MARSHALL McLUHAN, WHAT'RE YA DOIN?

No glooming and dooming over television for Douglas Davis. He pounds away at TV bashers, especially in the academy, who have made reputations and livelihoods predicting the end of civilization in terms as dire as those once used by ban-the-bomb apocalypticians. For that alone Davis's polemic is refreshing. Would that it did the job better.

Here are The Five Myths of Television Power, as our author lists them in five chapters: "TV Controls Our Voting"; "TV Has Destroyed Our Students"; "TV is (Our) Reality"; "TV Pacifies Us (We Are Couch Potatoes)"; "We Love TV." Leave aside the quibble over whether such assertions deserve the name of myth; they, or something like them, have been vigorously circulated and invite rebuttal.

Davis, who is described as a writer on culture but writes more like a teacher of sociology, joins the critics in their attacks on network television, which he charges "long ago lost psychic touch with the taste of the audience." If that world "psychic" sets off forebodings, they are justified by Davis's style. Anyway, he is against the sort of packaged products that, he says, are turning off viewers, who are in turn turning off what used to be the big audience grabbers and seeking out "raw video." He notes accurately, if not felicitously, that "prime-time TV drama nearly always splices lust and terror to smooth conciliation."

The book's ideal seems to be a sort of New Age TV for the Rousseauean psyche. Davis sees cable stations, VCRs, interactive video, personal computers, and such as "democratizing agents" that are bringing the real stuff into people's lives. He praises the remote control gadget for the freedom it offers to graze and zap.

His specifics, particularly regarding television journalism, are not revolutionary. Nobody is likely to take exception to his compliments to CNN for its "unbuttoned" coverage, with correspondents operating their own cameras, or his welcome to C-SPAN and Court Television for carrying events from beginning to end. But here, as elsewhere, he tends to overreach.

To begin, the unwary reader may come away with the impression that CNN and C-SPAN are trouncing the networks in ratings. Not so. Although the networks are losing viewers, the standard evening news programs that Davis despises still supply most of the nation with its daily allotment of news. Americans turn to CNN in large numbers mainly during times of calamity, and relatively few (by network standards) turn regularly to the estimable C-SPAN or the innovative Court TV at all.

The craving for authenticity that Davis detects in the television audience is also questionable. The popularity of what he calls the "long-form" sex coverage of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial and the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas encounter, which he presents as heartening evidence of a new and appealing reality on the tube, reflects the mass audience's enduring taste for sex in any form. The networks' recent Amy Fisher docudramas were big hits, too.

But the more significant question for journalists is whether unmediated coverage of major events in an unadulterated blessing. Yes, it was exciting to see the CNN correspondents sticking microphones out the window of their hotel room at the start of the bombing of Baghdad, and the way the Pentagon controlled network coverage was lamentable. But difficult issues do not lend themselves to coverage by pictures alone. For matters like recession, medical coverage, immigration policy, and all the other headaches facing the new administration, telling is as important as showing, and whatever their limitations, network correspondents, by and large, still do that better than their counterparts at CNN, who, after all, are playing by the same rules most of the time.

Moreover, one virtue of Court TV, an enterprise Davis rightly admires, is that it does not settle for just keeping thecamera rolling; lawyers are on hand to add background and interpretation, without which most viewers would have trouble understanding the finer points of what they are watching, fascinating though that often is. Lately, Court TV has been packaging portions of trials and analysis in one-hour segments, a trend that must dishearten Davis.

Like most polemicists, Davis just won't give his devils their due. It is always a pleasure to have someone trash Marshall McLuhan, but today's theory mongers are not as thoroughly wrong-headed as contended here. Dealing with political campaigns -- his best subject -- Davis does a service by drawing attention to the fact that many candidates lose even though they out-spend their opponents in television advertising. But to say that television is not the absolute power some medianiks proclaim tells us only that every campaign is made up of many elements.

He writes about 1992: "Faced for a change with real issues related to its own survival, the electorate responded by voting rather than by sitting out an irrelevant, indecisive media disturbance." Granted. But all that means is that when lots of people are out of work, they become worried enough to bear with Ross Perot's infomercials and it gets difficult even for Roger Ailes to make magic. The Clinton victory does not prove that television advertising is of negligible consequence in less drastic times or that voters are as smart and independent as Davis portrays them just because they chose his preferred candidate last year. The Clintonians, after all, also used commercials.

And his hurrahs for the 1992 upsurge of call-in shows is a touch unsophisticated. In flocking to the call-ins, the polls were avoiding the Sunday morning talkies, where they would be pressed on the issues. It looks as though we shall be seeing more of that sort of pretense of populism, and I can't share Davis's joy at the prospect.

Every chapter suffers from similar effusions. Just as you're getting interested in his description, say, of the way video games test children's abilities, he flies off into Peter Panland. His notion of "impressive anecdotal evidence" that television need not drug and stupefy youngsters is "wild whoops of joy and anger from kids pounding, pulling, and pushing images across the screen" in video-game establishments. Are riots at rock concerts similarly reassuring?

Common sense is with him when he argues that if used in imaginative ways,television can help youngsters to learn. (He is especially enthusiastic about the Carmen Sandiego video games, which sound like good stimulating fun.) And amid his rejoicings over whoopee interactiveness, Davis also comes out in favor of books that do not pop or sizzle, noting that despite the bleak predictions of critics, more people seem to be reading these days. That's encouraging, but it hardly exhausts the question of television's influence on what is being read or how it is being absorbed.

Even at its most sensible, Five Myths is off-putting. The pages are clogged with phrases like "the welter of invective seeking to find mechanistic explanations for deep structural flaws," "the individuating potential of the VCR," and "the arrival of an intensified verbal-visual literacy, informed by the divided or all-encompassing view of life evidenced in our sample." The repeated use of "impacted" as a transitive verb is especially jarring, but no doubt he is riding the wave of the future on that one.

Davis does a lot of name-dropping, sometimes in a peculiarly intrusive way, writing, for example, "from what Edmund Burke might have called from the sublime to the ridiculous." (Incidentally, my Bartlett's traces it to Napoleon Bonaparte.) He can't use "Let me count the ways" without mentioning Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and he hauls in the plot of King Lear in a labored analysis of what happened in the 1992 presidential election. (I think Larry King played Cordelia.) You may get the impression that Davis is showing off by dusting off his Shakespeare.

"Life, not TV, now drives the world," he announces, as though that needed announcing. But the question, of course, is what part television is playing in life. As its best, The Five Myths of Television Power provides glimmers, but, as Robert must have told Elizabeth the hundredth time she started counting the ways, Enough already.

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