Media O.D.

Many Americans love their televisions, their speedy Internet connections, the high they get from an Instant Messenger pop-up, the sense of gratification that washes over them when they open up their in box and watch the e-mails roll in.

They have their beloved news programs and TV dramas, the Web sites they're addicted to and the talking head experts they trust. And yet these same connected people can often be heard complaining about The Media -- that simultaneously shadowy and invasive conglomerate of sounds, images and information -- as if it's responsible for much of the evil in the world. We crave information like candy, gobble it up all day and then grumble about it when our bellies ache later.

The observation that media outlets overwhelm us isn't new, but the very nature of this seemingly all-encompassing entity makes it pretty hard to bring into focus. Todd Gitlin, a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University, has spent years trying to sort out the media's influence. His book "The Whole World Is Watching" dissected the New York Times' and CBS' coverage of the New Left. "Inside Prime Time" was a rigorous study of the network television industry, and Gitlin has written many other essays on everything from sound bites to MTV.

In his latest book, "Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives," Gitlin attempts to break down the fast and furious influx of news, music, TV and other mediums. Gitlin recently spoke with Salon from his home in New York about the cluelessness of the TV networks, the Washington Post's love for Ken Starr and why conservative viewpoints thrive on TV and radio.

HANSEN: In general it seems as if network television is really on the decline. It seems as though, in terms of quality, there's HBO and then everything else. Network TV has increasingly bad reality shows, like "The Bachelor," and then HBO is holding up this very high standard of programming.

GITLIN: HBO has the advantage of financing itself by subscriptions. Any enterprise that's subscription-based has some latitude. That's true of sex channels or high-end sports events, and it's evidently true of a commercial entity like HBO. I don't know how well they're doing financially, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there is principle at work. Certainly, large attention-getting industries are not manned or womanned solely by corrupt people without principle.

The networks, on the other hand, are obviously thrashing around in a state of panic. The Koppel-Letterman debacle, for which they were excoriated rightly, was not only terrible public relations but also a sign of their rudderlessness. There are many such signs -- the quiz show binge and reality shows and so on. I don't know how they can stop their erosion. They had a long way to come down; at the peak in prime time the three networks were able to garner some 92 percent of the viewers. They're now down to the 50s. That's still not insubstantial. They well may be able to hold out at that level or slightly below, but what's striking to me is that tendencies which were already at work there -- toward a kind of nihilistic whatever-goes attitude -- just got more room to come into play.

HANSEN: "Nihilistic" is a strong word.

What I mean by nihilism -- and what I learned by studying that industry 20 years ago -- is that there aren't a lot of ideas or convictions on the part of people who make these decisions. The economic rationale of their imitativeness -- including their self-imitativeness -- is, "Well, we don't really know what works, so let's repeat what worked and let's throw money at the studio or the star or the producers who gave us hits." When there was no competition or hardly any, this was good enough.