In his book The Inarticulate Society, Tom Shachtman examined the declining quality of oral communication. In one chapter, Shachtman recounted the contribution of television news to this deterioration. He looked at the quality of language on “The cbs Evening News” from 1963 to 1993. The first broadcast he examined was on August 29, 1963, the maiden voyage of cbs’s half-hour format. There were few visuals. Cronkite read the news from a script, and journalists filed their reports. The vocabulary appealed to the reasonably educated. Shachtman: “The sentences have dependent clauses and often run to 18-25 words. Each sentence contains such conceptual and abstract words as ‘unanimous,’ ‘reduction,’ ‘underdeveloped,’ and ‘colonial,’ and such phrases as ‘using the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute as a cover.’ Absolutely no pictures accompany these reports.” In addition, “the television reporters’ sentences are full, sometimes near to bursting from the effort of condensing information. Their sentences are also complete, have dependent clauses, and are highly grammatical; they are often longer than can be uttered with a single breath.”

Thirty years later, Shachtman found that correspondents and those interviewed (especially politicians and government officials) are driven to produce quotable sound bites, having learned that this is often the only way to get attention. This, as much as anything, has reduced campaigns to slogans and public-policy debates to dueling clichés. Vocabulary is now at a seventh-grade level. Sentences are 12 to 15 words. (Shachtman comments that correspondents will soon be “talking in headlines.”) “The language of the broadcast is tending toward complete union with the few thousand words that we utter in our everyday conversation.… Whereas the first Cronkite news of 1963 was clearly based on full literacy, this 1993 broadcast exists in theoretical limbo, between the written language and the spoken language.” This vocabulary signals the surrender of seriousness. News of politics, government, the economy, and foreign affairs requires language an articulate adult would use. But when journalism becomes tabloidism, a seventh-grade vocabulary will suffice.

That the networks are retreating from hard news is probably for the best, given the institutional biases against objectivity, sound analysis, historical consciousness, and in-depth reporting. Network news is great at dramatizing the plight of victims (welfare mothers, illegal immigrants, the homeless), but seemingly incapable of showing the other side—the impact on our culture of illegality, irresponsibility, and fragmentation.

Emotions are what TV news does best—the tenant who tearfully doubts he’ll be able to afford an apartment once rent control ends; the assembly-line worker who doesn’t know what he’ll do if Washington allows the merger to go through and he’s laid off; the woman on welfare who wonders how she’ll be able to afford day care and medical insurance on a $7-an-hour job once her benefits end; the agonized civil-rights leader who assures an interviewer that if affirmative action is abolished, inner-city youth will lose their opportunity for higher education and a ticket out of the ghetto; the widow of a crime victim who’s just sure that if it weren’t for “the ready availability of handguns,” her husband would still be alive.

Broadcast news thrives on poignancy: the angry charge, the tearful confession, the admission of despair. All can be conveyed in a matter of seconds, with facial expressions (the picture worth a 1,000 words), and crisp but evocative commentary supplementing the sound bites. Where network news fails is at conveying any sense of how a situation developed. Why is there a shortage of affordable housing? How does a 27-year-old end up alone with a junior-high education and five kids? How have government policies and judicial decisions conspired to create a burgeoning predator population?

One side of these stories transfers easily to film; the other does not. For people who believe that national problems need to be solved through reason rather than emotion, that presents a big problem.

The Virtues of C-SPAN
By Harvey Mansfield

With a healthy, unexciting breakfast, you need a zesty appetizer to start the day. I receive mine from c-span, where the morning talk show, “Washington Journal,” gets my partisan juices flowing. A liberal and a conservative politician pick articles from the morning paper and usually get into an argument. They spin, they bicker, they exchange barbs. I love it.

c-span, two educational channels funded by the cable television industry, is known for providing “unfiltered” news—including live coverage of floor debates in the U.S. House and Senate, unabridged taping of campaign stump speeches, and similar political jousting. Yet the same network famous for providing the most partisan news is also considered the most objective. Why? Because c-span lets politics appear as it is, with all its partisan slants. Sometimes the slant is obvious, as when a Democrat or Republican states his party’s position, and sometimes it is concealed behind the desire to appear “nonpolitical” (or “bipartisan”). c-span tolerates both: It doesn’t dismiss people’s opinions merely because they are partisan, and it doesn’t dismiss the aspiration to rise above partisanship merely because the effort often fails or is insincere.

Brian Lamb, the head moderator, and his able assistants do something almost never done on the major networks. They listen and they question; or rather, they listen so that they can question. Lamb’s purpose is to enable the talker to make his point, not to embarrass him. But to do that, he asks for evidence, for a source, for an example, for consistency, or—when it’s a wanderer—for the point. Sometimes the result is to embarrass an ill-informed caller or a biased guest, but that is not the intent. The intent—though Lamb doesn’t boast of it—is to educate.

On c-span talk-show programs the moderators do not simply sit by silently while others talk; they maintain an active neutrality that helps all sides. They want to improve our respect for democratic debate; so they do their best to make the debate worthy of respect. You never hear a voice-over or a sound-bite on c-span. In a voice-over, the network reporter gives the gist of a speaker’s statement in his own words, and then often illustrates his interpretation with a punchy phrase actually taken from the speaker. The emphasis is the reporter’s, and the speaker, who may well be the President of the United States, becomes a character in the reporter’s story—and thus a witness to the reporter’s moral or intellectual superiority.

The ruling vice of American journalists is not that too many are Democrats but that they show such disrespect for democracy. Their error is mostly unconscious but nonetheless grave: They despise the surface of things and look too much, too quickly, for the inside story. The surface of things in democratic politics is the partisan dispute of the moment, but journalists allow themselves to get bored with that. They don’t listen partly because they have heard it before and mostly because they are convinced beforehand that it doesn’t mean anything. The only important events, they believe, are the ones that go on behind the scenes, and the only important words are those spoken in private: What we don’t see determines what we do see, and the job of the journalist is to unearth secrets, not to report what is obvious.

c-span, by contrast, is not afraid of the obvious. It adopts the citizen’s point of view instead of the wise guy’s. The citizen according to c-span is part voter, part tourist. As a voter, a citizen needs to know what is necessary to form sensible opinions, which means he needs to hear issues and principles as well as tactics and intrigue. Scandals are displayed of course, but for what they show about accuser and accused, not for general, Zeitgeist, hot-air commentary.

With frequent shots of Washington, D.C., c-span appeals to the naïve tourist who both wants to learn and is favorably inclined toward the sights he visits. And c-span has two school buses, actually mobile transmitters, that travel throughout the country, stopping at historical sites, museums, local newspapers, and exploring congressional districts. Viewers get to see the things Americans are proud of—their history and above all their government.

Most of the day the two c-span channels broadcast proceedings of the House and Senate, with explanations but without cynical comment. c-span also covers ceremonies, and stays for the whole event, with no apologies for the boring parts, which actually give spectators and viewers time to wonder and reflect. The network is there for political meetings of all kinds and tendencies, and after the session is over, the camera lingers for a minute so that we sense the difference between formal and informal, and are reminded that life is larger than TV.

c-span is not mainly intellectual or entertaining, though it is both. It is deeply practical as it helps us examine the business of our common life. Its founder, Brian Lamb, is a suitably modest man who understands our democracy and has set an example of how to use the media democratically. c-span airs many complaints about the media and receives a few of its own. Since more callers are conservative, for instance, the latter sometimes want to know why liberals get equal time. But if the rest of TV news were more like c-span, complaints would be fewer and less justified.