Way back on his Born in the U.S.A. album, Bruce Springsteen sang a song about his rock-and-roll youth called "No Surrender." In the song he noted that he and his buddies had "learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school." Some critics took Springsteen to task for that line. They thought it would discourage kids from staying in school. "That must have been a really good record," they sniffed sarcastically. To which the obvious answer came, from critic Dave Marsh, "No, it was probably just a really bad school."
Well, I'd say that for the duration of the Reagan-Bush era I learned more about my country from Entertainment Tonight than I did from the CBS Evening News and McNeil-Lehrer combined. Now that might be because I watched ET more often than I did those other folks. But there's more to it than that. Entertainment Tonight, the half-hour syndicated show-biz and pop-culture news program, reflects America more clearly than does its real-news counterparts because it covers the world from where America lives - the sofa. It reports on the world you would live in if you really had your whole life free for the pursuit of amusement.
For the uninitiated, Entertainment Tonight follows the format of a real news show. It has two anchorpeople at a desk - John Tesh and Mary Hart - plus standby Leeza Gibbons. They read copy and set up video pieces that feature interviews with actors, musicians, directors and writers about their latest work, or their career aspirations, or their latest mid-life crisis, or whatever.
ET also carries behind-the-scenes reports on upcoming films and TV shows. These are especially interesting because they teach us that even the set of the glitziest, multizillion-dollar Hollywood mega-production looks cheesy and fake on videotape. The show also does "in-depth" (i.e. seven- or eight-minute) topical pieces. For instance last night they looked at the wild proliferation of strip joints and porn films in the newly freed countries behind the old Iron Curtain.
ET also does lots of "whatever happened to..." feature-ettes. Just last week we looked in on George Lazenby, the Australian model originally chosen to replace Sean Connery as James Bond. Seems that after starring in a single Bond flick (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 1969) Lazenby decided that he was too big for the Bond series.
Twenty-three years later 007 marches on. Lazenby told ET that he spent much of the intervening generation getting drunk, smoking pot, and riding his motorcycle. Of course that's all behind him now and he's making a fresh start. On ET everybody is always making a fresh start. Just like in America.
ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT is the ultimate info-tainment program. All those others, from Hard Copy to America's Most Wanted, present information as entertainment. But ET goes one better. It presents information about entertainment as entertainment.
Of course the ET anchorpeople are not really journalists - they just play them on TV. But the job doesn't really call for any journalistic or critical faculties. ET doesn't do reviews. Passing judgment is so alienating. Instead they do previews of an entertainment world where everything and everyone, from Knot's Landing to Bill Moyers, is created equal.
ET never evaluates and it never complains; it just gives us a daily 22-minutes-plus-commercials peek through the looking glass of American popular culture. But, of course, in the past decade that same pop culture has become the defining reality - the meaning-maker - of American life.
We live in a country where one past president delighted in quoting from Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" movies. And we've just lived through a campaign in which one candidate said he stood for The Waltons over The Simpsons, while another sang "Don't Be Cruel" on an NBC news show and played "Heartbreak Hotel" on his saxophone. (There hasn't been a clearer choice since Nixon-McGovern.)
I, for one, don't think there's anything wrong with popular culture defining the language of politics. The competing myths of our popular culture - represented by Dirty Harry, or the Waltons, or The King, among others - do symbolize some of the real competing forces and conflicting impulses within our body politic. It is precisely because they stand for those deep forces and impulses that these stories and characters became enduring myths in the first place. That's why you can learn a lot from Entertainment Tonight, if you come with your eyes open to what's going on between the lines, or behind the looking glass.
Also during the Reagan-Bush era, Entertainment Tonight was almost the only TV news program that regularly carried stories confirming the existence of a progressive opposition movement in America. When regular folks like you and me put on a mass action or create a grassroots organization, the regular news outlets yawn. But when left-leaning movie stars and rock and rollers do shows for human rights, or go to Central America, or sit-in with the homeless, or get arrested to block nuclear testing, Entertainment Tonight covers the story.
Of course they also cover it when right-wing stars like Tom Selleck do whatever it is that they do. But the Hollywood Left (Warren Beatty, Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen, Bonnie Raitt, Barbra Streisand, Robin Williams, etc, etc., etc.) has the numbers and the box office clout.
During the latter Reagan years, when the straight-news blackout on dissident activity was at its deepest, you could almost have sworn that CBS and ET were covering two different countries. And maybe they were.
Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.
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