NO BOOKS ON THE AIRWAVES

Did you catch CBS' Tuesday Night Book Club?

Of course you didn't. No one did. It was killed so fast, viewers hardly had time to realize that the housewives in this Arizona book club rarely ever mentioned books.

Which was the point, of course. Book talk wouldn't interest viewers, not the way adultery does. Which sums up television's treatment of books in general.
OK, bringing up TV and literature in this way inevitably leads to the Big Shrug: It's an American commercial medium, what do you expect? Lectures on Ezra Pound? Another complaint about TV's limited cultural grasp is not going to keep Les Moonves up nights.

But with that argument, we surrender the field to the Rupert Murdochs. We accept that the noisy junk we've got is all there is. All there will ever be.
Consider: At a conference in May, New York columnist Kurt Andersen noted that his Public Radio International program, Studio 360 was the only arts-feature program of its kind in the States when it started 10 years ago. Yet most European countries, Mr. Andersen noted, boast half a dozen such shows. Each.

So why do European airwaves have a richer literary-cultural discussion going on than ours? For one thing, there's a recognition that some aspects of human life are too important to be left to the discretion of a few media oligarchs. That recognition often leads to some form of public support.
In America, when people advocate gutting government support of PBS and NPR, which Congress tried again this year despite President Bush's mild opposition, they often cite cable TV and talk radio as the marketplace's answers to any audience needs.
That's hardly the case when one considers what laughably passes for books-and-arts coverage on cable or talk radio.

I've detected no such programming on commercial radio, except when another culture-war distraction flares up. And there's precious little on cable. Once the Bravo channel was bought by NBC, and A&E turned to such shows as Dog the Bounty Hunter, they gave up their educated, upscale audience to chase the same wide demographic.
Yet in his new book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson posits that such a mass audience is dying. Outfits such as eBay and Amazon.com make money not from a few big sellers but from millions of little ones. And these niches ("the long tail") are the market's real future.
Well, tell that to advertisers. They still want to nab the mass audience, the dim, young, mass audience. Book readers, meanwhile, skew older. And although older folk often have more cash than 18-year-olds, they're less likely to blow it on energy drinks or $300 jeans. So readers are ignored by most ad folk.
As long as the mass media in America, including newspapers, think like this and as long as advertisers foot the bill, book culture will be slighted. To a degree, this is so even in the nonprofit sector, which has increasingly sunk into commercialism: Ten years after it was launched, Studio 360 is still the only show like it in the States.
With books sidelined by the electronic media, I find I'm of two minds. On the one hand, TV has ruined whatever it's touched: pro sports, political campaigns, swimsuit competitions. And publishers already shamelessly push pretty, camera-ready authors. Maybe continued TV neglect of books wouldn't be so bad. We could go on reading and enjoying them – quietly.

On the other hand, if it doesn't appear on TV (and sorry, Webheads, broadband Internet is becoming just TV 2.0), if it doesn't appear on TV, it doesn't exist in America.

So what are we going to do?

GuideLive.com Arts/Entertainment News and Events Dallas-Fort Worth The Dallas Morning News Entertainment Columnist Jerome Weeks