Watching fraud

Sept.18, 1988

I saw it on TV, so I know it's true."  We've all heard people say this, and some of the more gullible of us, myself included, have even voiced it ourselves.  But TV is no different that the printed page or the direct-contact spoken word:  Anyone can lie, and some can most convincingly.

You see, most of us like to think that there are some things, some people, some institutions we can trust but we hesitate to trust those individuals we are in daily congress with because we've been burned by direct contact before, whether by the opposite party of a love affair that went wrong, or by a fast-talking salesman who got a foot in the door and a hand into our wallet.  We like to think that there are more reliable relationships that these and we are drawn to those that are at least once removed from us, whether these be newspapers, TV, orators, or preachers.  We see such sources as authorities, and we accept them until they prove themselves wrong.

And we do this because it is tough enough to get through the business of day-to-day living without having to rely on our own resources to check out everything that impinges on our lives.  We take for granted that experts know what they are doing, that professionals are competent at their jobs, that grand institutions that can perform the miracle of putting moving pictures on glass would never deliberately try to fool us.  If we were suspicious of everybody, we would be unable to function.

What makes television so powerful is that we naturally assume that if we can see something, it must be so.  And this is why fraud of all types works so well on television.  Two actors appeared on the daytime talk show circuit during the past half year, victimizing Geraldo Rivera (there's a switch!).  Oprah Winfrey, and Sally Jessy Raphael by pretending to be a sex therapist and one of her clients on Raphaels's show, for example, where one of them was recognized by a member of the audience.  As you can expect, now, the topic of frauds is making the rounds.

According to an article in Sept. 8's The New York Times, Raphael said that the hoaxers made her and her audience a laughingstock, and Rivera stated that these talk shows are important sources of information that cannot be acquired elsewhere.  The frauds, meanwhile, maintained that the shows are merely entertainment, and that they were simply tyring out their acting skills.

This is the center of the question:  what is TV all about, and when is a fraud a fraud?

Television is only incidentally information or entertainment.  It is primarily a means of making money.  The way it works is that producers give us programming that will make us watch the ads (or subrscribe to pay TV), and the more profit they make, the better they judge the programming to be.  But the public does have to be catered to or it will stop watchign the shows, and the public expects certain things from the programmers.

Yes, a game show certainly is entertainment.  When the 1958 show "Dotto" was revealed by a disgruntled contestant to be fixed, the producers' reaction was, hey, this is entertainment pure and simple, so why should anybody care?  Then the enormously popular "The $64,000 Question `` was also found to be feeding answers to certain contestants, and the public went wild, because, though these shows are indeed entertainment, they are not entertaining if you know that they are scripted, like "Bonanza" or "Miami Vice."  Those who watched and sweated with the contestants felt betrayed when they discovered that the contestant sweated because his isolation booth was not vented.

Producers are now very careful with their shows, having learned that the entertainment factor can be heightened without tilting the machine, but other forms of fraud are still rampant.  Commercials themselves are a prime example.

Years ago, General Motors showed the superior visibility of it's laminated safety glass by smearing petroleum jelly on a competitor's tempered glass windows to "dramatize" the difference in visibility.  (GM now uses tempered glass in it's cars' side windows anyway because it is cheaper.)  Just a few months ago a product called "DreamAway"  was heavily promoted on daytime TV; it was supposed to melt away pounds as you sleep.  The U.S. Postal Service is now trying to get their money back.

"Docudramas", with their composite characters and altered storylines, are replacing documentaries, and a decade ago "In Search Of," hosted by Leonard Nimoy, tried to convince audiences that there really is a Bermuda Triangle, that seroius scientists believe in ESP and ghosts, that UFO's kidnap people and are flown by space aliens.  Eveangelists beg for money so they "continue the ministry," that is so they may keep the airways open to beg for more.

Television is a medium that is accountable only to itself, that is no longer capable of separating fact from fantasy, of distinguishing between entertainment and information, because all comes down to the bottom line.

Edward R. Murrow is more truly dead now than when he was buried in 1965, and the Geraldo Riveras attract enough Yahoos to make themselves rich with the sensational claptrap, the truch or fraudulence of which means nothing to the direction of our society.

The real fraud is TV's pretension that it is important, that it informs a thinking audience, that it makes a positive difference in this world.  Television is a positive force to those who get rich from it; the rest of us are far poorer than if it had never been invented.

Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.

There's a few typos in this article, I copied it exactly as it was published.   I would assume it was the person that wrote it down from dad's copy, since he was meticulous in his editing.