Foreign Policy Magazine Article Skews Facts About TV Industry

TV Saving the World? Desperate Housewives a remedy for 3rd World problems? Foreign Policy Magazine goes off the deep end.

(SALEM, Ore.) - The 'Wolf in Sheep's Clothing' analogy may be a little overdone, but I also think it qualifies as an over used strategy in this world. It simply references a deceptive act against a person, it happens all too often.

A magazine that I have subscribed to for many years, Foreign Policy, published an article titled "How TV Can Save The World" in their November 2009 issue that appears to serve little real purpose aside from a feeble attempt to save an industry threatened by a superior technology.

Writer Charles Kenny wants you to believe that the garbage on American TV offers hope to the world, and he dismisses the only medium in our future, and that is the Internet.

Foreign Policy has printed similar articles about how everything's A-OK with the U.S. newspaper industry, which couldn't be anything more from the truth. I've wondered in the past how many people are instinctively "educated" by their writing style that tells people what they should believe.

The very first page of the magazine in question, well before the article in question, is an Editor contribution titled, "Forget Twitter, Think TV".

The article begins with: "It's not Twitter or Facebook that's reinventing the planet. Eighty years after the first TV crackled to life, television still rules our world..."

That paragraph concludes with: "All those soap operas might be the ticket to a better future after all."

What? A close friend of mine visited Vietnam back in the late 1980's and on his trip he met a village elder who had a working TV set. What was he watching? Married With Children. He looked at my friend and asked if Ted Bundy was what most Americans were like. My friend, who didn't have a TV in his American home, said he cringed and compared the program to "vomit", trying as hard as possible to make this Vietnamese man believe him, but he didn't think it worked.

The last thing we need to do is saturate the world with unrealistic Hollywood crap that isn't fit for our own overly gratuitous public.

The writer goes on about how TV dates back to 1928. Well, that is only partly true at best. In the United States, television was a post-WWII phenomenon and it didn't happen in the 1920's except in development laboratories.

Wikipedia states: "The first regularly scheduled television service in the United States began on July 2, 1928. The Federal Radio Commission authorized C.F. Jenkins to broadcast from experimental station W3XK in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. For at least the first eighteen months, 48-line silhouette images from motion picture film were broadcast, although beginning in the summer of 1929 he occasionally broadcast in halftones"

So in the most technical sense, there was some possibility that you could have seen TV, maybe... that is if you were exclusively rich or a mad scientist.

This gives you an idea of how many people were watching TV in the old days. Wikipedia states: "An estimated 19,000 electronic television sets were manufactured in Britain, and about 1,600 in Germany, before World War II. About 7,000–8,000 electronic sets were made in the U.S."

"The first live national television broadcast in the U.S. took place on September 4, 1951"

"The first live broadcast from the European continent was made on August 27, 1950"

"Regular network television broadcasts began on the DuMont Television Network in 1946, on NBC in 1947, and on CBS and ABC in 1948. By 1949, the networks stretched from New York to the Mississippi River, and by 1951 to the West Coast"

If our children reads this FP article, they will come away truly believing that television is a much older medium than it really is. If Kenny had stated, "Though TV didn't become common until the late 1940's and early 1950's" as a preface, his story would have more strength, but he didn't.

From there it gets worse as Kenny writes, "...television, that 1920's technology so many of us take for granted" - when today's TV technology is anything but an 80+ year old notion. Then he takes on the idea of American trash TV being a savior to the world with this: "The programs that so many dismiss as junk-from song and dance shows to Desperate Housewives-are being eagerly consumed by poor people everywhere who are just now getting access to television for the first time."

TV came into the American public in the late 1940's, but really not until the early 50's did it find its way into the mainstream American household. The moral to this story is Just because it was printed doesn't mean it is true."

It seems hardly possible that old American TV shows, unrealistic to the core, will be any kind of saving grace for the world's poor. The Internet on the other hand, offers people a chance to learn about an endless array of things; opportunities, options, enhancement. The Web is interactive, television is brain numbing and overly commercialized. It doesn't offer enough choice, but a Wify signal is a ticket to the world.

I am sometimes puzzled by the obvious political and business-related motivations present in Foreign Policy Magazine. It is clear that they are pro-Israel, solidly behind the World Bank, the Catholic Church, and Globalization, and that their articles typically serve as a defensive or debunking arm for big business that seeks to be seen as progressive and environmentally friendly and sound. They also generate information that is clearly top rate, but it is found among those pieces that appear more like propaganda than news.

Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor.
Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), the first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several other awards including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website, affiliated with Google News and several other major search engines and news aggregators.
You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com