Misunderstanding Media
Marshall McLuhan wrote ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ in 1964. He was way ahead of his time. It was and still is a definitive look at how mass media effects and influences us and why. It influenced me to adjust my career track. Most people associate McLuhan with the phrase “The medium is the message” which is often mistaken as the title of the book. It was a chapter in the book.
Which is the essence of my point.
When I was a young broadcast journalist working at a television station in southeast Idaho, my first assignment my very first day on the job, was to cover the Teton Dam collapse. It was my first job in television and an interim step on my career track that started in radio as a copywriter and news broadcaster culminating as a writer/producer at an advertising agency in New York City. I had studied to be a geologist, but McLuhan’s book changed my career direction toward the power of the media.
The dam broke loose on a beautiful Saturday morning in June. I was at the television station, a CBS affiliate. My wife and I had just moved to town and I was arranging my desk and preparing for work Monday morning. There were a few other people at the station preparing for the nightly newscasts, and the on-duty staff photographer. I introduced myself and we went about our business.
When we heard of the dam collapse over the police scanner, the photographer grabbed me and we took off in the station news van from our location in Idaho Falls toward Rexburg about 30 miles away, which was about 15 miles away from the dam and the point of the collapse.
By the time we got to Rexburg the state police had closed all roads north and the water was dissipating out over the southeast Idaho Snake River flood plain which is exclusively flat farmland. At that point there wasn’t much for us to see in the way of the dramatic cascading deluged we envisioned, which actually did take place at the point of the collapse. We were 50 miles away. We got film of lots of washed out farmland, barns and homes, and actually helped to transport people to safety. I got a few good interviews, it was an exhilarating experience.
The phrase that stuck in my mind from all the reporting was, “a giant wall of water!” Although we didn’t actually see that sight, as many did further north, maybe a few feet high from our point of perspective, we did see the damage it caused and that was plenty enough. 13 people were killed, with a massive loss of livestock, crops and property.
By Monday morning, we had CBS network news people at the station interviewing me and the photographer. They sent our film back to New York for their national news broadcasts.
This was 1976, before digital, before satellite feeds, before iPhones, internet and social media. We used a 16mm Cannon Scoopic camera. The film had to be developed, then shipped by air courier.
The “giant wall of water” imagery, by the time it registered with the general public, took on more of an iconic, dramatized narrative similar to the famous 1889 Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania where the topography was more rugged, more populated, and the devastation more pronounced from a visual perspective, and where over 2,200 people lost their lives.
I always wished that we could have gotten close enough and film footage of the actual “giant wall of water” to match the imagined iconic legend that was graphically impressed in our minds through the mass media.
A year later I was the Pocatello bureau chief for that same television station. I was pretty much a one man operation. One summer afternoon I heard on our police scanner that an irrigation canal had broken and was flooding a Pocatello neighborhood. The image of a “giant wall of water” took over my imagination and I was determined that I was going to produce exactly that come hell or high water ..pun intended.
I grabbed my 16mm Cannon Scoopic and rushed to the scene in the news van. It was nothing. The canal broke and water was running down one street. Kids were enjoying it like an open summertime fire hydrant in old Brooklyn. However, I wanted an imposing “giant wall of water” on the news that night. After all, it did happen, it was news, and someone could have been hurt. And it was a slow news day. I drove the van as close as I could get, hopped out and started filming. Up close from the camera’s lens it looked like the Johnstown flood. Then I got lucky. A dog riding a garbage can down the stream looking like a canine surfer captured the scene and reenforced the “giant wall of water” imagery. It ran on the news that evening. The story was picked up both regionally and nationally. Thanks dog.
Point clarification coming up.
A few years later, the American embassy in Tehran was raided by Iranian dissidents and 52 American hostages were held captive for 444 days. By this time I was in New York writing ads and producing television commercials for Jiffy Lube. But I noticed one thing. In some of the news footage of the Iranians burning the American flag chanting “Death to America” the camera lens was focused up close on the action, where it should have been. But I later saw in some raw footage of that particular scene, that it was just a handful of Iranians trying to light up the flag with a zippo. When the camera pulled back to check focus, it looked like nothing. From 50 feet away you could hardly see it, but from up close through the camera’s eye it looked like the world was on fire.
My point, obvious as it may be and notwithstanding the current media news du jour regarding confederate statues, “white supremacists” and the never-ending race issue, is to know what you’re looking at, realize what you’re seeing within the 24 hr. news cycle, and interpret accordingly. The medium may be the message, but the people who control the media may want you to view the world through their eyes only.
Sometimes, not always but it happens enough, a giant wall of water could be just a drop in the bucket.
John Kushma is a communication consultant and lives in Logan, Utah.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-george-kushma-379a5762
http://newsbout.com/a/John+Kushma
