The sharp-edged critic Robert Hughes, who just passed away, was no fan of network news, though he lived to see it pass into obsolescence. Here’s his 1995 New York Review of Books critique of its role in the capitalist continuum:
“Television is not, to put it mildly, an art of conceptual memory. Its images are always displacing themselves. It must therefore pump up each one’s vividness to keep the millions watching. Cut out more connective tissue, make each bright pop-up image brighter still. The audience’s revenge is selective inattention. The viewer is amazingly adroit at channel surfing, zapping past a channel whose product is judged in two seconds to be boring. Knowing this, the network must make the next product more vivid still… and so it goes, in a descending curve of simplification. As Lewis Lapham points out in his introduction to a new edition of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, McLuhan recognized thirty years ago that the relation between abbreviated news and the consoling icon of advertisement is as fixed and, so to speak, as theologically necessary as the ancient relationship of hell and heaven. We are given our glimpses of scandal and disaster: corpses in Bosnia, the burned-out crack house in New York, the assassination in Mexico City. The bad news sells the good news: the smiling anchor, more real than the world outside, and the ads, which are Eden. The core message, in the end, is that the world may be a strange, violent, and horrible place, but products keep it away, as garlic repels vampires. Hence the sense of reality-shortage that accompanies image-glut.”
