Each week since October 1988 I’ve delivered myself of a five-minute “media criticism,” a sort of sermonette, on “CBS Sunday Morning.” A dozen times in those eight years a stranger has stopped me on the street, at a movie, or waiting in line for a glimpse of Matisse to ask: “Do you write your own stuff?” To which I have learned to reply, passively aggressively, “Well, they didn’t hire me for my looks.” But at least it’s a human question. More frequent and more mystifying is the suspicious stare, the abrupt nod, the pointed finger, and the accusation “I saw you on television.” After which nothing. Not “I like what you said” or “You’re full of crap” or “How much do they pay you?” Just “I … saw-you.” And then the usual New York vanishing act, like Shane. This used to bother me a lot, as if the medium lacked substance, or I did, or the spectral street, maybe even Matisse. Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder whether what such strangers really seek on the surprising street is assurance. The problem is epistemological. They saw me on television. I am real. Television might also be. After almost half a century of looking at the ghosts in our machines, we are agnostics about reality itself.

Never mind docudramas, re-creations, staged news, computer enhancements, or commercials that sell us cars by promising adventure and sell us beer by promising friendship. Our dubiety about television probably started with the quiz-show scandals in 1959. Oh how they wept, like Little Mermaids. That’s one of the things I remember most about television in the fifties. Nixon cried in his Checkers speech. Jack Paar cried about his daughter. And Charles Van Doren cried because he’d been caught. So did Dave Garroway cry on the “Today” show because he was upset about Van Doren, who’d parlayed his “Twenty-one” winnings into a job as a “guest host” on Garroway’s very own program. And because Dave was upset, so was his chimp, J. Fred Muggs. Who says men don’t have feelings?

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