It was widely rumored among the young that John F. Kennedy didn't die in Dallas, but lived on, a vegetable kept alive in some secret clinic.

It was also rumored that the astronauts were identical twins or condemned criminals. This was part of the widely accepted belief that the moon shots were staged in northern Mexico. One of my own children assured me that the reason the moon rocks differed so much from what had been predicted was that they actually came from east Texas.

TV coverage of the moon visits & Kennedy's death may, in fact, have mirrored reality but, if so, this was exceptional. Taking TV as a whole, it would be difficult to refute the conviction of the young that this medium favors pure fiction. David Wolper, Hollywood's king of TV documentaries, recently said he was now "making his own old newsreels."

Such schoolboy pranks hardly compare to distortions arising from news treated as entertainment. Newsmen long ago discovered that news could be used as a hook from which to hang prejudices. They rarely reviewed current events or films or books; they merely ornamented opinions with them. For them, reality was an irrelevancy, something best avoided; what mattered was opinions about reality.

TV news favors this format. It offers cliché drama costumed as news. The commentator occupies the screen most of the time, though his visual appearance is totally irrelevant: Irrelevant to the news, but not irrelevant to the drama of the news hour, which is something utterly different, its own reality, with the commentator as star.

It takes someone out of the past to put all this in perspective. When a television director once suggested to Harry Truman that his tie was inappropriate for TV, Truman stared pityingly with those blue eyes for about ten seconds.

"Does it really matter?" he asked. "Because if while I'm talking about Korea people are asking each other about my necktie, it seems to me we're in a great deal of trouble."

Oscar Wilde once made up a joke about a biographer of Michelangelo who never mentioned his art. Wilde's joke is TV's policy. Educational TV loves to do profiles that "let viewers see the man," that is, deal with his loves & eccentricities, but ignore his genius, which may belong to a medium ill-suited for TV presentation. So TV presents specials on Einstein as a moral philosopher, Fitzgerald as an alcoholic & the Wright brothers as homosexuals.