TV, Violence, and the Return of Radical Chic

Television -- or as it is called on dire occasions, the media -- was not neglected in the apportionment of blame for the Los Angeles riots. The chastisement was bipartisan. A few days after South Central Los Angeles burned, President Bush and Senator Bill Bradley, who agree on little else, blamed the media for purveying the wrong sort of news about inner cities. Mr. Bush said the media ought to show what is working. Where, asked Senator Bradley, were the accounts of single mothers who are defying the odds?

If it were just a question of trying to accentuate the positive, television news would get fair marks. Had the president and the senator really watched much of it over the years, they would have seen plenty of stories of single mothers making it, of schools that teach and youths who go on to college. These, after all, make good television fare. But how can they compete with the nightly pictures on local news shows and "reality-based" concoctions, whose main selling point is crime? The lesson pounded home in incessant reports on drug busts, drive-by shootings, muggings, gang depredations, and all the rest is that crime in urban American is a minority enterprise zone.

Of course, that is never said. Even television producers are enlightened enough not to stigmatize any group explicitly -- yet messages do get through. In the hungry coverage of the trials of John Gotti, could the audience fail to notice that almost all the names of capos, underbosses, and so forth ended in vowels? In the stories of Wall Street finaglings, the religious attachment of so many of the principals was never uttered, but what was a viewer to deduce from the mentions of bar mitzvahs and gifts to Israel? And such episodes are rare and mild compared to the night-after-night pictures of young black men being hauled in for the sort of crime that sends shudders through anybody who lives or works in a big city.

Television news, particularly in its local manifestations, is not famous for explaining much of anything, but in the aftermath of the riots, it tried hard. Even before the fires were doused, the tube was awash in explanations, which sometimes verged on excuses, for the rage and despair caused by years of neglect. Neglect-despair-rage became a litany, joined after a while by "family values."

And when the cleanup began, you could sense the relief with which reporters focused on non-rioters, especially those black residents of South Central Los Angeles who were trying to make a life under tough conditions and were now pitching in to repair what others had destroyed. These people made moving witnesses. But even here, the accounts of Korean-American shop-keepers who had been burned out had an unavoidable racial component.

Some high-minded practitioners were quite carried away by the urge to give more edifying material than riot pictures. There, on Nightline and other programs, were rival chieftains of the Crips and the Bloods expounding their philosophies. The return of radical chic. But even with such earnest efforts, the single reiterated image of the white truck driver Reginald Denny being beaten by several black men could not be explained or explained away, any more than the image of the white policeman Lawrence Powell slugging the black speeder Rodney G. King could be softened by sympathetic right-wing radio talk-mongers.

No group enjoys seeing its own cast in an unfavorable light (even police have their anti-defamation league), and the ancient temptation to blame the messenger proved to be very much alive.

The photographer who was seen caught in an angry crowd as unrest grew and the police vanished was in for it because he was white -- but his camera did not improve his prospects. The camera, which in other places has been welcomed by rebels as a means of getting their case across, was evidently viewed by these insurgents as yet another establishment weapon. Or maybe they just preferred to go about their work without publicity, which was quite sensible; looters and arsonists who failed to notice that a videocam was being aimed at them wound up in jail after the fact. Those pictures of a young man torching a store are not likely to add to the popularity of photographers among high-spirited inner city youths. Videoists, beware.

So the post-riot criticism of television seems to have been instigated in part by discomfort with the scenes of rioting. Liberally inclined folks may reasonably feel that such pictures may not stir sympathy for looters and could bring on a backlash even among viewers who had been appalled by the pictures of Mr. King being beaten. (In fact, polls taken soon after the riots indicated that most Americans saw them as a symptom of unmet social needs, which may mean that in addition to watching the pictures, they had also been listening to the experts. However, sales of guns rose, too; perhaps some people find it easier to be understanding with a weapon attheir side.)

Even if a backlash should develop, how could television not have given its all to such a story? Surely, it was as much a duty to show the beating of Reginald Denny as to show the King video over and over. And even if the televised scenes of looting inspired peace-abiding folk to join the rebels, should reporters and photographers have suppressed their coverage?

The crime of television news shows and simulacrums of news is not that they purposely play up race but the extent to which they play up crime, and in most cities, alas, street crime and race are inseparable. Even in tranquil times, television gives a skewed picture. The only black working people you can count on seeing on screen any given night are anchors and athletes. People who go to jobs every day and bring up children who go to school (unless they prove to be geniuses) are not and never have been newsmakers. (Sitcoms do better in this regard, but that's another subject.)

"Sex-and-violence" has joined "waste-and-fraud" as a mantra for politicians in need of a cost-free entry into the indignation stakes. But neither complaint is frivolous. No one seems to know just what effect, if any, the gore that stains all those made-for-TV movies has on crime or on youthful sensibilities, but it is probably not wholesome. What to do? The next time a senator blows off about violence on television, perhaps he will take a moment to define an acceptable arrangement that would give viewers more of what most of them don't want and take away what they evidently do want. He might come up with something called public broadcasting.

Will the network bosses, syndicators, and producers of news shows and shoot-'em-ups, chastened by the riots, reassess what they are about? Not too likely. But at the very least, anyone trying to weigh television's influence on young people for whom the tube is a major companion will have to focus not on a few nights of rioting but on what cluttered the screen for all those nights and days before Los Angeles -- and will continue to clutter it as long as crime pays.

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