I was in Chicago for the week of the 1968 Democratic Convention. What I saw on TV and in the streets and hotels were two differ­ent things. The TV coverage, com­ing in for climactic shots, invari­ably missed the provocations that led to the violence. Continuity was utterly ignored in the TV conven­tion week "story." Moreover, one had to be there in person to ex­perience the ghastly smells that pervaded the besieged Conrad Hil­ton lobby due to the spreading of some not easily eradicated chem­ical. If I had not realized it before, I knew then that pictures often convey less than meets a person armed not only with sight but with all the other senses. It was borne in on me that it is simply not true that a picture is worth a thousand words, for words can convey the evidence of the five senses as images on a screen can­not. If the "medium is the mes­sage," then the Age of Gutenberg provided us with a better medium—and more truthful messages. It is too bad that Gutenberg is no longer considered "with it"; he could have saved us from many of our troubles.

In The Left-Leaning Antenna (Arlington, $8.95) Joseph Keeley, former editor of the American Legion Magazine, confines himself to the subject of political bias in television. The bias obviously stems from the fact that most of the people who work in TV news rooms and in developing the various shows are liberal in the mod­ern, or nonclassical, sense. The news, as he says, gets "pre-cooked" by left-leaning network staffs, so that even when it is read by an unbiased broadcaster it comes out skewed. What Spiro Agnew—and TV Guide’s Edith Efron before Agnew—said about the subjective twist imparted to TV news cov­erage is absolutely true. But this does not get to the root of the matter, which is that TV is not a good medium for instruction even when it is in well-disposed hands.

TV Is Show Business

Mr. Keeley senses this when he says that TV is primarily show business. Since show business de­mands the spectacular, a Wood­stock rock festival, with its weird costume effects and its sense of being a latter-day tribal rite, is obviously worth more to the TV cameraman than a familiar Boy Scout jamboree. Jerry Rubin, Ab­bie Hoffman, and Rennie Davis have become the self-annointed TV spokesmen for their generation be­cause they accurately diagnosed the networks’ natural craving for theater. The cameramen could pre­sumably have discovered an over­whelming majority of sober citi­zens in the Chicago of August, 1968, but would they have lent themselves to the portrayal of a good show? Obviously not.

So it isn’t just that the studios are under the control of "liberals." Mr. Keeley has an interesting chapter on TV news coverage of Vietnam, called "The War Away From Home." In part, it is the "liberal" bias of the media that has made the Vietnam War seem "immoral." Well, all wars are murderous and thus break the Commandment. But if you get right down to it this war is actu­ally less immoral than some other wars we have fought. One does not need to apologize for our motives in trying to save any part of the world from communism, which is an immoral form of society. The Mexican War, which was a grab for territory, was less justified than our Vietnam venture. And, by comparison with Vietnam, our Indian wars were really genocidal.

Nevertheless, Vietnam has af­fronted the American people as no other war in our history has af­fronted them. The prime reason, again, is that the TV coverage of the war has been a matter of cli­mactic shots without bothering with provocation or motivation or continuity. As Mr. Keeley points out, we see our troops burning villages while old men, women, and children stare and weep. What we don’t see is General Giap or Mao Tse-tung or Lin Piao elaborating the guerrilla strategy that has com­pelled us to wipe out a village in order to remove a focal point of poison.

The bigger question is whether TV could have covered the war with an honest concern for provo­cation, motivation, and continuity even if the cameramen had been veritable saints of objectivity. One doubts it; the camera doesn’t act that way. From now on all wars, even those that are most justified, will seem morally insupportable unless a strict censorship is in­voked and the cameramen are ban­ished from the front.

The Sight of the Camera Modifies the Subject

Another trouble with getting the truth about society from the camera is that it is hard to sneak a picture. The TV paraphernalia advertises the approach of the pic­torial reporter, and this automati­cally transforms the scene into a stage. It brings out the ham even in shy people. Would Abbie Hoff­man and Jerry Rubin have become what they are if they had been limited to answering questions off-camera? Would they have attract­ed an army of followers?

Unlike the camera reporter, the old-style journalist could mingle with a crowd incognito. He could listen to people talking among themselves and expressing their natural fears and hopes. He could take part in conversations without revealing his occupation, drawing out the multi-faceted truth that can be conveyed only in words. By being a bit of a snoop, the old-fashioned reporter could, paradox­ically, remain an honest man. Con­trariwise, the cameraman, work­ing in the open, is condemned to telling an essentially dishonest story.

Mr. Keeley does not do much philosophizing about the funda­mental shortcomings of the cam­era other than to indicate that TV in war can’t get behind the lines into enemy territory. He is more hopeful than I am that TV could balance its coverage of the Rubins and Hoffmans by taking "positive" pictures of sane happenings. While it is perfectly true that the TV networks could carry out their functions with more decency and sobriety than has been the custom, there is a built-in reason why they must always be defective carriers of the truth.

Take Kent State, for example. The radical planning that eventu­ally forced the confrontation with the National Guard had been in the works for a couple of years before the final tragedy. An SDS activist, Terry Robbins, had been given much of the responsibility for radicalizing the campus. But there were hundreds of other campuses in a state of turmoil in 1969 and 1970, and how would TV know which one was destined to boil up into something that would end in the killing of four students? The point is that the TV camera couldn’t be there to catch Terry Robbins’ activities in their early stages. A word man such as James Michener, however, could go in and, by sitting around and "rap­ping" with many people, students and townsmen, get at a many-faceted truth.

Mr. Keeley’s study of bias in TV is first-rate. His proposals for keeping a tighter watch on the application of the fairness doc­trine are all good. But he doesn’t answer the larger question of whether it will ever be possible to get the truth out of pictures.