Response 1-- Michael Feinstein

 While reading the early chapters of Williams’s book I kept forgetting that these thoughts about television were compiled nearly 50 years ago. While certain aspects of television have certainly changed, the writing is evidence of how much has remained static. However, in the third chapter, as Williams discusses the influence of “arguments and discussions” within the news on television it became rather obvious to me that this work was written before the founding of CNN and the 24 hour news cycle. The TV news at this time, as described by Williams, seems so much less invasive and all-consuming. I wonder what Williams would have thought of our pundits— the unelected “television intermediaries” (44)— whose mediation of current life has become some people’s only connection to the outside world. Could Williams have predicted the rise of figures like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who supply their viewers with a perspective on American politics and culture that is filtered more by their own ideology than it is by facts? He seems to indicate towards such a possibility when he wrote “In any large and complex society this mediation of representation is especially important, since in its speed and general availability it tends towards monopoly of the reactive process, and is no less a monopoly when it includes an internally selected balance and differentiation of opinion” (45). When he writes balance my mind of course goes to the Fox News slogan fair and balanced and perhaps the balance described here by the network was one that was always meant to be implicitly understood as “internally selected”. Additionally, his words seem to almost hint at the the particular power of Fox News to overwhelm its’ audience into submission when he describes television’s “monopoly of the reactive process.”

However, as many have noted, the true skill of Fox News is their ability to tell their audience exactly what to think while still creating the impression that the viewer has come to these thoughts on their own. To paraphrase from the alt-right, Fox News viewers believe they have done the research simply by taking everything that their network of choice has told them at face value. Williams understands television’s power to “shape responses” (44) but could he have guessed how deeply that shaping could penetrate the human psyche? Yes, television news programs have always had the insidious ability to “simulate a representation by their own criteria” (46) but perhaps its’ capacity to simulate thought processes and to confuse and rupture how its’ viewers engage with the world that exists outside of their television screens is a relatively new trick— or a recently heightened one at the very least.