How TV Failed to Get the Real Picture

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Besides perspective, these assignments might have provided something else we desperately needed: respite from assault by imagery. And a reminder that the goons don't rule the world. Not yet, anyway. TV itself needed such respites too -- interruptions of its uninterruptedness, so it could sort out its information, make sense of it in sensibly edited and narrated reports. The basic function of journalism is selection. It is through that skill that a medium earns civic responsibility and achieves public trust. Just because we have evolved a technology that can create the impression of encompassing events instead of merely observing them -- and a race of iron-bottomed anchorpeople to lend friendly authority to this illusion -- does not mean that either should be employed without restraint.