Short Takes : ‘Civil War’ Creator Criticizes TV

WASHINGTON — Film maker Ken Burns, creator of PBS’ acclaimed documentary “The Civil War,” blasted American television for offering “nearly the same thing everywhere . . . on dozens of clonelike channels.”

Burns told the National Press Club on Monday that “a kind of cultural peerage” has been conferred on a small group of TV commentators.

“Issues and ideas are merely pushed around the plate, never digested, by the same people,” he said.

“In the worst of our television, we are addicted to personality, to the breathless embrace of celebrity, ensuring as we go a tyranny of the televised over the great mass of the un-televised.”