DOES TELEVISION DO THE JOB OF REPORTING ANY BETTER THAN radio? Surely documentary programming presents the reality of the world that is covered. After all, pictures never lie. That cliché is no longer true, however, as the line between photographs and computer-generated images is getting harder to discern. Imagine this scene from a nature documentary:
Deep in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, a troupe of howler monkeys swings through the treetops, 100 feet from the ground, hooting like a football crowd as it passes. A sloth hanging from a lower branch is shaken from its lethargy and starts to climb slowly down the great buttressed trunk. Out of the shadowy recesses of the forest, two giant butterflies appear, huge, iridescent blue wings flapping in synchrony as they circle a brilliant shaft of sunlight.
The scene is meticulously accurate: all these animals live in that region of the Amazon; they are in the place they belong, doing what they normally do. But the documentary form has its own way of re-creating reality. This two-minute scene is selected from hours of footage that took days or even weeks to shoot. The magic of editing creates a flurry of activity in the forest, puts together a crowd of creatures in a place that in reality is mostly silent and still.
As the flow of information continues to increase, newspapers compete for our attention by compressing reports into single paragraphs. Radio and television stories chop “interviews” up into sound bites, leaving a personality or politician just time to say “I don’t agree,” or “There is no cause for alarm.” News reports may range from fifteen to forty seconds, and an “in-depth report” might last for two whole minutes.
The overabundance of information is reflected in the tidal wave of brief fragments coming at us. According to Theodore Roszak, writing in The Cult of Information, a single weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person in seventeenth-century England would have encountered in an entire lifetime. In addition, computer processing speed has doubled every two years for the past thirty! As a consequence, information has become compressed. So between 1965 and 1995, the average length of a TV commercial shrank from 53.1 to 25.4 seconds, and the average news sound bite was reduced from 42.3 to 8.3 seconds! At the same time, according to TV Dimensions ’95 and Magazine Dimensions ’95, the number of ads squeezed into a minute went from 1.1 to 2.4.
I was confronted with a striking confirmation of the compression of information in 1992 when we were preparing a program on the Earth Summit being held in Rio. By then, The Nature of Things had been an hour-long program for thirteen years. In the archives, I looked up the report done in 1972 on the UN conference on the environment held in Stockholm. The program was still a half-hour long back then, and to my amazement it contained three- and four-minute interviews with Paul Ehrlich and Margaret Mead. Today, we never put on an interview longer than thirty to forty seconds. And it was clear my expectations and interest span had changed, because I found the 1972 interviews slow.
Thus, the shorter, punchier accounts we now get are stripped of any kind of historical or contextual material that might make the news event more understandable in a larger sense. Each night a stream of unrelated stories gives us a glimpse of a fractured, puzzling, often frightening universe. There are battles being fought by mysterious factions in countries whose past is a blank. Violence and misfortune are the normal state of affairs, forest fires rage, trains crash, and deficits rise. Studies are reported on subjects we have never thought about, and politicians announce decisions without rhyme or reason. Modern life exists in a confusing, chaotic world that is much as it must have seemed before people were formally educated.