Measuring the Giant

Assigned to do a term paper on television critics, Iowa State University Coed Elisabeth Dwight recently sought help from her father, Ogden Dwight, who happens to be the TV critic for the Des Moines Register (circ. 224,337). How much influence, she asked, does the television critic possess? Replied Dwight: "Not a damned bit."

By last week, with the television industry undergoing an agony of self-reappraisal in the lurid light of the quiz-show scandals (see SHOW BUSINESS), many a journalist working the TV beat as reporter-critic was busy appraising his own job. And to many a critic, it appeared that Des Moines's Dwight was not far off; the television reporter-critics have precious little influence. The quiz shows themselves are a case in point. For years, the nation's TV critics flayed the quiz programs as phony, valueless, and taste-degrading entertainment ("Immoral!" cried Jack Gould of the New York Times). But aside from an occasional dark hint, the television newsmen notably failed to expose the rash of fixing that had been taking place under their uplifted noses. They were thus left with the meager consolation that their abstract judgment had been correct--even though nobody seemed to be listening when they tendered it.

Secret Chuckles. Throughout the U.S., several hundred newsmen spend 30 to 35 generally dreary hours each week watching TV as part of their jobs as critics. They reach an impressive, if not impressionable, newspaper readership that rivals in number the legion of comic-strip fans. The New York Herald Tribune's John Crosby is syndicated in more than 90 papers, the Los Angeles Mirror-News''s Hal Humphrey in 87; in San Francisco, the

Chronicle's TV columnist-reviewer, Terrence O'Flaherty, is read by Californians who do not even have TV sets.

What little influence the TV critics do have is generally exerted within the television industry itself. A handful of top critics--Gould, Crosby, Humphrey, O'Flaherty and Variety's George Rosen--are regularly read by network executives, program sponsors and advertising agencies. Such critics can point to a few direct results of their influence. During the 1956 Suez crisis, several blistering columns by the Times's Gould shamed all three networks into covering the U.N. Security Council debate on the Mideast. After John Crosby rapped CBS for vapid programing, CBS Board Chairman William Paley postponed a European vacation to help whip up something better. This fall, before putting on the air the new private-eye program called Staccato, the producer invited Los Angeles' Humphrey to appraise the opening show. After Humphrey passed judgment--"a miserable piece of junk"--it was scrapped, another episode substituted.

But such successes are the exception rather than the rule, and most of the critics admit it. The Times's Jack Gould even declines to take credit for getting the Security Council sessions onto the networks. Says he: "I only confirmed a general attitude." Says a network vice president in Chicago: "A lot of network brass would say, 'Oh, yes, we take the critics' opinion seriously,' but they get nothing but a chuckle behind closed doors."

Standing Answer. While the critics' influence with the industry is in-and-out, there is no doubt about their impact on the public: they have almost none. Television history is rife with examples of shows--Milton Berle, Lawrence Welk, I Love Lucy--that rose to the top despite critical lambasting. "I frankly question the influence I have," says Gould. "At best, it's an incidental one. I never heard of a critic killing a show." Says the Chicago American's Janet Kern: "The whole idea of influence is one that I frankly think is a myth. When I get letters asking for my qualifications as a television critic, I have a standing answer. I tell them I have the four necessary qualifications for the job: a television set, a typewriter, a dictionary, and a job on a newspaper."

That may be one of the major problems: all too many television critics were plucked off often unrelated and sometimes obscure newspaper jobs, without any particular reference to reportorial ability or critical qualifications. Says Critic O'Flaherty: "Too many of the television columnists in the country today have had little or no training for their jobs." Says an ABC vice president about the critics: "Generally speaking, they do not have good enough background: some of them are young kids just off the obituary desk; others are graduated mail-room boys."

As a part of journalism, television reporting is as young as television itself--and it suffers from many of the same problems. Still in its teens, the television medium ripened before it matured, became an overnight giant that still mistakes size for superiority, quantity for quality, and juggles its allegiance between public and sponsor. Covering this jumbled mass medium, the television critics themselves often seem confused. Should television be entertainment? Or education? Or what? Can the critical standards of theater, or music, or art be applied to television, or does it demand evaluation on its own? The critics have not decided. "The weakness of the critics," says Jack

Gould, "is their own uncertainty as to what should be their criteria." Until the television writers grow up to meet this criticism, they will probably remain as ineffectual as the industry they cover.

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