478
PARTISAN REVIEW
TV GUIDES
TUBE OF PLENTY: The Evolution of American Television.
By Erik
Barnouw. Oxford University Press. $14.95.
TELEVISION: Technology and Cultural Form.
By Raymond Williams.
Schocken Books. $3.45.
The history of communications is at last beginning to be
studied seriously from quite different angles. These two books are as
different in style and approach as any two books on the subject could
be. Yet they are complementary and broadly speaking they point in the
same direction.
Eric Barnouw's three-volume
History of Broadcasting in the
United States
covered a great deal of ground in a well-informed and
lively manner. The volumes were particularly interesting on politics
and broadcasting, dealing at length with politics inside broadcasting
and with the attitude of politicians towards broadcasting. This new
single-volume history has the same virtues with a few new virtues
added. Compression has sharpened some of the points: events since
1970, where the third volume ended, have changed the perspectives.
The narrative always maintains an element of suspense. What could be
more telling than punch-lines at the end of subchapters-usually also
well-placed at the end of pages-like "But before it began, the televi –
sion industry faced a painful crisis" or
"If
there was to be resistance, it
would come from another sector of the program world. And it did"?
There are some excellent anecdotes and enough pithy quotations to
catch the flavor of fleeting moments in the cultural as well as the
political history of the last fifty years. Exactly the right passages are
quoted from men like Sarnoff or Minow and from once-influential
books like James Rorty's
Our Master's Voice
of 1934 or, at the opposite
end of the spectrum,
Red Channels: The Report of Communist
Influence in Radio and Television
of 1950. Individual radio and
television programs are summed up skillfully, and there are just
enough statistics to illustrate both the main programming and the
main market trends.
By contrast, Raymond Williams's spare, highly analytical and, in
places, difficult book is lacking in detail except in one solitary chapter
in the middle where the distribution of types of television programs on
five channels - three in Britain, two in the United States-is studied
reasonably systematically for one week in March 1973. Williams is the
