Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404100193
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PETER CROW
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Thanks to television and other forms of modern communication, people all over the industrialized world have more power than ever before.
Tyrants can no longer ignore the masses; nor for that matter can popularly elected presidents. Why? Television is now too ubiquitous to control. Greater dividends come from playing to the crowd than trying to control it. So says Michael O'Neill in his comprehensive study, "The Roar of the Crowd," subtitled "How Television and People Power Are Changing the World."
Moreover, the proliferation of multinational corporations, facilitated by computers and satellite communications, has broken down conventional borders between nations. The stock market has become as strong a motivator in world affairs as narrowly national interests. Accelerating the economic push toward internationalism is cable television. Starving Kurds and diminishing rain forests intrude into our living rooms in ways that print journalism alone could never bring about. These problems are becoming impossible to ignore.
Unfortunately, the roses in this picture hide some rather bleak prospects, according to O'Neill. While modern communications compel accountability, it's an accountability of photo-op, sound bite, number-crunching byte simplicity. In elections, being telegenic has become more important than displaying wisdom or statesmanship. International diplomacy is conducted via CNN reporters rather than seasoned diplomats. The new world order threatens to become the new world disorder.
Once editor of the New York Daily News, O'Neill has a journalist's eye for interesting detail and writes with that particular brand of cynicism characteristic of seasoned newsfolk. Even when they see a glass half-full rather than half-empty, they still don't trust what's in it.
Part of O'Neill's pessimism, though, comes from having been hoisted on the petard of his own thesis. Take for example his observation that television has trivialized elections, forcing politicians to react to crises rather than confront longterm problems. O'Neill cites some examples from Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton - but without much scrutiny.
Whatever one may think of Bill Clinton's positions on deficit reduction, health care, national service and gays in the military, clearly they are not knee-jerk reactions to public sentiment. Whatever the President's deficiencies in timing and hard-nosed politicking, few fault him for being shallow or ill read. O'Neill overlooks all this.
Yet Clinton is the latest product of the very high tech environment O'Neill describes so suspiciously. The period before the communications revolution brought us, true, Truman and FDR, but also Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge.
"The Roar of the Crowd" is an informative, readable analysis of powerful influences on our culture and world. In the attempt to make sense of a complex phenomenon, however, the author himself sometimes falls prey to oversimplification, the very flaw he most decries in modern media.
Peter Crow teaches at Ferrum College.
by CNB