The medium of television has confirmed that nothing transcends like success. After decades of Donald Trump banking his triumphs via TV, it was a mere random and unplanned television moment this week that transformed celebrity into consequence.

New technologies appear like puffball mushrooms on a dewy lawn and seem as quickly superseded by others. Our culture has whizzed through Modernism and Post-Modernism and the Machine Age and the Nuclear Age and the Computer Age with a rapidity that could induce whiplash. Yet one legitimate “Age” will persist — the Television Age. The term was used back when tiny screens encased in bulky furniture were watched through an arrangement of cathode-ray tubes and mirrors. Now, of course, there are hand-held little screens and computers that present technical “tele-visions,” and our lives revolve around their images, sounds, entertainment, and information. Nomenclature aside, we live in what will be the Television Age for a long time to come.
Television has shaped the news and our perceptions, far beyond the pervasive presence of propaganda and persuasion. From commercials to biased reporting, there is a malignant underbelly to television’s hold on the course of civilization. It is a situation that will be resolved — whether through social and political disruption, or the Unseen Hand of the Market. In the meantime, we can understand our times, and ourselves, better by appreciating the effect of television. That effect is substantial, not superficial; the dispositive consequences of television are found in television’s inherent subliminal power, more than its “coverage” of events and personalities.
In 1951, the Senate hearings into organized crime were chaired by Estes Kefauver, who would be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in the next year’s presidential election. What Milton Berle was to evening TV and the manufacturers’ sales, the Kefauver Hearings were during daytime coverage. Many people bought the new DuMont, Philco, and RCA electro...