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- <text id=91TT1777>
- <title>
- Aug. 12, 1991: The Last Media Circus
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Aug. 12, 1991 Busybodies & Crybabies
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- NATION, Page 26
- The Last Media Circus
- </hdr><body>
- <p> If last week's summit between George Bush and Mikhail
- Gorbachev symbolized the end of the cold war, it may also have
- marked the end of a rather less historic phenomenon: the Great
- International Media Circus, with its Tibet-size press rooms
- wired for every conceivable form of human communication; "photo
- ops" in which a couple of dozen photographers viciously compete
- to see who can take the same picture the most times; legions of
- bored, humiliated reporters wandering aimlessly about with the
- glazed eyes of the living dead; and assorted bearers, runners
- and factotums, each armed with a walkie-talkie in order to
- remain, Sununu-like, in a state of "constant communication"
- ("Base to Smith, Bush is moving, Bush is moving!"). Last week's
- summit had all this, plus near riots in the press room whenever
- White House aides distributed another meaningless pool report
- (sample title: "Mrs. Bush Pool Report #A").
- </p>
- <p> Why is the circus folding its tent? Economics. Pan
- American World Airways, from which the White House charters the
- press plane, is under bankruptcy proceedings and is in the
- process of selling its assets. If Pan Am goes under, no other
- airline appears both willing and able to replace it as the
- official purveyor of 747s to the press corps. "No other airline
- wants to do it," says Gary Wright of the White House Travel
- Office. "The bottom line is the airlines don't make enough money
- out of it, and the p.r. value is negligible."
- </p>
- <p> Then there are the financial realities of modern
- journalism. Monstrous as the Moscow extravaganza was--the TV
- networks couldn't resist sending their anchors, and CBS
- dispatched seven camera crews--many news executives have
- concluded that they can no longer afford saturation coverage of
- all presidential trips. (The overall cost of just the press
- centers in Moscow and Kiev was $250,000.) The Associated Press
- sent 11 staff members on the trip, a third less than the number
- that covered the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in 1988.
- </p>
- <p> Since the coldest days of the cold war, summit coverage
- has been a growth industry. But it has ballooned to such
- mammoth proportions that it has crossed into the realm of
- self-parody. Only a relative handful of the 2,113 journalists
- accredited to cover the Bush-Gorbachev meetings managed to lay
- eyes on any of the leaders' key aides, much less Bush or
- Gorbachev. Some White House regulars were assigned to pools, but
- most journalists "covered" the events by sitting in the press
- room at Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel, a mile and a half from the
- Kremlin. There they read pool reports, watched CNN on projection
- TV screens, spoke mainly to one another and were given a single
- diplobabble briefing by the two press spokesmen, Marlin
- Fitzwater and Vitali Ignatenko.
- </p>
- <p> The absurdity of all this was highlighted Tuesday night
- when a White House aide announced that the pool assigned to
- cover Bush's visit to Gorbachev's suburban residence was not
- expected to provide any coverage. "You'll just go up there and
- hang out," the aide advised.
- </p>
- <p> Observed a Moscow-based correspondent: "Coverage like this
- has become a giant fraud--everybody pretending and writing as
- if they actually saw something. It's really just
- institutionalized plagiarism."
- </p>
- <p> By Stanley W. Cloud
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-