that hint of technological determinism--that machines by themselves make history, that the technology of the media dictates content. But people who were once "soft" determinists are now getting a bit "harder" (pardon the pre-feminist, Viagra metaphor) as they reconsider whether communications technologies do, in fact, shape media messages. So here's a question: Is there something inherent in television that has corrupted American politics?

Why is it that, since the mid-1980s, political talk on television (and radio, for that matter) has been dominated by conservative hosts and pundits, conservative experts, and spin from conservative think tanks? Why has liberalism (let alone the left) been so marginalized on TV? We all have our answers, many of which boil down to the commercial domination of television and the corporate need to find a medium friendly to business.

Two new books, Jeffrey Scheuer's The Sound Bite Society and Trudy Lieberman's Slanting the Story, delve into this problem. Both try to explain how and why television and conservatism have become a match made in heaven.

Scheuer's book is the more thought-provoking of the two and harkens back to Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message."

According to Scheuer, television is the perfect vehicle for conservatism because television's visual and rhetorical conventions are biased toward a quick, telegraphic simplicity, and so. is conservatism.

Scheuer looks at the spread of shallow political dialogue, sensationalism, and superficiality in politics, all of which have severely undermined public faith in the political process. He lays the blame primarily on television. But the argument here is less about programming than about the inherent properties of the medium: that its fast-paced audiovisual codes have, by themselves, changed political history. There is an underlying grammar of TV production, and it simplifies all it touches.

Because commercial television relies on images that contain action, on increasingly rapid editing and fast juxtapositions, on punchy sound bites, on easy equations between cause and effect, and on binary images of pro and con, the medium as it has been used in America requires simplicity in image and idea. Television favors little infobits instead of thoughtful, complex debate; its commercial framework, in particular, promotes individual self-fulfillment and indulgence over community betterment and cooperation. "For all its technological and social complexity," argues Scheuer, "television's main systematic effect on human thinking is that of simplification." Thus, television is biased against abstraction, ambiguity, and reasoning; it is biased toward quick, knee-jerk, emotional responses. These tendencies benefit conservatism and undercut liberalism and progressivism, Scheuer argues.

To make matters worse, progressive or radical thinkers often exclude others because their discussions and analyses are often too complex or too obscure for most people to follow, Scheuer maintains. The left, to put it bluntly, has a "television problem" because it has failed to appreciate the inherent qualities of the medium.

Scheuer also notes recent regulatory and corporate trends: the rampant deregulation of broadcasting that began under Mark Fowler, Reagan's head of the FCC in the 1980s, and the ongoing consolidation of media corporations. The rise of the "electronic right" on TV is also the result of the collapse of government oversight (including the 1987 elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which required stations to air both sides of controversial issues) and the increased power of big money. It's not just that conservatism and television are perfect bedfellows; their union has gotten much cozier, more symbiotic, in the past twenty years due to government policy.

Scheuer's proposed solutions are ones we've heard before--increased media literacy programs, a media activism movement that pushes for the repeal of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and increased anti-trust action against AOL Time Warner, Viacom CBS, et al.

He also argues for the reversal of Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 ruling that established campaign spending as a form of freedom of speech. Other media critics, most notably Bob McChesney, have argued for a new media activism as well, although with considerably more passion. Nonetheless, one wonders what it will take for people to get out in the streets over the issue of media consolidation and rightwing bias.

Unfortunately, Scheuer does not offer much advice on how the left can overcome its television problem.

Here he misses an opportunity, for I am convinced that there is a market for The Progressive Week in Review (only with a better title). Such a show could be thought-provoking and entertaining, especially when viewers get a load of what Tom Brokaw, 20/20, and Newsweek aren't telling them--just imagine a few episodes with the folks from Project Censored or FAIR offering their finds. And there's no reason flashy graphics and images couldn't be used to our advantage--that's what leftwing feminist videomakers have been doing for years.

Yes, we leftists can be tendentious, obscurantist, and boring. But plenty of us are not. The real problem remains the financial structuring of the medium and the enormous influence of the television industry in Congress. Besides The Body Shop and Ben & Jerry's (maybe), who's going to sponsor such a show? Which cable channel or network would dare put it on the air?

Trudy Lieberman is also deeply concerned by the right's highjacking of television. She has written an impassioned expose of how all those rightwing think tanks have shaped media coverage of public affairs. Lieberman, too, notes that conservatives have been especially successful at distilling their positions into snappy sound bites. She traces the strategies used by the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and others to court the press on a regular basis, to provide talking heads for news and talk shows, to get op-ed pieces printed, and to criticize newspapers and journalists perceived as promoting a "liberal bias" in their stories.

Lieberman is relentless in the very best way, hitting you again and again with numbing examples of the various and dogged ways that conservative think tanks and their agents work to shape coverage of some of the major stories of the day. But the book has more hard-nosed, practical advice for the left, including an argument that left-oriented foundations should spend their money the way the right does--on issue advocacy.

Lieberman's book is a quick, infuriating read. But it will give you examples of how the right has, under a cloak of invisibility, shaped public discourse in its favor. She does what is so hard for so many of us to do--see what wasn't in the news, or what was poorly covered or marginalized because of rightwing influence.

For example, she takes apart "Caveat Emptor: The Head Start Scam," released by the Cato Institute in 1992 and widely (and uncritically) covered in the press. The report cited experts and studies to support its claim that Head Start was a failure and should be eliminated. Immediately, papers from The Washington Post to the Phoenix Gazette ran headlines like "Experts Question Worth, Efficiency" or "Time for a Colder, Closer Look at Head Start." Articles described the Cato Institute as a "Washington-based research organization" instead of a rightwing think tank. Then Lieberman shows how these experts, many of whom supported Head Start, were quoted out of context. She exposes the so-called research in the report as bogus, slanted, or wrong. And she reveals that some of the "experts" weren't experts at all.

In other chapters, Lieberman documents how the right similarly shaped news coverage and ,public discourse about Medicare, the need to privatize Social Security, and the need to curb the regulatory powers of the FDA.

But in fairness, she neglects to show how liberals manipulate TV, too. After all, Chicago Hope and ER have offered sustained diatribes against managed care, and The West Wing has already dumped on the gun lobby, the religious right, and GOP opposition to sampling in the census. Sometime soon, a scholar will jump into this battle for public opinion to assess the quality and quantity of competing messages and strategies.

Despite the powerful evidence in both books about the impact of rightwing influence in the media, neither writer has fully documented what happens on the reception side, in people's living rooms. While we all harbor our worst suspicions about millions of Americans going over to the dark side because of the Olin Foundation and its compatriots, neither book offers detailed, depressing evidence about the effect of this bias.

So while we are correct to be alarmed by the extent of rightwing propaganda, we don't yet have an analysis that shows what worked, and what didn't, with millions of viewers.

And things may not be as bleak as they seem. There aren't millions of young people listening to the scathing social criticism on the latest Rage Against the Machine CD because they embrace conservative politics and love the status quo.

Nonetheless, more of us should increase our efforts to expose rightwing propaganda and the biased, truncated political discourse on TV.

The left has a more willing audience than many acknowledge. The trick is how to use our resources at the beginning of the new century to counter the rightwing juggernaut and unmask its ideology as the bankruptcy that it is.

Susan Douglas teaches Communication Studies At the University of Michigan.