ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 12, 1996 TAG: 9603120099
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: FRAZIER MOORE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Just tear your eyes off the television screen for a moment and you'll find more books out there about TV than you can shake a clicker at.
Recent TV literature includes guilty pleasures such as ``My Life in High Heels,'' wherein Loni Anderson tells the world her ``WKRP'' co-star Gary Sandy was a real love machine. Yikes!
Or you can bury yourself in the official companion volume to ``Friends,'' or the latest by "America's Talking" host E. Jean Carroll, frightfully called ``A Dog in Heat is a Hot Dog, and Other Rules to Live By.''
Or you may choose to get a bit more serious with any of a half-dozen other new tomes.
Just in time for the presidential election season, for instance, three new books explore how TV affects (and sometimes hobbles) the process.
``Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time'' (Times Books) is an informed look at the genres of blabber-casting, with chapters ranging from ``Daytime Dysfunction'' to ``Toe to Toe with Ted'' (that is, ``Nightline's'' Koppel).
Written by Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, ``Hot Air'' is anything but, as it builds a case for a growing dilemma.
``As the talk show culture has exploded,'' Kurtz notes, ``the national conversation has been coarsened, cheapened, reduced to name-calling and finger-pointing and bumper-sticker sloganeering.''
Ah, yes.
With the current presidential race, nothing could be more timely than ``Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate'' (Free Press).
The product of extensive research by political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, ``Going Negative'' substantiates what too many of us feel on our own: Negative political advertising often wins over uncommitted voters ... to None of the Above.
These nonpartisans, the authors write, ``find politicians, politics and government distasteful; political advertising simply sounds like more of the same.''
``Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy'' (Pantheon) has gotten much attention from the press it targets. And for good reason.
Author James Fallows (himself a respected journalist) draws many conclusions, among them that the news media are sorely out of touch with the public's interests and needs. As a result, he declares, the institutions covered by the media suffer - as does the citizenry.
Current practices of journalists ``affect the future prospects of every American by distorting the processes by which we choose our leaders and resolve our public problems,'' Fallows writes.
Many viewers define ``TV history'' as a CBS series after 13 weeks. But three more new books take viewers back ... back ... even further back than ``Courthouse'' and ``Dweebs.''
In ``The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961'' (Viking), Jeff Kisseloff has assembled a fat and highly readable account of TV's early years, as voiced by witnesses that include veteran comic Jack Carter, Barbara ``Leave It To Beaver'' Billingsley, CBS' Dr. Frank Stanton, director Arthur Penn and hundreds of others never really heard from - until now.
``Zworykin, Pioneer of Television'' (University of Illinois Press) zeros in on the Russian-born scientist in his first-ever biography.
Mind you, author Albert Abramson is careful not to anoint Vladimir Kosma Zworykin as ``the father of television.''
But Abramson, himself a retired television engineer who now works as a consultant and free-lance writer, calls Zworykin ``the single most motivating force behind the system of television that is in universal use today.''
He also reports that Zworykin, who died in 1982 one day short of his 93rd birthday, had no television set in his Princeton, N.J., study, and had often stated that any TV's best feature was the ``off'' switch.
In ``The Vanishing Vision - The Inside Story of Public Television'' (University of California Press), James Day traces public TV's often-troubled past.
It ``has lived in crisis, uncertain of its future, ever since its awkward birth in 1952 as educational television,'' Day writes. ``Then, as now, it was an aberration.''
A past president of National Educational Television and WNET-New York, Day describes the current state of public television as a Byzantine bureaucracy with fragmented leadership and a short leash held by a wary Congress.
``Only by going back to its hobbled start at the hands of a grudging government,'' Day writes, ``can we understand what it is, why it is and what it has the power to become.''
LENGTH: Medium: 86 linesby CNB