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exampl e, tha t it was Brita in , not the United Sta tes, whi ch had the
world 's first regul ar telev ision service in 1936, Nor does he as k key
ques ti ons about the extent to whi ch the United Sta tes was a specia l case
before the I960s.
I
do ubt whether anyone in Brita in would ever refer to
televi sion as " tube of plenty," altho ugh the phrase mi ght well have
fi gured in the propaganda cam pa igns preceding the introducti on of
commercial televi sion in 1955 when there was talk of mov in g from
austerity to affluence.
If
the phrase is going to be used-and it deserves
to be used in rela ti on to the United Sta tes -it must sure ly be seen
within the contex t of specific Ameri can experience as descr ibed say in
Po tter's
People of Plent y
or Boorstin 's
The Democratic Experience.
Whenever Barnouw moves into the world outside the United
Sta tes - and he has a grea t dea l to say a bout American foreign poli cy –
he does not seem compl etely a t home. A jo lting reference on the las t
page confirms a general impress ion : the des igna ti on o f Chri stopher
Nasc imento as Prime Minister of Guyana mi ght please Mr. Nasci–
mento but would surpri se Mr. Burnham . T he mi sta ke may no t be
important , but it is important in dea ling with the th orn y problems of
the "cold war" to distin guish cl earl y in its earl y stages between the
timeta ble of Ameri can opinion ("anti-Ameri can activiti es") and the
timeta bl e of actual events in Eu rope. T here is, indeed , an interes ting set
of ques tio ns concerning the relati onship of "actua l events" to the
" images" of them.
In
places Ba rnouw seems cl ose to sugges tin g tha t
foreign poli cy in an age of telev ision has become entirely a ma tter of
hero-and-vill ain mythology.
I
do no t beli eve tha t it can be simp lified in
this way . A cross-reference to the place of radi o and televi sion in
Brita in during the Suez crisis of 1956 would have been illumina ting,
and it is signifi cant also perha ps tha t the other grea t " pro blem" of
1956, Hungary, is onl y dea lt with after the event in the context of
Khrushchev dea ling with awkwa rd ques ti ons abo ut it on hi s visit to the
United States in 1959. Televi ion , Barnouw says in a brief
envoi,
was
"admired , trusted beyond o ther sources, accepted as
the
world–
without a sense of wha t mi ght be mi ss ing, because 'the' worl d was
defined by the tube itself. " He is sometimes peril ously nea r to defining
the iss ues of "'the' world" in communi ca ti ons terms alone.
Barnouw and Willi ams point in the same directi on when they
each turn from television within pa rticul ar societies to televi sion as a
world force. They are both strongly influenced by Herbert Schill er's
Mass Commun ications and the American Empire.
T here is need for far
more study in thi s fi eld-of popul ar reacti ons and interacti o ns as well
as o f the stati stics of program fl ows. Unfortuna tely, such stud ies tend
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